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What If The Wolf Never Hid?
New Yorkers keep acting surprised by Zohran Mamdani. Maybe the question isn’t what he hid from us. Maybe it’s whether we ever bothered to look.
Terminology note: Wherever possible, I use “Gazans” when referring specifically to the people of Gaza. I use “Palestinian” primarily when quoting or referring to the terminology used by others. This is a deliberate choice and should not be read as my endorsement of the historical or political claims associated with the term “Palestinian.”
In the fairy tale, the wolf wears Grandma’s clothes.
That’s important.
Because the deception is the point.
Little Red Riding Hood opens the door because she doesn’t understand who is waiting on the other side.
But what happens when there is no disguise?
What happens when a politician spends years telling us what he believes?
And we don’t bother putting the pieces together until after we hand him the keys?
That is the question I keep coming back to when I think about Zohran Mamdani.
Not whether he is secretly something.
Not whether a viral video, photograph, religious reference, family member or association “proves” some hidden agenda.
Those are easy arguments to make.
They’re also intellectually lazy ones.
I’m interested in a harder question.
What happens when we stop examining each fact about a political leader individually and begin putting them next to one another?
Because Zohran Mamdani did not materialize at City Hall on January 1, 2026.
Before the campaign ads, there was an upbringing.
An education.
Intellectual influences.
Activism.
Political organizations.
His own writing.
His own words.
His own choices.
And an unusually persistent engagement with Israel for someone ultimately seeking an office that has virtually no role in American foreign policy.
None of those things, standing alone, tells us everything about Zohran Mamdani.
That distinction matters.
Because I’m not going to tell you what to think about him.
I’m going to show you what I found.
Open the hyperlinks.
Read the original sources.
Look for information that contradicts me.
Especially that information.
Then put the pieces beside one another and decide for yourself what they mean.
Because sometimes the important question isn’t what one dot tells us.
It’s what happens when there are enough dots that we can no longer pretend we don’t see the possibility of a pattern between them.
BEFORE THE POLITICIAN, THERE WAS THE BOY
Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991 to two extraordinarily accomplished parents.
His mother, Mira Nair, is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker.
His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a prominent scholar whose work has examined colonialism, postcolonialism, political violence and the construction of political identities such as “settler” and “native.”
That doesn’t make Zohran responsible for his parents’ politics.
Children are not ideological carbon copies of their parents.
But biography still matters because human beings do not develop in intellectual vacuums.
Families influence us. Teachers influence us. Books influence us. Political movements influence us.
We absorb some ideas. We challenge others. We reject others completely.
Formation is context. It is not proof.
Mahmood Mamdani’s 2004 book*Good Muslim, Bad Muslim* includes a passage arguing that suicide bombing should be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized simply as barbarism, and that the suicide bomber should first be recognized as a category of soldier.
There is an important counterargument here. A scholar interviewed by Forbes said Mahmood was analyzing suicide bombing, not advocating it. That distinction belongs on the board.
And this remains his father’s argument. Not Zohran’s.
So I went looking for Zohran’s.
Not what he thought as a teenager.
Not whether he once challenged some other argument in one of his father’s books.
The question relevant to an adult political leader—especially after October 7—is much narrower:
Has Zohran Mamdani, as an adult, publicly repudiated this specific formulation about suicide bombing or explicitly said he disagrees with it?
I found no adult public repudiation of that specific formulation in the record I reviewed, including after October 7. Ynet reported during the 2025 campaign that Mamdani had not publicly commented on his father’s controversial statements.
That does not prove he agrees with his father.
Silence is not agreement.
But neither should we manufacture a repudiation that does not appear in the public record.
There is another adult fact worth putting on the board. In a resurfaced 2017 interview, Mamdani said he sometimes helped edit his parents’ speeches and writings “to make it more accessible,” adding that doing so allowed him to “stay engaged with what they’re saying and doing.” Editing someone’s work does not mean endorsing every argument in it.
But it makes the adult question more—not less—reasonable: what does Zohran Mamdani himself believe about that specific argument today? On the public record I reviewed, he has not said.
His mother has also been outspoken about Israel. In 2013, Mira Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival and explicitly aligned herself with PACBI and the larger BDS movement.
Again: her decision. Not his.
If that were all we had, I’d tell you to stop right here.
But then Zohran Mamdani began speaking for himself.
BOWDOIN
At Bowdoin College, Mamdani studied Africana Studies. His capstone work examined Frantz Fanon, and he founded the college’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Bowdoin’s retrospective documents both
Studying Fanon doesn’t make someone radical.
