In June, after Zohran Mamdani somehow bulldozed through the New York Democratic mayoral primary and seized the nomination, I was walking through my neighborhood — I live just north of Manhattan — when a friend saw me and deadpanned: “So when Mayor Mamdani makes the buses free, can we ride them on Shabbos?”
This was classic “Purim Torah” — a real question of halakhah, Jewish law, wrapped in a premise so absurd that it could only be a joke. None of us actually believed that a proud, self-professing socialist who rejected the Jewish people’s right to a state in our ancestral homeland and who had trouble bringing himself to condemn the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust could ever win the mayorship of the most Jewish city in the world outside of Israel. It felt as impossible as snow in August.
Yet here we are, six months later, and the snow is piling up. Mamdani is the mayor-elect. The joke is now the law. And every New Yorker, Jewish or not, is asking the same question: Now what?
The coming Trump-Mamdani cage match
The night of Nov. 4, 2025, might one day be remembered the way Oct. 25, 1917, the occasion of the Bolsheviks’ storming the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is remembered in other contexts: the moment the temperature changed. At 11:47 p.m., with 97% of scanners reporting, the Associated Press called it: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, 34, a state assemblyman from Astoria and a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had beaten former Gov. Andrew Cuomo 50.4%-46.1% in a general election with turnout in the Bronx and upper Manhattan rivaling presidential-year numbers.
Mamdani’s victory speech in a converted Bushwick warehouse was pure defiance: “President Trump, the people of New York just voted. We are ready to fight for every single dollar this city has earned.” The room shook with cheers. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, watching from the White House, fired off a Truth Social taunt during the speech: “Communist just took NYC — sad! We’ll see about those funds.” By morning, allies amplified warnings on federal aid, though Trump himself signaled openness to talks.
The numbers behind the impending federal vs. city government fight are terrifying. New York receives roughly $10 billion in federal aid every year, including grants and reimbursements. Mamdani’s first-term agenda — fare-free buses (approximately $650 million annually), city-owned grocery stores in the 27 food-apartheid neighborhoods ($300 million startup plus $180 million yearly), universal public child care ($5 billion a year), a fast-track to a $30 minimum wage by 2030 — either requires that federal money to stay intact or the full $10 billion in new corporate and millionaire taxes he has promised. Trump can kill the first option with one executive order. He has done it before, and he is eager to do it again.
Legal war rooms are already humming. Mamdani’s transition has quietly retained Neal Katyal, the ACLU’s state-power litigation team, and half the public-law faculty at the City University of New York for a barrage of 10th Amendment and anticommandeering lawsuits. On the other side, Trump’s attorney general will have a menu of pressure points: Title 8 enforcement, Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants, Community-Oriented Policing Services hiring money, and even threatening to pull Secret Service details if the mayor travels to Israel or the West Bank. The first federal complaint could land before the new mayor finishes his inaugural address on Jan. 1, 2026.
When Trump and Mamdani met at the White House in November, it was cordial. Trump expressed high hopes for Mamdani’s mayorship and even appeared to forgive the Democrat for calling him a fascist. But the warmth between them seems unlikely to last.
The slow-motion economic exodus
Walk into any Midtown steakhouse the week after the election, and the conversation was identical: “How fast can we get the Gulfstream fueled?”
Mamdani never pretended to be anything other than what he is. His platform was printed, bound, and posted online months in advance: an 11.5% corporate tax, the highest in the continental United States; a city income tax surcharge that pushes the combined city-state rate for incomes over $1 million to 14.8%; vacancy taxes on landlords who keep apartments empty; commercial-rent control; strict good-cause eviction statewide; and a phased $30 minimum wage by 2030. He sold it as simple arithmetic: take from the top 1%, deliver to the bottom 80%.
The top 1% started moving the decimal points. Whispers of a corporate exodus have filled Midtown. Florida real estate listings have spiked, with firms such as Citadel eying Miami expansions. Real estate titans insist that the sky isn’t falling — at least not yet. Still, the fear is that permanent rent freezes and the elimination of vacancy decontrol could force firms to rethink every property they own in the city.
The carnage for small businesses is only beginning to be modeled. Between projected increases in overtime, payroll taxes, and workers’ compensation during the Mamdani mayorship, analyses from City Journal and ProMarket have estimated that many small businesses are facing the choice of reducing their employees’ hours, laying them off, or relocating. And in the restaurant industry, a staple of the city, early models suggest that 15%-20% of eateries would be at risk of closures without federal subsidies.
Mamdani waves away the exodus talk the same way former Mayor Bill de Blasio once did: “They said the same thing when we went to $15. The city didn’t collapse.” That’s true, but $15 to $30 in five years while commercial rents, utility rates, and liability insurance are all spiking 8%-15% annually is a different equation. And this time, the rich really can leave: Zoom, Starlink, and red-state governors waving zero-income-tax flags have removed the last remaining handcuffs.
A quieter but equally ominous trend is already visible in the city’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. Real estate brokers in Borough Park and Williamsburg have been reporting an uptick in inquiries from large families looking to relocate to Lakewood, Monsey, or even Kiryas Joel — places in New York state where housing is cheaper, schools are private, and the local government is unlikely to impose the same tax burden or cultural shifts. For the first time in decades, the great New York City Jewish migration is pointing outward, not inward.
