When Zohran Mamdani announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City in late 2024, he flew under the radar of voters and critics. But as his campaign gained steam—notably for arguably radical proposals such as free bus fares, municipally owned grocery stores, and a $30 minimum wage—he wound up overtaking his chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, and winning the Democratic candidacy for an election that will take place Nov. 4, 2025.
Some of New York City’s Jews started to fret. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, is a vocal ally of Palestinians and a critic of Israel, promising to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to visit the city, as per the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for the Israeli leader.
On this week’s episode of The Jewish Angle, Phoebe Maltz Bovy—who grew up in Manhattan—speaks to Aryeh Cohen-Wade, an opinion editor at The Hill and host of the podcast Culturally Determined, to unpack Mamdani’s background, from his college days as a co-founder of his campus’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to his role as a state assemblyman. They examine how his youth, charisma and progressive policies have inspired voters—while angering others—and whether a Mamdani mayoralty could herald a new era of Muslim-Jewish solidarity in the face of rising right-wing authoritarianism.
Transcript
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: This is The Jewish Angle, a podcast from the Canadian Jewish News, and I’m Phoebe Maltz Bovy. When my West Toronto neighborhood went all in with the Free Palestine signage after October 7, I found myself sometimes a bit wistful for my hometown of New York City. When I’d be back there, I’d see the flyers for hostages, and it just seemed like there was a bit more of a sense that, you know, Israel is a real place where people had just suffered rather tremendously, I guess, if only for demographic reasons. New York struck me as maybe a less stressful place to be Jewish, where you didn’t really have to explain yourself. Not that all Jews had any particular stance on Israel or on Gaza or on the Israeli government’s actions or anything like that, but just sort of like an easier place to be Jewish than Toronto, and specifically the bit of it I happen to live in. But the recent win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary of Zohran Mamdani has made me wonder if there is as big of a difference as all that. So, I have a lot of things I’m trying to make sense of here and decided the person to have on to chat about this with is my longtime friend from the computer. But we have also hung out in person and fellow online opinion editor and podcaster Aryeh Cohen-Wade.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Welcome, Aryeh, thank you so much for having me.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Aryeh is host of the Culturally Determined podcast as well as associate opinion editor at The Hill. And he, like me, we both spend a little too much time on something called Blue Sky, which is the new Twitter we will discuss. He is not a current New York City resident. We will discuss this. But you have a lot of New York pedigree because you have written New York Times headlines in the past, and you have written for the New Yorker, the web. But I think that counts. That’s more than I have. So, good on you. But we got to know each other through Blogging Heads, which was basically this, right? Like, it was a video, having podcasts.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yes. Blogging Heads was sort of way ahead of its time, and before the technology made it quite easy to do this sort of thing. We had multiple conversations over video before we met each other.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. Yeah. Back in the day. So, you’re not in New York City?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: No, I’m not. I’m in Jersey City, New Jersey, which is not even in New York State. But for people who don’t know, Jersey City is across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan and is very much within the orbit of New York City. But Jersey City residents do not get to vote in the New York City mayoral election, which is a real shame.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. So, what I was going to ask you about that on that note is, would you have been paying attention to the Democratic primary of the mayor’s race if it weren’t for all of the posting about it on Blue Sky? And I ask because apart from, I think, my mother once saying, so you know something about the mayor’s race? And I was like, I don’t care. I don’t live in New York anymore. And now I, unfortunately, do care. But it’s mainly just that I’ve been seeing the posts. I mean, it’s in the Times, too. But, like, how, what about you?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: I mean, you know, New Yorkers consider themselves to be living in the center of the universe. And there’s lots of people in national media who live in New York City. And so, things that happen in New York, for many other reasons, people who don’t live in New York pay attention to them. Because I live so close to the city and go into it quite often, I would be paying attention even if I wasn’t on Blue Sky, but for many months, I was sort of just vaguely paying attention because I knew I don’t get a vote. And it sort of seemed like it was a fairly boring race until Andrew Cuomo, very late in the game, former governor of New York State, declared that he was running as well. That got me to pay a little bit more attention. And then, in the last couple of weeks, I guess, more and more people were getting excited in one way or another about the race.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, well, I’ll ask you about Cuomo as well. It’s just such a name I remember from my childhood because I looked up when Mario Cuomo, his father, was governor, and apparently it was 1983 to 1994. So, this was like, that is my childhood. So, I’m thinking like, okay, that’s why. And I think that you got the name recognition there for the elder millennials for sure. But I saw, when I saw how enthusiastic Blue Sky, at least my corner of it, seems to have been for Mamdani, I assumed that meant he had no chance because I went through that thing in my head of the, like, the Internet isn’t real life, Phoebe. You know, Twitter isn’t real life. And certainly, if old Twitter wasn’t real life, where does that leave Blue Sky? It’s got to be like three people, the least representative of anything. But then, look what happened. So, I guess I’m wondering, were you surprised by the results?