The surprising story of the New York mayoral campaign is not liberal Zionist opposition to Mamdani’s campaign, but their support.
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE ELECTION DAY, supporters of Israel stepped up their attacks on Zohran Mamdani, who won the New York City mayoral contest on Tuesday night. In late October, over 1,100 rabbis across the country signed a letter denouncing “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization throughout our nation.” As Alex Kane reported in these pages, the signatories included not just conservatives and centrists, but alsoliberal Zionists: At least 65 rabbis and cantors affiliated with the liberal Zionist lobbying group J Street signed on. On October 31st, Angela Buchdahl, arguably New York’s most prominent Reform rabbi, accused Mamdani of promoting “the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problem here.”
This was predictable: Liberal Zionists have long opposed anti-Zionism’s “political normalization” and regularly oppose candidates who challenge the Jewish state. The more surprising story of the 2025 New York mayoral campaign is not liberal Zionist opposition to Mamdani’s campaign, but liberal Zionist support. Even before the Democratic mayoral primary, Mamdani received the cross-endorsement of his primary rival, Comptroller Brad Lander, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the city. After the primary, Mamdani won the backing of Representative Jerrold Nadler, the longest-serving Jewish member of Congress, as well as State Assemblyman Micah Lasher, the frontrunner to succeed Nadler when he retires next year. In the campaign’s final weeks, Lander, Nadler, and Lasher were joined by other prominent liberal Zionists, figures who oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, yet support its existence as a Jewish state. Victor Kovner, one of the founders of J Street, Sharon Kleinbaum, rabbi emerita at the LGBT synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, and State Senator Liz Krueger all endorsed Mamdani’s campaign. Each has said that they disagree with Mamdani about Israel, but support him all the same. “I differ with some of Mamdani’s views about the future for Israelis and Palestinians,” wrote Kovner in The Forward, “including his failure to vocally support a two-state solution. But one doesn’t have to agree with all of his views about the Middle East to conclude that he is the best candidate for mayor.”
This is a new political phenomenon. Since at least 1967, the organized American Jewish community, and virtually all US politicians, have treated Israel’s system of Jewish legal supremacy as nonnegotiable. Anti-Zionism has been beyond the pale. Mamdani’s victory suggests that we are witnessing a historic change. The increasingly right-wing character of both Israel’s government and the pro-Israel establishment in the US is not only leading more Americans to question Zionism, it’s also leading some Zionists to cease making Zionism a political litmus test. By bringing together anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists, Mamdani has forged a coalition that allows Americans who disagree in their ultimate vision for Palestine and Israel to work together to end unconditional US support for Israel. In the coming years, that coalition could change the Democratic Party, and American politics, as a whole.
IN RECENT DECADES, barely any anti-Zionists have competed seriously for high political office. But when they have, liberal Zionists have shunned them. In 2018, when then-candidate for Congress Rashida Tlaib suggested she might prefer a single democratic state in Israel-Palestine, J Street withdrew its endorsement. The lobbying group, whose Political Action Committee says endorsees must “commit to supporting US security assistance to Israel as outlined in the 10-year Memorandum of Understanding negotiated by President Obama,” has not even endorsed progressives who are less explicitly anti-Zionist than Mamdani, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Cori Bush. As The Forward has noted, J Street endorsed 48 candidates in 2022 who were also endorsed by AIPAC, which supports the Israeli government unconditionally, but only one who was also endorsed by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). And it’s not just J Street that won’t ally with anti-Zionists. Last year, Kamala Harris’s campaign refused to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the Democratic National Convention. This summer, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party revoked its endorsement of mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, a JVP-endorsed candidate who supports boycotting Israel.
Mamdani’s success shows that this firewall is starting to erode. As I notedafter Mamdani’s primary win, he presents his positions on Israel-Palestine—which are radical in the context of American politics—in liberal and universalist terms, framing his opposition to Jewish statehood in the language of equality under the law. In an October debate, he said he “would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion. And part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country.” Rather than exceptionalize Israel, he’s said that he opposes not only Jewish supremacy in Israel but Hindu supremacy in India and Islamic supremacy in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
These arguments may appeal to some liberal Zionists, who are increasingly alienated from the actions of the Jewish state. On its website, New York Jewish Agenda declares that “we are proud to call ourselves liberal Zionists.” But in a Guardian report last month, its executive director Phylisa Wisdom acknowledged that its members’ views are in flux: “There are a lot of people who couldn’t ever imagine voting for an anti-Zionist mayor and who also could never have imagined their own feelings about Israel and the Israeli government that they are having right now,” she said. Many liberal Zionists, she suggested, think Mamdani is correct “that Benjamin Netanyahu should be behind bars.”
