Not Once Did He Say “Jews.” His Own Side Booed Him Anyway.
Zohran Mamdani spent the third anniversary of October 7 trying to please everyone. He pleased nobody, and the people who paid for it were Israeli peace activists holding candles.
Besties (not you Andy R.!), I have watched a lot of politicians fumble October 7. I have never watched one fumble it in both directions inside of twelve hours.
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani had a day on Wednesday, the third anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. I pieced it together from the New York Times, the New York Post, the Forward and basically everyone else who covered it, and it is a lot.
Quick background if you are new here. Mamdani is the 34-year-old democratic socialist who became New York’s first Muslim mayor this year. He founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin, the Democratic Socialists of America carried his campaign, and the Palestinian cause has been his whole brand since college. He runs a city that is about 12 percent Jewish. That is the biggest Jewish population anywhere outside Israel. So yeah, he knew this day was coming.
Just before 9 a.m.: the statement
Mamdani kicked off the day with a roughly 200-word statement. I will be fair to him, because I am not a hater. The first paragraph is not nothing. He calls the day “profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers,” calls October 7 “horrific war crimes,” and says Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and took 251 hostages. (The real number is over 1,200, as the Jerusalem Post pointed out. Minor detail. Except it is not minor at all.)
Then he pivots. “The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he wrote, and from there it is all Gaza: a “devastating, ongoing genocide,” bombed ambulances, drone strikes on journalists, aid turned away at crossings, the “so-called ceasefire,” a line about how “our tax dollars fund these war crimes,” then “occupation and apartheid” and a federal government he accused of complicity “with every arms shipment.” The Post did the math, and October 7 itself got less than a quarter of the statement. The Times noticed that he described Gaza in detail and gave nothing close to that for what Hamas did in Israel.
The bigger problem is what he left out. Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL said it in five words on X: “Not once do you say ‘Jews.'” I read the whole thing to check, and he is right. No “Jews.” No “Jewish.” The Forward also clocked that “terrorist” never shows up either. On October 7. Be so for real.
Let me be clear about what I am not mad about. I do not need the mayor of New York to agree with me about Gaza. People get to grieve Gaza, and a lot of people in his city are grieving it. My problem is the date. October 7 is the one day on the calendar for the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust, and he treated it like a warm-up act.
And it was not some impossible tightrope. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries mentioned Palestinian deaths and the destruction in Gaza too. He also called the attackers what they were, Hamas terrorists who wanted to destroy Israel, and nobody is mad at Hakeem Jeffries. Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James put out normal statements that did the normal thing. Even Joe Walsh, the former Republican congressman turned full-time Trump critic, asked Mamdani whether he could give Jews one day. One day!
Before anyone says this is just Republicans being Republicans: CBS News rounded up Democrats lining up to dunk on him. New York Congressman Dan Goldman called the statement “reprehensible.” Florida’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz said he was “desecrating the memory of murdered, innocent Jews.” New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer said he was blaming the victims. Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop called it “unnecessarily inflammatory.” Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres did not name him, but he told Israel’s critics to at least express condolences for the Israelis Hamas killed. Subtle, Ritchie. We see you.
New York’s Jewish leaders went off, as expected. Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called the statement “morally perverse.” Mark Treyger, who runs the Jewish Community Relations Council, told the Times that people wanted a leader who would bring the city together and that Wednesday “was just not it.” The JCRC’s official response, per JTA, said he “continues to fall short.” Former Councilmember David Greenfield, who now heads the Met Council, wished the mayor would just stick to New York.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, did not name him either, and she did not need to. At a UJA-Federation event that night, she said the day should be about one thing only, remembering the 1,200 people Hamas murdered, according to Jewish Insider. Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon went further and compared the statement to turning September 11 into a day of mourning for al-Qaeda. Lowkey I think that one is a reach, since Mamdani did mourn the victims, just briefly. But I get how we got there.
And here is the stat that should have kept somebody at City Hall up at night. A poll released that same morning found 64 percent of Jewish voters in the city wanted the mayor to skip October 7 events altogether. Not “say better things.” Just stay home. That is not a vibe check he passed.
Afternoon: City Hall
Meanwhile, on the other side. Chapters of the Young Democratic Socialists of America had already announced a protest outside City Hall. Their charge: Mamdani keeps “capitulating to Zionist pressure.” According to The Media Line, SJP, Within Our Lifetime and Pal-Awda organized the rally, and a lot of the people there were DSA members. As in, members of the mayor’s own organization. The Post counted about 125 people.
Capitulating how, you ask? Their list includes meeting with President Trump, building relationships with Jewish leaders, and putting out a report on Antisemitism that, among other things, sent money to a pro-Israel Jewish community group. It also includes keeping NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish. I am just going to leave that one there.
Now about that Antisemitism plan, because ck already did the homework. The plan doubles funding for a city hate-prevention grant program called P.A.T.H., Partners Against the Hate, to $6.4 million. That program’s money has flowed through the Arab American Association of New York to CAIR-NY, about $223,500 since 2021, and to JFREJ, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, about $222,000. JFREJ co-signed a letter with Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid. And on the 2025 filing, the distributor checked “No” when asked whether it keeps records on how it picks grantees and how much they get.
So let me get this straight. The City Hall crowd is furious that one pro-Israel Jewish group got a check. From a program that sends Antisemitism money to groups that spend their days telling the world Israel is committing genocide. If that is what capitulating to Zionist pressure looks like, the Zionist lobby is fully cooked and nobody told us.