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: So, I had a similar thought. And this dates back to my Twitter days. And I’m no longer using Twitter or X.com as it’s called now. But yeah, it was often the case that when the 250 or so funny Brooklyn lefty types were all posting about something or some political candidate, it was almost guaranteed that was gonna be unpopular or that person wasn’t gonna win. And the main example that comes to mind is Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress and activist who challenged Cuomo in the Democratic gubernatorial primary in, I think, 2018, maybe 2017. And she lost resoundingly in all five boroughs of New York to Cuomo. And I was a New York State resident at that point, living in Rochester, New York.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Practically Canada.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right, across Lake Ontario from Canada. I could almost see it from my house. But yeah, so I voted for Cuomo in both the primary, I’m sure, multiple times, and every time he was up for the general election. And I think he served three or four terms. What we haven’t mentioned yet is that he resigned in disgrace after, like, a dozen or so women accused him of various sexual misconduct allegations.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. So, on that note, I have a lot of Trump-related questions here, in a way. So, I was wondering, like, how much is Mamdani basically what you get when you get a lot of people who are mad at Trump and specifically at what sort of everything that Trump’s second administration represents? So, I feel like Cuomo is maybe serving as a kind of avatar for Trump with both the focus on, like, I’m the one who’s gonna like, he’s not Jewish, but he’s the one who’s for the Jews. He’s on the side of the Jews. But also, he has this whole sexual misconduct allegation backstory. He’s the establishment. He’s the sort of old rich men kind of thing, I guess. I don’t know if it makes him Trumpian that Bill Clinton endorsed him or if it’s—I mean, it’s complicated because part of me is like, these are such different things, Democrats, Republicans. But at the same time, like, is there some sense in which this is just, like, a sort of—I don’t even know if I am allowed to swear on my own podcast. Is this a kind of sticking it to Trump?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: You know, I think that’s definitely one of the reasons. I think there are parallels there, you know, someone who the broader populace thought— I mean, Trump did not resign in disgrace, but he certainly left office in disgrace. And then most people, myself included, thought, well, he’s done for. Certainly, we never have to deal with this guy again. And I think that was pretty similar with Cuomo. And he resigned, I think, in 2021, so it’s even less or roughly the same amount of time. But the memory is still pretty sharp about what he did during the pandemic. He was popular for some mostly sort of PR reasons, but people got very into him during the pandemic because he gave these televised press conferences in which he seemed to have a mastery of all the details, which at the time was a huge contrast with the press conferences Trump was giving, where Trump didn’t know— just talking out of his butt, I’ll say, because we’re not sure if we can curse on here— and eventually was saying crazy things like, you know, putting a little bleach in there, that kind of thing. So Cuomo, just in comparison, I mean, he’s a talented politician, but just in comparison to Trump, seemed so much better. Then other things came out about his actual handling of the pandemic, including this scandal about sending patients who had COVID, or possibly had COVID, back into nursing homes that definitely led to excess deaths. I think it’s more about the cover-up of that issue that sort of dinged his shining star. But, yeah, he resigned. I think most people thought, well, we never have to— he’s been around for a long time. He was, I think, the deputy or Assistant Secretary of HUD in the ’90s under Bill Clinton. So he’s been in politics for most of our lives, in addition to his very famous father being the governor. I think people were just sort of like, whoa, we’re sick of this guy. And he finally got taken down, he resigned, and we don’t have to think about him anymore. Then he came back to run for the mayoralty, if that’s how you say that word, of his city that he obviously, like, did not really live in, and at best had lived in for like a couple of years because he was from Westchester. That was his right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, I had wondered about that, like, what his connection was.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: He was living in a— it seemed like he was— okay, it’s complicated because the current mayor, Eric Adams, also possibly did not live in New York City because he seemed— he had a property in Fort Lee, New Jersey, not too far. I am right now. So, you know.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Is he in the room with you right now?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: So, you know, this is a strange issue, but it seemed like he moved into an apartment that the family had bought for his daughter and moved in like a year or so prior. And so it was like, you know, it was a carpetbagger kind of thing, which there’s a great history of in New York with Hillary Clinton and RFK Sr. Both arriving in New York and being elected to national office despite not having deep roots there. But I think that, you know, that aspect pissed a lot.