Universities exist precisely so students can encounter difficult ideas.
So Fanon isn’t evidence of some hidden agenda.
It’s intellectual context.
What happened next is more important.
Mamdani helped establish Bowdoin’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
And this is where hindsight creates its own trap.
SJP has become an extraordinarily controversial organization in America, particularly since October 7.
It would therefore be easy to take everything subsequently said or done by every SJP chapter and retroactively attach it to a college student named Zohran Mamdani.
We shouldn’t.
Mamdani is responsible for what Mamdani said and did.
Fortunately, we don’t have to guess.
We have his words.
In January 2014, Mamdani and another Bowdoin student publicly defended the American Studies Association’s academic boycott of Israeli institutions.
Later that month, Bowdoin’s student newspaper identified Mamdani as an SJP founder and quoted him: “We can’t separate the two. We can’t privilege Israeli academic freedom over Palestinian human rights.”
That was 2014.
More than a decade before he became mayor of New York City.
Does founding an SJP chapter establish that someone is an Islamist? No.
Does supporting an academic boycott of Israel establish hatred of Jews? No.
It establishes something considerably simpler.
Israel and Palestine mattered enough to Zohran Mamdani that he was organizing around the issue as a college student.
Another dot.
Remember it.
THEN THERE WAS THE RAP SONG
Years later, before most New Yorkers knew his name, Mamdani performed music under the names Young Cardamom and Mr. Cardamom.
In a 2017 song, he expressed support for the “Holy Land Five.” JTA documents the lyric and the federal convictions behind the reference.
The Holy Land Five were officials of the Holy Land Foundation convicted of aiding Hamas; the U.S. government had designated the foundation a terrorist organization and seized its assets.
Mamdani rapped: “My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up.”
So I did.
And then I looked for something else.
Reconsideration.
Because Mamdani was young.
And young people say stupid things.
They make provocative art.
They embrace ideas they later reconsider.
They say things at 25 they might cringe at when they’re 35.
I don’t believe every sentence someone utters in his twenties should become a life sentence.
So the important question isn’t simply: Why did he say it?
It’s: What does he say about it now?
We have an answer now.
During the October 2025 general-election debate, a moderator put the Holy Land Five lyric directly to Mamdani, noting that the men had been convicted of supporting terrorism and asking how he would reassure Jewish New Yorkers.
Mamdani did not explain the lyric. He did not say he had reconsidered it. He did not say he had been wrong.
Instead, he answered that he intended to lead every New Yorker, including Jewish New Yorkers, and spoke about conversations that had taught him why other language surrounding the conflict caused pain.
That answer belongs on the board too. So does what it did not contain.
A youthful position followed by an explicit adult reconsideration would tell us one thing.
But that is not what the public record establishes here.
When Mamdani was finally asked directly about the Holy Land Five lyric as an adult candidate for mayor, he did not retract it, explain it or say that his thinking had changed.
That does not tell us everything he believes today.
But neither can we point to evidence of growth, reconsideration or repudiation when the public response does not establish it.
If his thinking has evolved, tell us how.
If he believes the lyric has been misunderstood, explain it.
But I am not going to manufacture an evolution that I cannot document.
FROM ACTIVISM TO POLITICS
After college, Mamdani became increasingly involved in political organizing, including the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. Vanity Fair’s profile traces the role of the club in his political development.
Let’s immediately dispense with something stupid.
Being involved in Muslim political organizing doesn’t make someone an Islamist.
A Muslim political organization is no more inherently sinister than a Jewish political organization, Catholic political organization or evangelical political organization.
But organizations matter when we’re examining how politicians are formed.
Who organizes with them?
Which movements give them their political vocabulary?
Which coalitions help them acquire power?
We ask those questions about politicians constantly.
We should ask them here too.
THE PEOPLE AROUND US
Piker is also the person who said that “America deserved 9/11.” He later said the remark was inappropriate and intended as satire.
Piker’s words belong to Piker. They do not become Mamdani’s beliefs by association.
But Mamdani was eventually asked about them directly.
During the October 2025 mayoral debate, Mamdani called Piker’s 9/11 comments “objectionable and reprehensible.”That is a condemnation, and it belongs on the board.
But it does not end the inquiry.
Then Mamdani became mayor.
So the factual record is not that Mamdani refused to condemn the 9/11 remark. He did condemn it.
The harder question is what that condemnation meant in practice.
