When Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani surged past former governor Andrew Cuomo to win June’s Democratic primary, the general election for New York City mayor instantly became a referendum on Israel. Reporters now chase the 33-year-old Ugandan-Indian progressive with the same question he ducked in the first televised debate: Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state?
The candidate still will not say – even after B’nai B’rith’s Dan Mariaschin called the equivocation “deeply troubling in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population.”
For many American Jews, this feels unprecedented. It is not. In 2019, Britain’s far smaller community faced Jeremy Corbyn, then Labour leader and odds-on favourite to become prime minister. They beat him so convincingly that the party suffered its worst result since 1935. The British campaign offers six lessons New York’s Jewish leadership has – so far – only half-learned.
1. Stand together or fail separately
Corbyn’s rise forged a rare alliance from strictly Orthodox to secular humanists. In March 2018, every movement’s president stood beneath Big Ben at the “Enough is Enough” rally; four months later, Britain’s three rival Jewish newspapers produced the same black-border front page warning that a Corbyn government would be “an existential threat to Jewish life.” That image of unity dominated prime-time bulletins for a week.
New York’s communal response to Mamdani is, by contrast, fragmented. The UJA-Federation issues careful statements, while independent Super-PACs flood social media; campus Hillels protest independently. A single, high-profile coalition – backed by every denomination and prominent Black, Hispanic, and Asian allies – would land on page 1 of the Daily News and stay there.
2. Own the news cycle, every day
From mid-2018 until polling day in 2019, British Jewish outlets fed Fleet Street an almost daily scoop: leaked emails, victim testimonies, opinion polls showing public disgust. My own December 2019 report – “The Jew who laughed last at Corbyn” – followed an Orthodox candidate who beat the Labour leader in his own district and embodied the backlash. The aim was ruthless and explicit: never let voters forget the word antisemitism.
Despite wall-to-wall New York media, Mamdani’s Israel problem drifts in and out of coverage. Jewish papers break stories, but mainstream outlets move on when a new subway crime replaces them atop the homepage. Coordinated embargo sharing, weekly thematic investigations, and constant mainstream pitching kept Corbyn’s crisis alive; it would do the same on this side of the Atlantic.
3. Commission hard numbers
British activists did not rely on anecdote. Professionally weighted polling showed 87 percent of UK Jews believed Corbyn was antisemitic, and that almost half of all Britons agreed. Those figures, repeated in every television package, permitted Labour moderates to rebel.
So far, the only public poll in New York to mention Israel was commissioned by a progressive think-tank and trumpeted Mamdani’s popularity among young voters. The city’s Jewish Community Relations Council or Anti-Defamation League should fund reputable surveys on antisemitism, BDS, and trust in each candidate – and publish the results early and often.
4. Elevate moral – not partisan – voices
Corbyn’s implosion began in earnest when Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis published an op-ed in The Times headlined “What will become of the Jews if Labour forms the next government?” Mirvis wrote that a “new poison” had entered British politics; TV cameras chased the Labour leader for a response for six straight days.
In New York, the loudest anti-Mamdani voices are campaign consultants. Imagine instead a joint pastoral letter signed by the city’s major rabbis – haredi, Reform, Sephardi, Persian, and Latino – warning that equivocation on Israel endangers community safety.
5. Human stories beat policy sheets
British activists personalized the issue: Holocaust survivors bullied in local Labour branches, Jewish students hounded online, Muslim allies quitting in protest. Faces, not footnotes, shifted hearts. New York papers can profile the Queens deli owner whose shop was daubed with “Zionists out” after a Mamdani rally; the West African immigrant who joined city sanitation to “repay” Jewish volunteers who fed her during COVID; or the Dominican-Jewish paramedic who fears City Hall might one day boycott Israeli medical devices that keep stroke victims alive.
6. Frame the debate as racism, not right-versus-left
Britain’s Jewish leadership refused to let Corbyn paint their campaign as Conservative propaganda; they insisted it was about basic decency. By election night, two-thirds of voters told pollsters Labour had an antisemitism problem and Corbyn resigned before dawn.
Mamdani’s strategists claim that criticism is billionaire-funded smears. New York’s Jewish coalition must keep the argument on antisemitism, civic tolerance and subway safety. If swing voters conclude the controversy is simply one more progressive-versus-centrist spat, the battle is lost.
Back in London I watched a community of 300,000 – barely the size of Flatbush – bend a national election. They succeeded because they were united, disciplined, data-driven and morally certain. New York’s Jews number 1.5 million. They have bigger newspapers, deeper pockets and a richer tradition of coalition politics. Yet with barely three months until voters pick a mayor, their campaign feels reactive while Mamdani’s TikTok army frames the narrative as social justice versus “colonial apartheid.”
The blueprint is on the shelf. Unite publicly. Dominate the news agenda. Publish credible polling. Let rabbis speak above the political din. Tell compelling human stories. Make the debate about racism, not geopolitics. London’s Jews wrote the playbook; New York’s Jews still have time to run it.
If they do, November could be a replay of December 2019 – when Jeremy Corbyn discovered that courting antisemitism comes with an electoral price tag no politician can afford.