“Liberal New Yorkers Who Are Privately Republican” Are Still Freaking Out About Mamdani

If there were awards for understatements, this New York Times headline from December 29 would surely be a winner: “As Mamdani Leaves Queens for the Upper East Side, a Cool Welcome Awaits.” How about a subzero welcome?

Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, first lady of New York City Rama Duwaji, have reportedly not yet moved into Gracie Mansion, the sprawling mayoral manor on the corner of 88th Street and East End Avenue. Mamdani won the election by a margin of almost double digits; when they take up their new digs in the coming weeks, they will relocate to a neighborhood that favored Andrew Cuomo by 24 points. And if Mamdani’s democratic socialism is making the rich nervous, his mayorship is spurring a crisis of nearly existential proportions for many of his and Duwaji’s extremely rich neighbors-to-be. One of them recently told the paper of record that he wouldn’t even recommend a sandwich spot to Mamdani, calling the youngest New York City mayor in more than a century an “entitled, ignorant, anti-capitalist, anti-Westernist ideologue.”

And that’s mild compared to what certain clusters of uptown moms are saying—that he’s bringing sharia law and supporting the intifada. Their warnings have gone straight for the proverbial jugular, with women arguing with full conviction that their children are no longer safe in New York now that Mamdani is mayor. Some have claimed that Duwaji is a Hamas sympathizer. (She is not.) One prominent chronicler of the Upper East Side wrote back in June that Mamdani’s primary win had ushered in a “spiritual Kristallnacht” that normalized hatred toward Jews.

As a Jewish mother of Jewish children in New York City who has spent the better part of my life in heavily Jewish social circles, I’ve personally heard some version of “Your children are no longer safe” more times than I can count. The anti-Mamdani sentiment is so assumed in certain corridors of the Upper East Side that it’s totally normal to hear the new mayor pilloried publicly in upscale Madison Avenue hair salons (the type where blowouts start at $125), something I’ve witnessed on a few different occasions. In this milieu, “Did you vote for Mamdani?” is now a litmus test of sorts for how much you supposedly care about your child’s well-being.

Why are some women in my community spiraling into Mamdani derangement syndrome? Perhaps because their algorithms have been serving up videos like this one, featuring a New York transplant in Los Angeles warning that mayoral incompetence was what led to her neighborhood burning down in last year’s Pacific Palisades fire. Underneath the video is the hashtag #stopmamdani. The young mayor has been a lightning rod for all sorts of anxieties, particularly the types that run rampant in the city’s cloistered, highly privileged private school environments. These are circles in which parents debate what foods should be served in the cafeteria with a passion usually reserved for life-and-death issues: “I’d rather my child starve than eat a hot dog”—that sort of thing.

Mamdani’s refusal to bear-hug Israeli leadership, which until recently was de rigueur for both political parties, has transformed him into the embodiment of a bogeyman for some Jews who live above 60th Street. Incidents such as last month’s horrific Bondi Beach mass shooting targeting Australian Jews have further heightened a siege mentality. This may not be surprising to some, but the holy war of words playing out in Mayor Mamdani’s new backyard is partly coming from mothers who not long ago held squarely centrist or even liberal beliefs. They raised funds for Planned Parenthood; they worked in Democratic administrations; they marched in “pussy hats” back in 2017. Now they’re giving off MAGA-mom energy, talking about the preservation of “Western civilization” and how they voted for Cuomo, the Donald Trump–endorsed candidate who was accused of sexually harassing 13 women. (Cuomo has denied the allegations.)

“It seems like a lot of the anti-Mamdani moms I’ve seen tend to be those ‘liberal New Yorkers’ who are privately Republican,” a mother at a prestigious uptown private school told me prior to the election. “I overheard two moms talking outside of school, and one remarked angrily that ‘if Mamdani wins, it will be the end of Western civilization.’” Some have gone full-on radicalized QAnon conspiracy theorist, with at least one well-educated Jewish mother, I was told, asking questions like, “Will we have to start praying five times a day now that Mamdani is mayor?”

The rumor mill is circulating a story about kids asking if their family will be sent back to Poland because of Mamdani’s victory. (The only families in New York City currently being deported—that we know of—are those of undocumented immigrants, some of whom are being detained by ICE agents in front of and alongside their very young children. The Gaza Strip currently appears to be the most unsafe place in the world to be a child—4 out of every 100 children have lost one or both parents.)