What does it mean to call a statement about September 11 reprehensible while continuing a cordial relationship with the person who made it—even after becoming mayor of the city attacked on September 11?
Continued association does not prove agreement.
But voters are entitled to ask what conduct, if any, would cause a political leader to draw a line with an ally or friend.
And remember Mamdani’s defense: leaders should engage people with whom they disagree. Good. That principle will matter once he has power. If engagement across disagreement is the principle, the real test will be whom he chooses to engage when the disagreement is with him.
The people around us do not prove who we are. But whom we repeatedly choose to stand beside—and what we’re willing to overlook to keep them there—can be information worth examining.
AND THEN THERE IS HIS WIFE
This one requires even more care.
Rama Duwaji is Mamdani’s wife.
She is not an elected official. She did not run for mayor. And her social-media activity does not automatically become her husband’s political position because they are married.
Full stop.
But that doesn’t make Mamdani’s response to it irrelevant.
Mamdani was asked about it.
He did not condemn those specific likes.
He did not say his wife was wrong to like those posts.
Put that on the board too.
But those are two different questions.
What does Zohran Mamdani believe about October 7?
He has answered that.
What did Zohran Mamdani think about his wife liking posts that appeared to characterize the October 7 attack as resistance and dispute reporting about Hamas sexual violence?
That is what he was being asked.
And saying that his wife holds no formal position in City Hall doesn’t answer it.
Of course her likes are hers.
But let’s not pretend a spouse is simply another name in somebody’s social-media feed.
This is the person Mamdani himself called “the love of my life.”
Anyone who has shared a life with another person understands that marriage is intimate in ways political associations are not. Spouses talk. They argue. They influence one another. They build a life around some collection of shared values while undoubtedly disagreeing about others.
Does that mean Mamdani agrees with everything his wife believes?
Of course not.
Does it prove he agreed with those posts?
No.
And I am not going to pretend it does.
But that is precisely why his response matters.
He was handed an opportunity to make the distinction himself.
He could have said:
I love my wife. Her views are her own. And I profoundly disagree with those posts.
He didn’t.
He could have said that describing October 7 as “resistance” was wrong.
He didn’t.
He could have separated his own beliefs from the specific material she had apparently endorsed.
He didn’t.
Instead, he told us that she was “the love of my life” and a private person with no formal role in his campaign or City Hall.
The first statement tells us something about their relationship.
The second tells us something about her employment status.
Neither tells us whether he disagreed with what she liked.
And that leaves a legitimate question.
How much do they share politically?
I don’t know.
Neither do you.
And her social-media activity cannot answer that question for him.
But he could have.
He was asked.
He chose not to.
Put that on the board.
THEN LET’S APPLY THE PRINCIPLE EVERYWHERE
In June 2026, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Mamdani directly whether he supported Israel as the Jewish state. Read the full ABC transcript here.
Mamdani answered: “I think any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
Good.
Then let’s take him at his word.
If the principle is universal, apply it universally.
Israel did not invent the idea of a country possessing a religious identity. Pew Research Center found that 27 countries formally establish Islam as their state religion and 13 formally establish Christianity or a Christian denomination.
Yet there is ONE Jewish state.
ONE.
Israel.
A tiny country in a world containing dozens of Muslim-majority countries and numerous states with formally established or historically privileged Christian identities.
And that raises the question I can’t get past:
Why this one?
Mamdani can criticize Israel.
He can despise Netanyahu’s policies.
He can oppose settlements.
He can advocate for Palestinians.
He can believe Israel’s political structure should change.
But when a politician tells me his objection is based upon a universal principle, I’m entitled to examine whether his political behavior has been universal too.
Where is the comparable decade-long campaign against Saudi Arabia?
Iran?
Pakistan?
Afghanistan?
Where are the student organizations?
The academic boycott campaigns?
The divestment movement?
The sustained political organizing?
I did find important counterevidence: Mamdani has also publicly opposed Hindu nationalism and the RSS. That belongs on the board too.
But in reviewing his public record, I did not find anything resembling the sustained, decade-plus campaign against those Muslim-majority states that can be documented regarding Israel.
Maybe I missed something.
If I did, show me.
I’ll add it.
Because evidence that complicates my argument doesn’t disappear because I don’t like it.
But if the disparity is real, we’re entitled to ask what explains it.
BUT WHO DOES THE BOYCOTT HURT?
Mamdani openly supports BDS. At a UJA-Federation town hall he said, “My support for BDS is consistent with the core of my politics, which is nonviolence.”
Nonviolence.
That’s an interesting word to remember.