The Democratic Party’s new poster child nobody wanted
HBO host Bill Maher waited exactly three nights to unload. “Democratic socialism is like a dating profile. Things look great until you meet up in the real world. For example, Bernie Sanders. His big thing was always bringing single-payer healthcare to our country of 340 million. But when liberal, tie-dyed Vermont tried to do it for a population of 626,000, it collapsed. … Bernie, AOC, Mamdani are not Democrats. They’ll be the first to tell you they’re democratic socialists. And that’s a very different thing. And I don’t think people know yet.” The studio audience was noticeably quieter than usual.
Democratic strategist James Carville spent the weekend on every cable show calling Mamdani a “gift” that will keep on giving for Republicans through 2032. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) never endorsed Mamdani in either the primary or the general election. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a two-sentence statement of congratulations and then disappeared from the Sunday shows. Govs. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) found urgent scheduling conflicts when asked if they would campaign with the new mayor. While the old Democratic guard fretted, progressives hailed Mamdani’s election as a blueprint for the nascent New Left.
Republican ad makers are already in overdrive. One 30-second spot being tested in Pennsylvania and Ohio ends with Mamdani’s victory speech superimposed over archival footage of bread lines in Caracas and empty shelves in Havana, closing with the words, “This is the Democratic Party now.”
Inside the party, the fracture is now a canyon. The DSA and Justice Democrats are celebrating the blueprint: 250,000 doors knocked, 200,000 new voter registrations, and 72% turnout among 18- to 29-year-olds. The old guard — Third Way, the Problem Solvers Caucus, every vulnerable House Democrat from Nassau to Westchester — is in full panic. They know every suburban soccer mom from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to DuPage County, Illinois, will see Mamdani’s face next fall with the tagline “This is who runs the Democratic Party now.”
Jewish New Yorkers in uncharted waters
For the city’s 1.3 million Jews, the victory landed like a gut punch in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023. Mamdani has never hidden his positions. As a Bowdoin College undergraduate, he founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. In Albany, he co-sponsored the “Not On Our Dime!” bill to strip tax-exempt status from any nonprofit organization that funds West Bank settlements. After Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, his first public statement mourned “all civilian life lost” without once naming the perpetrators. In debates, he has repeatedly called Zionism “a settler-colonial ideology,” Israel an “apartheid state,” and refused to affirm that the Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Irish people are allowed to have a state of their own in Ireland, and Italians in Italy, but for some reason, for the mayor-elect of New York, Israelites having a state of their own in Israel is a bridge too far.
More than 1,000 rabbis — Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist — signed an open letter before the election, labeling his positions antisemitic. The Anti-Defamation League called him “the most radical anti-Israel candidate ever to win citywide office in the United States.” The American Jewish Committee said his repeated use of the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza “delegitimizes the existence of the Jewish state and endangers Jewish safety worldwide.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams, speaking from Jerusalem days after the vote, told reporters bluntly: “Jewish New Yorkers should be scared.”
The Jewish vote fractured along generational and ideological lines. In Orthodox strongholds — Borough Park, Williamsburg, Flatbush, and Kew Gardens Hills — Cuomo crushed Mamdani by margins as high as 88%-9%. In the secular, liberal enclaves of Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, Mamdani often topped 65%. Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace knocked doors for him. The traditional federations, synagogues, and day schools mobilized against him.
Since the election, synagogue WhatsApp groups and listservs have been flooded with practical questions about aliyah, emigration to Israel; private-school security grants; and whether it’s time to move to Teaneck, New Jersey, or Boca Raton, Florida, also known as the American Holy Lands. Several major donors who traditionally fund Democratic mayors have informed City Hall fundraisers that contributions are “on pause” until they see how the new administration handles campus protests, hate-crime enforcement, and the annual Israel Day Parade.
Mamdani has made gestures — private meetings with UJA-Federation of New York leadership, a promise to increase anti-hate crime funding by 800%, a pledge to keep the Holocaust curriculum intact, and even add lessons on “Zionism as a form of Jewish self-determination.” But when pressed in those meetings on whether he will ever affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, the answer is always the same: “I support equal rights for all inhabitants from the river to the sea.” For most affiliated Jews, that is not reassurance. It is erasure.
The city holds its breath
New York has survived bankruptcy scares, blackouts, the crack epidemic, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and COVID-19. It will survive Zohran Mamdani. But survival is not the same as flourishing.
The next four years will be defined by four simultaneous wars that a Mamdani-led city will be compelled to wage: with the White House over federal dollars, with capital over taxes and regulation, with the Democratic Party over ideology, and with the Jewish community over identity, safety, and the meaning of peoplehood in a city whose mayor refuses to acknowledge that Jews have a right to a homeland.
The buses might actually go free. City-owned grocery stores might open in every food desert. Childcare might become universal. Rents might finally stop rising. But on some future Shabbos morning, a charedi father in Williamsburg or a Modern Orthodox mother in Riverdale might actually have to pull out a new volume of halakhic responsa and look up the law about riding a fare-free municipal bus on Saturday. Only this time, nobody’s laughing. The snow is here. The question is whether New York digs out — or gets buried.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the Allen and Joan Bildner Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University. Find him on X @DanRossGoodman.