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So it’s more, so it’s more with Cuomo, I think. Yeah. I think there is a way to talk about this. I mean, I realize this is a bit like— it may seem like we’re a bit in the weeds, but, like, this was not an election that was just simply a referendum on do we want to free Palestine or not. Like, that wasn’t— you know, there’s a lot. I guess what I’m trying to— like, I’m also trying to write about this, and I’m trying to convey that, like, there’s a lot of— there are a lot of balls in the air. I don’t know. There are a lot of pieces to this that are not, you know, immediately obvious if you only look at a Jewish angle. However, we are going to look at a Jewish angle, which is— so who is Mamdani? He’s a democratic socialist, sort of like a Bernie Sanders type, who— state assemblyman. He has a lot of progressive policies. He also was involved in founding his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine. And he has made plenty of more recent statements that go beyond, I would say, criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. It seems like he’s— I would say he— I would describe him as being pretty fundamentally anti-Zionist in the sense of not in favor of Israel existing as a Jewish state in the usual sense that’s meant. Does that seem like an accurate characterization?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yes, that seems right to me. People, debate moderators, and journalists try to get him to say that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. And he did not. He could have said that, and he did not. So, yeah, he does not seem like a Zionist to me.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Really? You don’t think he’s got a big old Israeli flag hanging from his home? Yeah. So I mean, his own background. He’s Muslim, he’s of, I guess, Indian background, born in Uganda, right?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yes. And he, much like Andrew Cuomo, is also a Nepo baby of sorts.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes. Do you tell.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Well, his mother is a somewhat famous director, although not Steven Spielberg level, but I don’t even know how you say her name. Is it Nair? Nair. Mira Nair, who made Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala. And his father is, I guess, a somewhat prominent Columbia professor.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So Nepo baby at like the level of Lena Dunham, though, like, sort of artistically impressive. He has culturally impressive parents.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yeah, he has somewhat famous parents, but not as famous in New York politics as Mario Cuomo.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: No, no. And I think if you’re gonna do the, like, privilege analysis thing, we have to talk about beauty privilege, which I think is relevant here. And it does kind of drive me a little nuts how little people acknowledge that this matters when it comes to men. And this is obviously, like, we’re talking a kind of Justin Trudeau situation. Maybe they could both, you know, in some future life model hair conditioners.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: But yeah, he’s young. I think he’s 32.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, 33, I think. But yeah, okay, 33. A child.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: So it’s his Jesus year. Although he might not— he might not choose to identify in that way.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That’s how we refer to things on the Jewish angle.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yes. And so it’s quite a contrast with Andrew Cuomo, who is 67, so over twice as old as Mamdani. So yeah, he’s young, he’s, I guess, telegenic. Do we still use that phrase? He did a lot of online video stuff that— you know, he was not— I did not know who he was six months ago or maybe even three months ago. There’s another candidate who ran who got like sixth place, whose name is Zellnor Myrie. And I had never heard of either of these people before. He’s like a state assemblyman or councilman or something. And so we had Zohran Mamdani and Zellnor Myrie. And it was like, who— you know, two people I’d never heard of whose names are.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I’ve never heard of any of them.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: I had Lander, who are both obscure and so Zellnor Myrie, whose name I’m possibly mispronouncing, has faded away. And Mamdani, because he’s a— for multiple reasons, but one is that he’s a talented, you know, politician emerged.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Had you heard of Brad Lander before?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Because I had, not only vaguely. The New York City comptroller is a strange position that has, you know, some amount of power, but often that person— that person often wants to become mayor and doesn’t become mayor. So I think this, like, Mark Green was Comptroller, and he ran multiple times and lost.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I remember him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I bring him up. He’s the Jewish candidate. Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other in the election, which I think was widely understood as kind of giving a seal of approval, like, this guy’s fine for the Jews. I think that everybody… I don’t know that everybody agreed to it, but that seemed to be for the people who wanted to see that. They saw that.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. So part of the complication here is that New York introduced a ranked-choice voting system that first came into effect in the previous election, which elected Eric Adams. And I think most people today would say that that was a mistake, that Eric Adams won that race because he has turned out to be a much stranger person than anyone understood at the time. He also was indicted for, like, really blatant, absurd corruption involving Turkey and the Turkish consulate in Manhattan. And the Trump administration basically, you know, did something that probably should not be legal and forced all the charges to be dropped for some sort of unproven or alleged quid pro quo, quote, “allowing ICE agents to operate freely in New York City.”