Because only a few pages ago, we examined his wife’s apparent endorsement of posts characterizing October 7 as “resistance” and Mamdani’s decision, when asked about those posts, not to condemn them specifically.
Her views are not automatically his.
We already established that.
But if nonviolence is important enough to Mamdani that he describes it as the core of his politics, then his unwillingness to invoke that principle when directly asked about apparent praise for the violence of October 7 becomes considerably more interesting.
He had the principle.
He had the question.
He chose not to connect the two.
But before we ask what that support says about Mamdani, let’s examine the idea of BDS itself.
BDS presents itself as a movement for Palestinian rights.
So let’s judge it by that standard.
Does boycotting Israel necessarily help Palestinians?
Because there is an uncomfortable problem buried inside the slogan “Boycott Israel.”
Israelis and Palestinians do not live in separate economic universes.
Before October 7, Reuters reported that around 200,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza worked in Israel, many earning far more than they could at home.
That matters.
Israel can have policies you condemn while Israeli economic relationships simultaneously improve Palestinian lives.
Those aren’t contradictory statements.
No country has to be perfect before we’re allowed to acknowledge when it does something good.
And providing Palestinians with jobs, higher wages and economic opportunity is good.
Now consider SodaStream.
For years, the Israeli company operated a factory in the West Bank employing hundreds of Palestinians alongside Israelis. Contemporaneous reporting described Palestinian workers receiving Israeli wages and benefits substantially above many local alternatives.
Israelis and Palestinians worked beside one another.
Earned paychecks beside one another.
Got to know one another.
This wasn’t a peace conference.
It was coexistence happening at work.
And BDS targeted it.
SodaStream ultimately moved the factory. The company cited commercial considerations; BDS claimed its pressure contributed, and the company’s CEO later blamed boycott pressure. I am not going to pretend the historical question of exactly why the plant moved is settled.
But the Palestinian consequences were real. JTA reported that roughly 500 Palestinian employees lost jobs after the West Bank plant closed, and the final 74 later lost their positions when work permits were not renewed.
Which raises a question that should be uncomfortable for anyone supporting BDS:
If your movement exists to help Palestinians, what happens when your boycott hurts Palestinians?
What happens when the Israeli company you’re trying to punish is also the company paying a Palestinian father’s salary?
What happens when “Boycott Israel” means don’t buy the product made by the Palestinian worker you’re supposedly standing beside?
What replaces his paycheck?
What replaces his benefits?
What replaces the Israeli-Palestinian business relationship you just helped sever?
And perhaps most importantly:
How does destroying economic cooperation create coexistence?
Maybe BDS supporters believe Palestinian workers should accept economic hardship in pursuit of a larger political objective.
Then say it plainly.
But don’t pretend there is no Palestinian cost simply because the movement calls itself pro-Palestinian.
A movement should be judged not only by whom it claims to help, but by what happens to those people when its strategy succeeds.
And then we come back to Zohran Mamdani.
Because Mamdani supports BDS.
So my question isn’t simply why he criticizes Israel. Politicians criticize foreign governments constantly.
My question is why this particular strategy survives his scrutiny.
Mamdani is a democratic socialist who tells us to think about workers, wages, inequality and material conditions.
Then think about the Palestinian worker.
If a boycott strategy can eliminate his livelihood, where is the economic alternative?
If Israeli-Palestinian economic cooperation is something BDS seeks to disrupt, what does Mamdani believe should replace it?
Maybe he has a compelling answer.
I want to hear it.
Because this is where political ideology becomes a question of judgment.
It isn’t enough for a policy to have compassionate intentions.
You have to follow it downstream.
Who benefits?
Who gets hurt?
What happens next?
And what are you building to replace what you just dismantled?
That’s something voters should ask of every politician.
Especially one asking to run New York City.
Because perhaps SodaStream gives us another kind of dot.
Not evidence that Mamdani secretly believes something.
Evidence that tells us something about how he evaluates—or fails to evaluate—the consequences of a political strategy he openly supports.
But there is another question here.
And for me, it is even more fundamental.
If your support for a movement directed at Israel is consistent with the core of your politics, wouldn’t you want to understand the country at the center of that conviction as completely as possible?
Not from a slogan.
Not from a campus organization.
Not from somebody else’s account of it.
Go.
Look.
Listen.
Challenge what you think you know.
During the mayoral campaign, Mamdani repeatedly said he did not plan to visit Israel if elected. His position was that his focus would be New York and that he did not need to travel to Israel to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers. He also raised the possibility that Israel’s law restricting entry to some BDS supporters might prevent him from entering.
