It was a perfect moment for TV. Next to the flags and the fireplace in the Oval Office, New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was asked about a protest outside a Manhattan synagogue where people yelled “globalize the intifada” and other nice things.
Mamdani looked straight into the cameras and said he “care[s] very deeply about Jewish safety” and that he “look[s] forward to rooting out antisemitism across the five boroughs and protecting Jewish New Yorkers and every New Yorker who calls the city home.”
You might be confused about what all the fuss is about if you only saw that clip. A Muslim mayor who is also progressive talks about protecting Jews from antisemitism while standing in the Oval Office. What could be more comforting?
Everything that came before it.
The gap between what he says and what Jews hear is huge. Mamdani didn’t just show up in Washington with no ideas about Israel or Jews. He spent two years building a brand on the kind of language that makes Jewish parents in Brooklyn and Queens lose sleep at night.
People in New York City did not hear a poetry reading when they heard “globalize the intifada” outside of that synagogue. They heard about the Second Intifada, bombings on buses, and massacres in cafés. They heard, “Make that happen everywhere.” That is not a mental illness; it is a memory. Mamdani’s answer did not clearly say that the phrase is wrong.
Instead, he tried to make it a vocabulary class. He defended the slogan in interviews and podcasts in June, arguing that “intifada” is “a word that means struggle” and saying that what he hears in it is “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”
He took it a step further to make his case. He talked about the Arabic materials at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and said that the museum had used the word “intifada” to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The museum’s answer should have ended the conversation. It said, “Exploiting the museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize ‘globalize the intifada’ is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors. Since 1987, Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history.” The Zionist Federation of Planet Earth is not saying that. That is the United States’ official Holocaust museum.
Making a slogan that scares Jews into the mainstream: Mamdani’s defense of the chant didn’t happen in a vacuum. The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others have said that “globalize the intifada” is a call for violence, not justice, and that it can easily lead to attacks on Jews, not just on Israeli policies. James Carville, a veteran Democratic strategist, had to go on a podcast and tell him straight up to “keep that phrase out of your mouth.”
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, told him to explain why he was defending a slogan that many Jews see as a threat. This is not something that people on the Right say. Mainstream Democrats, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are telling a potential mayor that using certain words is not smart activism when you run a city with a million Jews.
Mamdani not using the phrase, not condemning it either
They are a match next to gasoline. Mamdani always gave the same answer: he doesn’t use the phrase himself, he says, but he won’t condemn it. He talks about “universal human rights” and not wanting to control what people say.
In the end, he changed his mind a little because business leaders and donors were putting pressure on him. He told a group of business leaders in July that he would no longer use the phrase “globalize the intifada” and would “discourage” its use, while still describing it as a protest slogan against Israeli occupation and a call for Palestinian human rights.
However, he still framed it as a protest slogan against Israeli occupation instead of a call that many Jews hear as supporting violence. Don’t condemn, but don’t encourage. For a city where Jews have been attacked outside of synagogues and students have been chased into libraries while that exact chant echoed outside, that difference is important.
Rabbi Buchdahl’s warning: Before the photo op in the Oval Office, Angela Buchdahl, the most famous Reform rabbi in New York, made it clear in a sermon that quickly went viral in the Jewish world.
She said, “Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.” She pointed to his now-famous statement from 2023 that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it has been laced by the IDF.”
She said it was a crossing of a bright red line because it not only demonized Israelis but also repeated “the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problems here.” That is how Jews heard the Oval Office sound bite. The same person who connected police violence in the US to Israel and used the Holocaust Museum’s Arabic materials as a way to defend “globalize the intifada” is now quietly promising to fight antisemitism. The words are comforting, but the record isn’t.
Genocide in Gaza, safety for Jews in New York: Then Washington came. A reporter asked Mamdani, who was standing next to US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, if he had said that the US was committing genocide in Gaza. He fixed the record in a way that made things worse. He said that he had “spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide” and “spoken about our government funding it.”
This accusation isn’t new. He has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide many times and said that the US is paying for it. The setting is what’s new. It’s not a small thing to bring language from campus rallies and Twitter threads straight into the Oval Office. It puts the word “genocide” next to the word “Israel” in the heart of American power. Minutes later, in the same room, he was telling the country that he cares a lot about the safety of Jews and will fight antisemitism in New York.
Many Jews don’t think that combination is fair. It sounds like double-talk. You can’t “fight antisemitism” while turning the only Jewish state into a casual synonym for genocide and refusing to take a clear stand against a chant that many Jews hear as an invitation to repeat the worst years of suicide bombings, just on a global scale.
This isn’t about feelings, it’s about power: Mamdani and his supporters often say that these are just words and that critics are “weaponizing antisemitism” to silence support for Palestinians.
They say that the real extremists are somewhere else. There is always a new bad guy to blame. But for the mayor of the city with the most Jews in the world, words are not just an academic exercise. They are messages to principals and police chiefs, protesters and counter-protesters, and the person who is trying to decide whether to bring a child to synagogue this Shabbat or leave the Star of David necklace at home.
When the word “intifada” becomes something the mayor-elect repeatedly refuses to condemn, when the Holocaust Museum has to publicly ask him not to use the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to support that slogan, and when a prominent rabbi says he is making “abhorrent antisemitism” more mainstream, the mood in a city that is already on edge changes.
Jews in New York don’t want a Zionist mayor or for City Hall to approve every decision made by the Israeli government. They want something much simpler: the person in charge of their city should know that some words and history can spark a fire and not play with them.
The least a New York City mayor should be able to do: A mayor who says they “care very deeply about Jewish safety” should have a simple minimum standard: If a slogan has been used while Jews were being attacked and killed, you don’t try to sanitize it by making cute comparisons to the Holocaust. You don’t like it. You don’t explain what you think a phrase means in Arabic grammar if it makes a lot of your Jewish population feel like the violence of the Second Intifada is coming to their neighborhoods.
You make it clear that you don’t want that energy near your city. If you really want to call Israel’s war in Gaza “genocide,” at least you know what that means for Jews who are trying to get to shul safely while the word “genocide” is spray-painted next to Stars of David on campus buildings.
Mamdani wants credit for the last 10 seconds of each answer, when he talks about antisemitism and Jewish pain. The first 10 seconds, the slogans, and the accusations are what New York’s Jews have to deal with. They have every right to believe him when he talks about genocide and intifada, not when he says at the last minute that Jews are safe.
If Mamdani really wants to get rid of antisemitism “across the five boroughs,” he can start with his own words.