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So this is a moment for Canada to just pause. Canadian listeners may now pause and feel smug.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. So anyway, there’s this strange system where you rank your choices, which is very unusual in America, in which you rank the top five people. And I think a lot of people, a lot of voters, still don’t understand the system and were confused by it. And there’s some strange… If you think about this a lot, it’s like time for some game theory. You need to think about what order you’re ranking people and who you want to get knocked out first. So anyway, the candidates who are running against each other can cross-endorse and say, “Pick both of us. We like each other. I’m happy if he wins. He’s happy if I win.” Lander, who maybe in a more normal time or city would have been sort of the boring, wonky guy who could have possibly won, he and Mamdani cross-endorsed. I think it’s somewhat hard to say both. Like, so I… Brad Lander is, I assume, a Zionist of something.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh. So I looked this up. He is basically like where you would imagine, like a Jewish Democrat would stand.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yeah, right. So. And they filmed this cute, very friendly video where they are like meeting at a street vendor or something and saying, “You go first. You go first.” So they get along with each other. Clearly, Brad Lander is fine with Mamdani being mayor, and maybe he hopes to become deputy mayor or something along those lines. But he arrived at Mamdani’s celebration party and gave a little speech, and everyone was chanting, “Brad, Brad, Brad.” I think that’s interesting because both, you know, Lander is not saying, “Well, as a New York Jew, I have to flee for my life right now because the globalized intifada is coming to get me.” But also, the fans of Mamdani who are chanting “Brad, Brad, Brad” are chanting for a Zionist. And so they can’t all be committed anti-Zionists either, who are trying to no platform anyone who supports Israel as a Jewish state. So, yeah, what I was surprised by was I thought Lander would do a bit better because he was sort of like the boring, conventional choice, but he also wasn’t Cuomo. I think a lot of the energy was just there was this whole campaign, “Don’t Rank Andrew,” which was saying, even if, you know, don’t even put Cuomo fifth on your ranking because that could benefit him in the later round. It’s like anyone but Cuomo, and anyone but Cuomo won, you know, like 75% or so of the first round vote.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So I want to specifically discuss these smear claims because I’ve seen everyone from M. Gessen in the New York Times to a troll I was arguing with on Blue Sky saying that to even bring up the fact that Mamdani refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” that he refuses to say he thinks Israel should continue to exist as a Jewish state, specifically, whatever… To bring up his pro-Palestine activism is basically… Well, now let me talk about this troll, because this is getting into the Blue Sky stuff. Somebody was saying that it’s basically racist. As if I had simply looked at Mamdani and said, “Well, he looks like the sort of guy who’d be pro-Palestinian,” versus these are his known policy views.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Oh, for sure.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: They are not the views of everybody with his complexion. Goodness knows, a lot of Israelis have his complexion. They are his specific policy views that are obviously helping him with some voters. And so I guess what I’m trying to make sense of from afar, and having trouble doing so, is like how central has this topic been in his campaigning? Or like his supporters’ boosting of him? Because certainly on Blue Sky, it’s been big. This is a lot of why people have said, “Look, hooray, finally we have a pro-Palestinian candidate to get behind.”