But for purposes of the question I’m asking, I don’t care whether Israel ultimately would have let Mamdani through the door.
I care whether he wanted to walk through it.
Because intention tells us something.
Imagine a different answer:
Of course I want to go. I want to meet Israelis. I want to meet Palestinians. I want to see the places I have spent years talking about with my own eyes. Israel may not admit me because of my support for BDS, but if they will, I will go.
That answer would tell me something about him.
It would show me intellectual curiosity.
It would show me a willingness to encounter evidence that might challenge what he already believes.
It would show me that his convictions are strong enough to be tested.
But that isn’t what he said.
When Mamdani raised the possibility that Israel might not admit him, he added that even if the answer were different, “the result would be the same.”
In other words, the potential travel restriction isn’t really the question.
The intention is.
And Mamdani wasn’t simply confronted with this question by political opponents.
Journalist Errol Louis has described interviewing Mamdani shortly after October 7 and then urging him off camera to consider exactly this kind of fact-finding.
Louis recalled telling him that “fact-finding always helps.”
He explained that the Jewish Community Relations Council trip he had taken did not simply show participants Israel. It took them into the West Bank to meet Palestinians and see conditions there for themselves.
Louis said he came away feeling he wasn’t getting through to Mamdani.
In other words, the invitation wasn’t:
Come see only the Israel I want you to see.
It was:
Go look for yourself.
And this is where something Mamdani told us about himself only a few minutes ago in this story comes back around.
Remember Hasan Piker?
When Mamdani was challenged about appearing with someone whose September 11 comments he himself called objectionable and reprehensible, his defense was that political leaders should engage with people with whom they disagree.
Good.
I agree.
Then I want that Mamdani here.
The one willing to sit with people who disagree with him.
The one willing to listen.
The one willing to engage beyond friendly audiences.
Where is he when the subject is Israel?
You will walk around Astoria for hours with someone you disagree with.
But you won’t walk through Israel?
You will defend engagement with someone whose words you call reprehensible.
But when it comes to the country you have criticized, organized against and supported boycotting for more than a decade, you don’t want to go see it for yourself?
Why?
And then something fascinating happened.
Other Muslims decided to go look instead.
Bronx imam Sheikh Musa Drammeh heard Mamdani’s refusal to visit Israel and responded by organizing a delegation of Muslim leaders to make the trip themselves. Reporting on the Sharaka-backed mission described eight imams and Muslim community leaders—seven from the United States, one from Germany, many from New York—traveling to Israel after Drammeh said he wanted to make Mamdani’s refusal “null and void.”
They visited Jerusalem’s historic and holy sites.
They met Israeli Arabs.
They met rabbis and interfaith leaders.
They visited Yad Vashem.
They went to sites of the October 7 atrocities.
They listened.
They asked questions.
They encountered a country instead of an abstraction.
The delegation’s purpose, according to the reporting, was explicitly to model interfaith engagement, confront antisemitism and bring firsthand observations back to divided communities. A follow-up report described the Muslim leaders meeting survivors, visiting memorial sites and arguing for face-to-face interfaith solidarity after October 7.
That matters to me.
Not because another Muslim’s opinion somehow proves Mamdani’s is wrong.
It doesn’t.
Muslims aren’t a monolith any more than Jews are.
It matters because Drammeh did precisely what I am asking readers to do here.
He looked.
He sought firsthand information instead of treating conviction as a substitute for encounter.
Maybe Mamdani would visit Israel and come home believing exactly what he believes today.
Fine.
That’s not the point.
I don’t need him to change his mind.
I need to know he is willing to challenge it.
Because authenticity isn’t agreeing with me.
Intellectual honesty isn’t reaching the conclusion I want you to reach.
It is being willing to look at evidence that might prove you wrong.
Isn’t that exactly what I’ve been asking you, the reader, to do from the first page of this article?
Open the hyperlinks.
Read the original sources.
Look for information that contradicts me.
Especially that information.
I can’t ask that of you and not ask it of him.
And if Israel and BDS have occupied this much of Zohran Mamdani’s political life, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask:
Why didn’t he want to look?
FROM ACTIVIST TO ALBANY
In 2020, voters sent Mamdani to the New York State Assembly.
They returned him in 2022.
And again in 2024.
So let’s eliminate another criticism that doesn’t survive scrutiny.
Mamdani did not become mayor with “zero political experience.”
He had been an elected legislator for years.
But legislative experience and executive experience aren’t the same thing.