J Street’s views are evolving as well. In January 2024, the group withdrewits endorsement of New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman, in part because he accused Israel of committing genocide. But this August, J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami declared that he had “been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.” J Street does not endorse in local elections, but after Mamdani won the primary, Ben-Ami said that “political figures like [him] may well have an important role to play if we’re going to succeed” in achieving J Street’s goal of “Jewish safety” and “Palestinian freedom.” J Street still supports a Jewish state. But by suggesting that Mamdani, who opposes one, has an important role to play in achieving J Street’s vision, Ben-Ami implies that liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists need not be political adversaries. As he said in his statement after the mayoral primary, their shared commitment to “democratic principle” requires that they work together “to beat the threat we all face from the authoritarian right.”
If some liberal Zionists have warmed to Mamdani because they’re more alienated from Israel, they’ve also warmed to him because they are more alienated from many of Israel’s defenders in the US. Lander, arguably New York’s most prominent Jewish liberal Zionist elected official, has accusedIsrael of “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “forced starvation” in Gaza. Yet Mamdani’s chief rival, Andrew Cuomo, in his effort to woo New York’s pro-Israel establishment, joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal team at the International Criminal Court. Cuomo has also engaged in blatant anti-Muslim bigotry, calling Mamdani a “terrorist sympathizer” and laughingwhen a talk show host said Mamdani would have cheered 9/11, which drew reprimands from J Street and Rep. Nadler. In 2022, the Canadian political scientist Mira Sucharov asked American Jews whether they supported Zionism according to different definitions of the term. When she defined Zionism as “a belief in a Jewish and democratic state,” 72% agreed. But when she defined it as “the belief in privileging Jewish rights over non-Jewish rights in Israel,” the figure dropped to only 13%. By embracing Netanyahu and Islamophobia, Cuomo defined Zionism in a way that makes some liberal Zionists uncomfortable. Despite identifying as Zionists, figures like Lander and Nadler may find Mamdani’s emphasis on equality in Palestine-Israel more appealing than Cuomo’s.
Mamdani’s coalition between anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists will be tested in the years to come. Despite Mamdani’s success, liberal Zionists in other states may refuse to follow Lander and Nadler’s lead when faced with anti-Zionist insurgents. If they instead help AIPAC-friendly centrists triumph, they will alienate the party’s young, progressive base. Lander will likely enjoy the backing of Mamdani and many of his supporters if he challenges AIPAC-aligned Congressman Dan Goldman next fall, as some expect. But if no major candidate with Mamdani’s views enters the 2028 Democratic presidential primary—and there are none on the horizon—will the activists who powered his campaign mobilize for a candidate like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, or Chris Murphy, who oppose unconditional support for Israel but stop short of challenging Jewish supremacy itself?
At this moment, both anti-Zionists and liberal Zionists are far from achieving their goals. Neither one decolonized state between the river and the sea nor partition into separate Jewish and Palestinian states is plausible in the near term. But the fact that their ultimate visions remain distant might make it easier to unite around shorter-term goals: In particular, halting—or at least seriously curtailing—US military aid to Israel, and fighting Donald Trump’s authoritarianism at home. Mamdani’s victory offers a glimpse of a left-liberal coalition for Palestinian freedom and American democracy, which echoes the great American progressive coalitions of the past. Between 1935 and 1939, the Communist Party of the United States supported the New Deal. In 1967, the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society joined protests led by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an umbrella group that included more moderate anti-war activists. In those cases, leftists supported liberals. And given how rare anti-Zionism remains among American politicians, leftists may sometimes make the same calculation in the years to come, as the struggle for Palestinian rights wins influence inside the Democratic Party.
But given the generational and ideological trends that Mamdani’s campaign represents, it may be that over time the power dynamics nationally shift leftward, and liberal Zionists play the supporting role. If this coalition becomes a politically viable alternative to both white Christian supremacy in the United States and unconditional support for Jewish supremacy in Israel, historians may look back at the 2025 New York mayoral race as the moment where it began.