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: He was not foregrounding that in his campaign, but reporters and debate moderators were asking him about it, and he did not say the… You know, he could have said more. He could have said something that would make more people happy. He could have said something like, “I support two states for two peoples,” which is sort of the standard American liberal Zionist hope for Israel in Palestine, and which seemingly has a very small chance of happening in the foreseeable future. So he could have just said that, like, the innocuous thing. And he didn’t. So he obviously does care about this. Maybe he was worried that there’d be some people in his coalition who would be mad at him if he did say that. But, at the same time, affordability was basically… The race came down to, I think, whether people were more worried about crime and the scariness of the crime wave that started during and after the pandemic. In that case, they might support Andrew Cuomo, and whether they thought affordability was the real problem, in which case they would pick someone else. And it’s sort of like, in a way, they can’t both be… You can’t have rampant crime and apartments too expensive for anyone to rent because if really there was a true crime wave, people would be fleeing the city somewhere else, and then prices would drop, I assume. So it was like, which reality do you believe? I think the affordability reality is the one, you know, that’s more real.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: This is going to seem a little bit galaxy-brained, so bear with me. But I think there is something like Trumpian in a non-sinister sense about Mamdani in that there’s this way that like what seems possible to say politically… There are all these notions of like, well, you can’t say this, you can’t say that, whatever. And then once you get a politician who just… Or maybe this can be sinister. Actually, it sort of depends. Trump kind of… I’m thinking like Trump 1.0 first time around, his appeal really was like, “No, no, I’m just gonna say what I feel like saying, and I don’t feel held back by political correctness.” And that actually helped him.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yes.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: And I think something similar may be happening with the not saying the expected Democrat line about Israel because I think there are a lot of people who are into that.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: I think that’s, I think that’s true. I mean, I think the, from what we’ve seen of Mamdani so far, the… The more like the parallel is… Is more to like an Obama, an Obama-type figure. He’s young, he’s good looking, he’s charismatic. He’s, you know, a good public speaker. And Trump, you know, Trump wasn’t just like saying rude things; he was a total outsider. So it was like the total outsider Mamdani, who’s been in office for four years or something, versus the ultimate insider, you know, former governor, son of former governor. So I think that aspect, you know, that aspect, like people want something new.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Can I just push back on The Obama thing? Obama has an interesting life story. He’s obviously not, you know, some white guy from a political dynasty. However, his policies were never that. He wasn’t nationalizing the bodegas. You know what I mean?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: He wasn’t even. He had. It was Biden who had to stumble into there being gay marriage. Right, you know what I mean?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. So a lot of it was. I mean, we didn’t use this term at the time, but a lot of it was vibes. Yeah, I mean, Obama, you know, he was black, there had never been a black president before, and he was young and seemed cool. And so I think, you know, politics has shifted since then. The right has moved more to the right, and the left has moved more to the left. And Obama more or less governed as a centrist Democrat, with some exceptions in the end. I mean, just the other thing is like, you know, the mayor of New York actually does not play any role in the ultimate settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so a lot of this is just like symbolism.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, it’s symbolism, but it’s also, I think, less about what this individual is going to do in office because, yeah, like, obviously they’re not going to do a heck of a lot in terms of policy. It’s more that it’s kind of like, I guess this is maybe getting to my last question, but like, getting to this kind of taking of the temperature in New York of where people stand on this issue. And I think the stakes of this are more in this huge, largely Jewish city, you know, not majority Jewish. I’m gonna get into population stuff in a moment, but like, what does it say that New York would be fine with this? And I think that’s what’s either anxiety-provoking or good for some people or interesting, you know, but wherever you stand on it, I think that’s the notable thing. Because I saw an interesting response to the New York Times article about Jews being divided in New York and, I guess beyond, about Mamdani’s success; with some saying like, oh no, this means antisemitism won, and others saying, oh no, that doesn’t mean that at all. This is just a great left Democrat has won. And then one of the comments to this was like, this could be New York’s first Muslim mayor. Why aren’t we instead having coverage of the joy this brings to New York’s Muslim population? I thought that was both a fair point and something I wanted to dig into a bit. Basically, New York is really different from most places. It’s different from Toronto, and it’s different in the world by having more Jews than Muslims still. Which kind of surprised me because I just always think of Jews as being so few. But, you know, like, everybody always says that people overestimate how many Jews there are and assume that everybody in New York is Jewish, but there I was thinking, right, that many. It’s like, oh, no, actually it really is that many. But at the same time, I’ve been thinking that maybe the whole antisemitism thing is a bit of a—I don’t know if red herring is the word—but like, this is more just about anxieties about—and here we should have Franklin Foer on to discuss—the end of the golden age of Jewish New York.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Yeah. Okay. There’s a lot there. I mean, and there actually was a piece in the Times specifically on what that comment or complaint about. They wrote a piece today that I just read the headline of, about young Muslim New Yorkers convincing their parents that they should vote for Mamdani and it would be, you know, everything would be okay, something along those lines.