A group of rabbis urged New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday to change his approach to the city’s Jewish community, raising alarm that his outspoken opposition to Israel and prominent Jewish figures is stoking racism.
A group of 10 Reform, Conservative, and Modern Orthodox rabbis met with the mayor this week and issued a message that there is a uniform sense that Mamdani’s relationship with the Jewish community must change, according to the New York Times. The mayor’s office described the meeting as an “open, positive and constructive conversation.”
“I’m happy to work in partnership with your administration, but Mr. Mayor, you are 90% of what could be different here,” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the Reform movement in North America, recalled saying in the meeting. “If instead of vilifying Israel, you spoke constructively, in measured tones — that would move the needle more than anything else, and I’m hopeful you’ll use that power.”
The meeting followed concerns stoked during Mamdani’s mayoral campaign last year when he declined to condemn the phrases “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” arguing he interpreted them as “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights.” In March, debate again erupted when Mamdani’s wife was criticized for social media posts she liked that celebrated Hamas’s October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, including a post that claimed its rape of Jewish women was a “mass hoax.”
More recently, Mamdani provoked controversy for making a public call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest. The mayor denounced him as a war criminal and “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” stoking fears that such rhetoric stokes hate against Jews, including in New York City, which holds the largest Jewish population of any city in the United States.
“There was no tiptoeing around the elephant in the room,” Rabbi Jonathan Leener, the leader of the Prospect Heights Shul, a liberal modern Orthodox synagogue in Brooklyn, told the outlet after meeting with Mamdani. “The mayor’s comments have ramifications, and he needs to be aware of how, in the current climate, that just adds to the temperature and creates an environment that I think a lot of Jews feel vulnerable in.”
“If he is going to criticize Israel or speak for Palestinian freedom, which I do regularly, then it really matters that there is complexity in his message,” Rabbi Timoner, whose congregation includes Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), said he told Mamdani. “We can’t vote there, we don’t have any ability to change what’s happening, yet people are profiling us and spewing hate at us because they’re angry at the Israeli government.”
On Tuesday, Israeli Consul General in New York, Ofir Akunis, accused Mamdani of targeting pro-Israel organizations in the U.S. with rhetoric that mirrors language used by Nazi Germany.
“The fact that the mayor used the word ‘monsters’ against AIPAC, as far as I know, and I know the history very well, the Germans used the same words toward the Jewish people in Germany, then in Poland, then in Austria, then in Europe, in France,” Akunis told Newsweek.
Mamdani has sought to deflect criticism that he harbors or has perpetuated antisemitism.
“There is no place for antisemitism in Queens or anywhere in our city,” he said after vandals targeted Jews in Queens in May. “I stand in solidarity with our Jewish neighbors. Their safety, dignity, and belonging are non-negotiable.”
But critics continue to raise questions that his policies and stance on Israel have failed to protect their community, including by his move to revoke the city’s use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, and scrapping his predecessor’s prohibition on city agencies engaging in the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement against Israel.
In a May protest at Mamdani’s mayoral mansion, demonstrators expressed concern about rising hate crimes against the Jewish community. Anti-Jewish incidents represent 57% of New York City’s total reported hate crimes in 2025, despite Jews making up only around 10% of the city’s population, according to the New York Police Department. For the second year in a row, there were more anti-Jewish incidents than other target groups combined.
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Meanwhile, crimes against Jewish houses of worship have been on the rise in New York City. Authorities thwarted what they described as a terrorist attack at a prominent synagogue in May. Multiple synagogues, Jewish homes, and a car in Queens were vandalized with swastikas and other antisemitic graffiti in the same month.
The incidents came after a man was arrested on charges of repeatedly ramming his car into the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters in Brooklyn in January, the same month a local man was arrested on charges of attacking a Queens rabbi on Holocaust Remembrance Day.