As I walked to school the morning after Zohran Mamdani was elected to be the next mayor of New York City, something in the air felt different. It wasn’t the weather, nor the traffic. It was the quiet, almost imperceptible shift in how I viewed the people around me. The barista who smiled at me. The neighbor who waved. The passerby on the street. I couldn’t stop wondering: Did they vote for my erasure?
Mamdani has won. And with his victory comes a flood of potential policies, past rhetoric, and embraced ideology that feel like a direct threat to my people – my family, my community, my very right to belong. The headlines are focused on his socialist ideology, his platform, his reforms, and his vision. But what about the people who put him there? What about the neighbors who cast their ballots with full knowledge – or worse, indifference – of what his leadership could mean for the Jewish community?
I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they didn’t read the fine print. Maybe they were swayed by promises of economic revival and lower rent for themselves and their families. Maybe they’re just naive. But what if they’re not? What if they knew exactly what they were voting for?
How do I walk through a world where my safety, my dignity, and my beliefs feel subject to the whims of a ballot box?
How has the right to speak my truth, to live openly and proudly as a Jewish New Yorker, become something others treat as negotiable? It’s not that my existence is suddenly in danger – it’s that my belonging feels conditional. My voice, my values, and my connection to Israel are treated as provocations rather than parts of who I am.
That’s the question that haunts me as I pass familiar faces on the street. It’s not just Mamdani’s history or the uncertainty of what he might do that frightens me – it’s the realization that so many people around me endorse him. Perhaps they didn’t look closely at his old Twitter posts or his positions on Students for Justice in Palestine, so focused were they on his promises to address affordable housing, police reform, and economic revival. It’s a scary thought that there are those in this world who focus on what is online, what is promised, what is marketed, rather than diving for the truth. Perhaps, even scarier, they did see, and chose to overlook it – deciding that those past statements mattered less than the policies that would affect their own lives. Or maybe, the most unsettling possibility of all, they looked at his old Twitter posts, his position on Students for Justice in Palestine, his promises to defund the police force he claims is corrupted by the IDF, and said, “Yes. This is what we want.” Either way, the message is clear: our voices, perspectives, and concerns about the Jewish community can be set aside in pursuit of broader political promises. That realization is what leaves me unsettled as I walk past familiar faces on the street.
I keep going back to the word democracy, to what the United States of America was built to protect and preserve. I cannot help but see the irony. A democracy is only as strong as its members, only as trustworthy as the moral clarity of its generation. How has our democracy come to this? How have we gone from a people rooted in honesty and acceptance to this?
After their families and communities were destroyed, my great-grandparents sought safety and a peaceful life of freedom in New York City, joining hundreds of thousands of others doing the same. They came in the 1940s, part of the wave of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, arriving with little more than hope and the belief that America – especially New York – was a haven. Between 1880 and 1940, more than two million Jews immigrated to the United States, many settling in New York City, which became a global center of Jewish life. They built communities, synagogues, and schools, believing they had finally found safety.
And now? The city that once offered refuge has become a place where antisemitism is not just whispered but shouted without consequence. Where elected officials turn a blind eye to calls for intifada, for the dismantling of Israel, for the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state. Where my existence as a pro-Israel Jewish New Yorker is not just questioned, it’s politicized.
How do I walk through a world where my safety, my dignity, and my beliefs feel subject to the whims of a ballot box? How has the right to speak my truth, to live openly and proudly as a Jewish New Yorker, become a question worthy of debate? People argue, “Anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism, they are not anti you, just anti-Israel.” They say, “Don’t be dramatic, it isn’t as if your existence is in danger,” but it is not that – it’s that my belonging feels conditional. My voice, my values, and my connection to Israel are treated as provocations rather than parts of who I am.
What frightens me most is not just the rhetoric of one politician, but the growing comfort with silencing those who disagree. We’ve seen it with Charlie Kirk, who was murdered for being outspoken about his opinions, the backlash people direct at each other on social media, and now, with the victory of anti-Zionist candidates in the polls. The message is clear: if you stand proudly for Israel, or for Jewish self-determination, your beliefs make you controversial, and your humanity, negotiable. The city that once promised freedom of thought and identity is now the same city where the message is shifting, in concrete, scary ways, signaling that ideological conformity is more important than anything else. Would all those hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors have come here, knowing this is what was in store for their children?
Mamdani may have won the election, but what I’m mourning is something deeper: the loss of trust in the people around me. The fracture in the social fabric that once felt like a true community. Now I fear that I am becoming a stranger in my own home.
This isn’t just about politics. It’s about survival. And today, survival feels lonelier than ever.
The writer is a sophomore at Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business (Class of ’28), a Lieberman-Mitzner honors scholar, studying strategy and entrepreneurship with a minor in political science.