Democratic candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani reacts after winning the 2025 New York City Mayoral race, at an election night rally in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, US, Nov. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

The 2025 mayoral triumph of Zohran Mamdani is sending shockwaves through New York City’s Jewish community, with many Jews publicly questioning whether the democratic socialist’s ascendance into Gracie Mansion may put their safety at risk or signal a new, more dangerous time to be publicly Jewish.

Mamdani, a 34-year-old progressive Democrat and the city’s first South Asian and Muslim mayor, secured victory on Tuesday night, soundly defeating independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. In the months leading up to the election on Tuesday, many Jewish New Yorkers raised alarm bells over Mamdani’s history of anti-Israel activism, his reluctance to condemn Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel, and his repeated assertions that Israel has committed a so-called “genocide” in Gaza.

The Jewish community largely rallied behind Cuomo, who earned around 60 percent of Jewish votes, according to exit polls. Mamdani ultimately won 33 percent of Jewish votes, the same polls said.

Some observers have argued that Mamdani’s win over an older, high-profile Democrat signifies growing frustration with the party’s status quo and represents a generational change.

Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who along with her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt co-founded the Altneu, an Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, analyzed Mamdani’s victory as the downstream effect of political correctness.

“In NYC today, we are seeing real-time effects of a culture that shuts down meaningful criticism by calling it racist. Point out a candidate’s recorded quotes? Racist. Note total inexperience? Racist. This is a cynical power play, not moral outrage. Don’t fall for it.” Chizhik-Goldschmidt wrote on social media.

Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who later founded the organization Americans Against Antisemitism, encouraged Jewish New Yorkers not to blame each other for the election outcome and look ahead.

“We tried. We lost. My hope is we learn,” Hikind said. “What the lesson is will demand reflective introspection. One thing that doesn’t work is trying to win the blame game. That never leads to growth or progress. Where do we go from here? Don’t have the answer to this. I do know though, it’ll require faith. Reflection, introspection and faith.”

Rabbi Marc Schneier, founder of the Hampton Synagogue, warned that Mamdani could represent an “existential threat” to New York City’s Jewish community, suggesting that Jews would flee the city in large numbers.

“Zohran Mamdani’s election is the greatest existential threat to New York’s Jewish community in modern history,” Schneier said. “I was the first to sound the alarm that Mamdani’s antisemitic rhetoric would drive a Jewish exodus from New York City, and that day has come. His victory represents not progress, but the normalization of hate in American politics.”

Schneier also posted on social media that he is opening a Jewish school in the Hamptons, anticipating higher demand from families seeking to escape Mamdani’s tenure.

“With the news of @ZohranKMamdani mayoral victory, I am announcing plans for the building of the first Jewish day school in the Hamptons. This is in anticipation of the thousands of Jewish families that will flock to the Hamptons and greater Suffolk County to escape the antisemitic climate of Mamdani’s New York City,” he wrote on X/Twitter.

A little-known politician before this year’s primary campaign, Mamdani is an outspoken supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.

Mamdani has also repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, falsely suggesting the country does not offer “equal rights” for all its citizens, and promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York.

Mamdani has especially received scrutiny for defending the phrase “globalize the intifada”— which references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israels and has been widely interpreted as a call to expand political violence — by invoking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II. He later backtracked on those comments, saying he would “discourage” supporters from using the slogan without explicitly condemning it.

Jewish New Yorkers have already been on edge amid a historic surge in antisemitic hate crimes over the last two years, following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel which resulted in the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.