After the election, Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, the senior rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun—the Orthodox synagogue Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended before they left the city for Washington, DC—addressed a letter to New York’s Jews about the atmosphere in New York City. “It’s beginning to feel like the 1930s,” he wrote, referring to the period in Europe when the Nazi Party began targeting Jews with discriminatory laws, economic sanctions, and social-isolation policies.

Not everyone is buying the historical comparison. Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, made a video in which he responded to Rabbi Steinmetz’s claim, saying it was “baffling” that Jews “would feel this level of terror just because Mamdani believes that Israel should be a state in which Palestinians and Jews are treated equally.”

One New York City private school mom who voted for Cuomo and is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors explained how the fear of Mamdani is driven by the twin engines of intergenerational trauma and rising anti-Israel rhetoric. “I know quite a few Jewish parents who are afraid of Mamdani and truly think he is deeply antisemitic and a threat to Jewish existence. I don’t believe that, but I do believe that his being our mayor validates and tacitly enables others with antisemitic beliefs to express or act on those beliefs,” she said. “Growing up on the Upper West Side, the Holocaust and antisemitism felt mostly like a history lesson. I was surprised to find myself unnerved by the anti-Jewish rhetoric from the left following October 7 and Israel’s attacks on Gaza.”

Other Jews in the same affluent social circles view the legacy of October 7 much differently. A 30-something lawyer who identifies as a Zionist and has three children, one of whom attends a Jewish preschool, told me, “October 7 has given us [Jews] permission to run wild with our fears.” (The Zionist lawyer voted for Mamdani and asked to be quoted anonymously for fear of professional and social backlash.)

Arno Rosenfeld, who writes the “Antisemitism Decoded” newsletter for the Jewish outlet The Forward, recently praised the new mayor—and his political instincts. “Mamdani, who became a fixation for many Jewish leaders during the race for mayor, has been remarkably conciliatory to the Jewish establishment, modeling a version of anti-Zionism that mostly avoids some of the pitfalls I’ve outlined,” he wrote.

But not everyone’s views are fixed. In a sermon two and a half weeks before the election, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue told his congregation that Mamdani “poses a danger to the New York Jewish community.” In December, while giving a speech at the biennial assembly of the American Zionist Movement, Cosgrove criticized that same community, saying that defenders of Israel shouldn’t be surprised that Mamdani was supported by some 33% of Jewish New Yorkers, and called for a “new chapter of American Zionism” that balances support for Israel with acknowledgment of and empathy for Palestinian suffering.

If these Jewish parents genuinely believed their own rhetoric—that we are entering a dire time for Jewish safety—wouldn’t they pack up and leave? There are plans for a Jewish day school in the Hamptons in anticipation of thousands of Jews moving to Suffolk County, but so far, there’s been no mass exodus. “No one leaving New York City because of Mamdani, say two top real estate CEOs,” a CNBC headline reported. “New York City is back. The people who work here, live here, they feel the energy, they have the conviction, and they have every right,” Scott Rechler, one of the CEOs, said in the story.

“I think the reaction some Jewish parents are having is not based in reality. I don’t see any indication of people running away and leaving. They tried to run away during COVID, but they got bored and it was inconvenient,” said Amanda Uhry, who voted for Cuomo and is the founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors. “One client told me that she is worried New York City is going to ‘turn into one big socialist Fieldston’”—the elite Riverdale private school where tuition for the current school year is $68,162. (Uhry graduated from the school.) “But even if it does, they will still have a wait list as long as the phone book.”

In the meantime, the question is how these hostile factions will coexist on the Upper East Side, where the pearl-clutchers might find themselves bumping into New York City’s first couple at the Guggenheim. “Jews have become like every other white, affluent group that only cares about themselves and taxes,” observed the 30-something Zionist lawyer, who lives in one of the wealthiest uptown zip codes with his three young children. “Imagine if Mamdani was saying he wanted to lower taxes on millionaires. Would there still be the same objection?”

The tsuris over Mamdani is also a rather strange perversion of two core Jewish values: tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (literally, “repairing the world”), which for generations have fueled a Jewish philanthropic juggernaut focused on helping the less fortunate and achieving equality and justice for oppressed groups. The granddaughter of the Holocaust survivors confided to me that she reluctantly compromised her morals to vote for “a sexual predator” because she was afraid of the National Guard showing up in her neighborhood with tanks under Mamdani. “If Trump dies, JD Vance will abandon Israel immediately. Will that be Mamdani’s fault too?” she said. “I guess it’s easier to be scared and angry at the brown man who’s raising your taxes than it is to face the even greater looming hypotheticals whose threats aren’t so easily communicated in attack ads.”