Before becoming mayor of America’s largest city, Mamdani had never run anything remotely comparable to the government he was suddenly being asked to lead.
That isn’t an insult.
It’s a fact voters were entitled to consider.
Then something extraordinary happened.
The activist won.
The democratic socialist won.
The 34-year-old assemblyman won.
And suddenly ideas weren’t merely ideas anymore.
They had access to government.
A DOT IS NOT A PATTERN. UNTIL IT IS.
This is usually the point where everyone retreats to a corner.
Critics take one fact and demand that it prove everything.
His father.
See?
SJP.
See?
The rap lyric.
See?
Piker.
See?
His wife.
See?
No.
That’s not how evidence works.
But Mamdani’s defenders can make the opposite mistake.
His upbringing doesn’t prove anything.
His education doesn’t prove anything.
SJP doesn’t prove anything.
The boycott doesn’t prove anything.
The rap lyric doesn’t prove anything.
His political alliances don’t prove anything.
His rhetoric doesn’t prove anything.
His refusal to affirm Israel as the Jewish state doesn’t prove anything.
His disproportionate focus on Israel doesn’t prove anything.
And individually?
They’re right.
A dot is a dot.
But critical thinking requires us to hold another possibility simultaneously:
Enough independent dots can eventually justify asking whether a pattern exists.
Not declaring one.
Looking for one.
Maybe you will examine everything I’ve laid out and conclude there isn’t one.
Maybe Mamdani is precisely what he says he is: a democratic socialist, progressive Muslim and anti-Zionist politician whose critics repeatedly interpret ordinary political and religious behavior in the darkest possible way.
That possibility deserves to be taken seriously.
Because if you begin an investigation already knowing the answer you’re determined to find, you’re not investigating.
You’re prosecuting.
But another possibility deserves to be taken seriously too.
Maybe the things we kept examining separately look different when we finally put them in chronological order.
Maybe his parents don’t prove anything.
His friends don’t prove anything.
His wife doesn’t prove anything.
His professors don’t prove anything.
But perhaps his own words, repeated across more than a decade, deserve considerably more attention—including the condemnations he did make, the questions he answered indirectly, and the specific things he was given an opportunity to disavow but did not.
Maybe his support for BDS doesn’t prove some secret ideology.
But if BDS can collide with Palestinian livelihoods and he supports it without clearly explaining what replaces the economic relationships it seeks to sever, that may tell us something about judgment.
Another dot.
There was only one way to learn whether any of this would matter once he had power.
Give him power.
New Yorkers did.
THEN THE HYPOTHETICAL ENDED
And this is where the story changes.
Before January 1, we could argue endlessly about what Mamdani might do.
Would his anti-Zionism remain personal political ideology?
Would his activism remain separate from his responsibilities as mayor?
Would his approach to Jewish New Yorkers look different from his approach to Israel?
Would the activist govern differently from the candidate?
Would any of this affect people who aren’t Jewish and couldn’t care less about Israel?
All hypothetical.
Until it wasn’t.
Because once Mamdani became mayor, we no longer had only an upbringing to examine.
Or professors.
Or friends.
Or SJP.
Or an old rap song.
Or boycott campaigns.
Or political rhetoric.
Or campaign promises.
We had something better than speculation.
We had decisions.
And decisions tell us things words sometimes don’t.
On his first day in office, Mamdani began making them.
Some involved antisemitism.
Some involved Israel.
Some involved the enormous machinery of New York City government.
And some may ultimately matter to New Yorkers who have never been to Israel, aren’t Jewish and couldn’t care less about the Middle East.
Because Part II isn’t really about Israel.
It’s about something much closer to home.
What happens when ideology acquires power?
And what happens when that power can reach your job, your pension and your pocket?
Part I was about what was there for New Yorkers to examine before they opened the door.
Parts II and III are about what happened after they handed him the keys.
But even then, this story won’t be finished.
This is the first of four pieces I will publish over the coming days.
The fourth one I can’t write yet.
On September 11, New York will mark 25 years since the day that changed this city forever.
Mamdani will attend that commemoration for the first time as its mayor.
And I don’t know what will happen.
I don’t know what that piece will say because, as I write this, the evidence for it doesn’t exist yet.
Maybe what happens will reinforce some of the questions I’ve raised here.
Maybe it will complicate them.
Maybe it will challenge them.
Good.
Because if I’m asking you to follow the evidence with me, I have to be willing to follow it wherever it goes too.
Even when I don’t know where that is yet.
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