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: That is often the case with the complaints about why isn’t there such an article?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: The act of the article is there.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yes.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Okay. And yeah, and many complaints about the New York Times in general. Actually, one of the reasons there’s still so many Jews in New York City is because of the growth of the ultra-Orthodox. So that is some change from the golden age of…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Sure. And they’re not voting probably in the Democratic primary.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. And I’m actually unclear about that, whether they often vote as a bloc, whether they are like registered independents or… Because a lot of them voted for Trump over the past, you know, 12 years. But in New York City, the actual election is often the Democratic primary. So whether they are registered Democrats or not, I don’t know. But yeah, the makeup of the Jews who live in New York City is not the same as it was in whatever heyday we’re imagining of, like, the New York intellectuals or city college budding neoconservatives or whatever. So there’s that and there’s definitely more Muslim New Yorkers than there were in whatever era that was in the 20th century. So, yeah, I think there probably is some anxiety about that. But you know, plenty of young Jewish New Yorkers either ranked Mamdani either first or second.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Like, I’m 100% sure that is the one thing. Okay, so that’s a note I wanted to kind of end on is just like, we don’t know really at this point from what I can tell how Jewish Democrats in New York City voted. There was a poll that the Forward had some exclusive poll about this from before the election that said something like, he would have been the top pick for one in five, I think, which is not none, but Cuomo still coming out ahead. And then also from the New York Times, there was this, I guess, precinct-by-precinct, so it’s sort of like just every few blocks basically of the city analysis that showed that in these areas that you would kind of like there were a few areas that Lander did particularly well, like did best, and those were areas where I would imagine a lot of the kind of old school New York Jews would congregate. Like, not to get too into the details of this on a Canadian podcast, but like on the Upper West Side and in Brooklyn, like parts, not all of the Upper West Side and goodness knows, not all of Brooklyn, but like bits of it where you would expect this. And I guess what I’m saying is like, how I feel about this myself kind of depends on how New York Jews feel about this, if that makes sense. Like, you know what I mean? Does that make any sense?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: You know, this is sort of an own, you know, own voices kind of thing. Like, let’s let New York Jews—
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Me not speak for the New York Jews.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. And because technically neither of us are New York Jews, although we’re at least New York Jewish adjacent throughout our lives. Yeah, it’s hard to say. And I know people who held their nose and voted for Cuomo acknowledging his personal, you know, basically more one person in particular more than held her nose.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: It was like, I’m disgusted that I felt forced to vote for Cuomo, but I couldn’t vote for the anti-Semite. And so that opinion is, and you’re…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Are you talking about an old or young person here?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Roughly our age person. So is that old or younger? You listeners could decide, a slip of a thing, right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Whereas there were other millennials…
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. Whereas I know I actually know multiple New York City Jewish Democratic primary voters who ranked Lander 1, Mamdani 2. And I think we’re mainly like, we just don’t want Cuomo back in here.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: I mean, I feel like, at the end of the day, this is significant about what it says about sort of what the Overton window maybe would be the way to put it, I don’t know. But like, what is or isn’t acceptable political speech, I think is interesting. Do I think that the mayor of New York is actually of tremendous geopolitical importance? I have trouble with thinking of it like that.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. And you know, that, and the whole thing is just that, you know, people in New York think that everything that happens in New York is super important. And other people in other parts of the country will disagree with that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, like the famous New Yorker cover, right? Not web only, alas.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Right. There’s one other thing I just want to briefly mention is, you know, so now we’re seeing so Mamdani is almost… so there’s still the ranked choice voting, so he’s not officially the nominee yet, but he’s almost definitely going to be the nominee. And the reaction from at least the online right has been extremely bad. And they are ready to, you know, be nasty to him in all sorts of ways. And I, it’s possible that John Ganz is the one who raised this point in his piece, but they’re attacking him as a rootless cosmopolitan. And there’s a possibility here for Jewish New Yorkers and Muslim New Yorkers and unaffiliated New Yorkers to say, you know, it’s more important for us to band together right now and oppose, you know, creeping or not even creeping, you know, right-wing authoritarianism embodied by Trump and his online hordes, and see that, you know, the people who hate, the people on Twitter or X who are posting racist things about Mamdani, they don’t like the Jews either. And maybe we should have some sort of solidarity across lines here and see, like, what are the interests of American Jews who I think, you know, are primarily… they see their interest as Americans before being Jews. That’s my opinion.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’ll see where it all goes. So where can people find you, Aryeh?
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: They can read the Hill opinion section. I edit pieces there. They can find me in Jersey City if they, if they happen to be here, out and about.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, thank you so much for coming on. This was great.
Aryeh Cohen-Wade: Thank you so much for having me, Phoebe.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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