For context, rabbis met with him in August and begged him to tone down the Israel rhetoric because it was feeding Antisemitism at home. He did, a little. When Netanyahu came to the UN last month and went after Mamdani and his wife by name, Mamdani skipped the protests and posted a video of himself planting an olive tree with Gazans at Gracie Mansion. The Times noted that the Antisemitism report made both sides angry. Jewish leaders hated that it barely mentioned Israel. Activists hated that it existed at all.
This is a man who made a Nakba Day video timed to Israeli Independence Day and a July video calling Netanyahu a war criminal. He has refused to define Antisemitism. And to the crowd at City Hall, he is a Zionist sellout. Make it make sense.
Evening: Union Square
Mamdani clearly planned his evening to avoid a scene. He turned down an invitation from Israel’s consul general to watch a 47-minute film of footage from the October 7 attacks. Instead he went to a candlelight vigil in Union Square run by Israelis for Peace, a group of Israeli peace activists, which honored both the Israeli victims and the Palestinians killed in the war that followed. A lot of his progressive Jewish allies came. Brad Lander, the former city comptroller and current Democratic congressional nominee, stood right next to him.
If you set out to design the most Mamdani-friendly way to mark October 7, you would build exactly this.
The City Hall crowd marched over and crashed it anyway. The Times counted hundreds of them. According to JTA, they took over the spot where the vigil was supposed to happen, and the organizers had to move it to another corner of the park behind police barricades. Protesters drummed and chanted the entire time, and Gothamist reported that at points nobody could hear the speakers over them.
The Post spotted Hamas and Hezbollah flags in the crowd. The Times heard chants in support of Hamas and calls for the deaths of Israeli soldiers. At the mayor they yelled “Zohran, you coward!” and “Zohran is a sellout!” and “Traitor!” Per City & State, as relayed by WFMD, someone told him he “cannot weaponize being brown anymore.” (I bet Andy R. was there. I wonder what flag he waved? Prolly the flag of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. It does incorporate a rainbow, so why not?)
And my personal favorite: “Zohran you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
He got called a genocidaire by his own voters
Read that chant again. They charged him with genocide. The man who put the word “genocide” in his October 7 statement. That same morning. The man who founded an SJP chapter. The man who promised to arrest Netanyahu. These are his people, the movement that got him elected, and they showed up to call him a genocidaire. I am sorry, but that is deliciously ironic and I am going to sit with it for a minute.
Here is what it tells you about the far left’s purity tests. There is no finish line. Mamdani gave them more than any mayor of New York ever has, and it does not count, because the test was never about Palestinians. It is about whether you will treat every Israeli, and every Jew who will not disown Israel, as untouchable. Standing at a vigil run by Israeli peace activists, people who agree with him on Gaza, failed the test. Keeping a Jewish police commissioner failed the test. Sending money to one pro-Israel group, through the same grant program that funds CAIR and JFREJ, failed the test.
And notice what the October 7 statement was for. The most generous read is that he wrote it to keep exactly these people happy, so he could get away with going to a vigil they would hate. It did not work. It cannot work. You cannot buy off a movement whose purity tests have no ceiling with a paragraph. Every gesture he makes toward Jews registers with them as betrayal, and every paragraph he writes for them costs him with us. He built that trap himself, back when he was the guy at the front of the crowd. Now he is the guy the crowd is chasing.
The people this actually happened to
I want to spend a second on Israelis for Peace, because they are the ones living rent free in my head. These are Israelis in New York who organized a memorial for their dead and included Palestinian dead in it. They are, on paper, exactly the Israelis the left keeps telling the rest of us to listen to.
On the anniversary of the day Hamas attacked their country, a few hundred people screamed at them, and some of those people waved the flag of the organization that did the attacking. Tamar Glazerman, the group’s co-founder, told the Post the protesters only cared that the group had Israelis in its name. “Not a word that we said had mattered,” she said.
Hamas flags. At an October 7 memorial. Hosted by Israeli peace activists. I genuinely have nothing to add to that, so I won’t.
Mamdani stood there holding his candle, stone-faced. He never addressed the crowd. At 8:50 p.m. his security detail walked him to a waiting SUV, and the Times said he looked ashen. He finished the night meeting privately with Palestinian families at Hinds Hall by Ayat, a Palestinian restaurant on the Upper West Side. The name honors Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed in Gaza in January 2024, and also nods to “Hind’s Hall,” the name protesters gave Columbia’s Hamilton Hall when they occupied it that spring. (Yes, also the name of a Macklemore song. We have been over Macklemore.) The owner told local press he picked the Upper West Side location because of Columbia’s activism. A little girl’s death is a real tragedy, and I am not going to joke about it. But think about where the mayor chose to end October 7: at a restaurant whose name doubles as a campus occupation slogan.
A year ago
Funny thing. In October 2025, when Mamdani was still a candidate, Fox posted video of his security hustling him out of Foley Square while a protester chased him, called him an Antisemite and demanded he denounce Hezbollah. That came right after his statement on the second anniversary, which Israel’s Foreign Ministry answered by saying he only stands with Jews when they are dead.
One year later, same exit. Security, a crowd yelling at his back, a car. The difference is who is yelling. Last year it was people who think he is hostile to Jews. This year it was people who think he is not hostile enough to Israel. And this year, the Hezbollah flags showed up with the people chasing him.
Credit where it is due
I am not here to feel sorry for him. But I will give him this, because it is true. Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker, gave him a lot of credit for showing up, and she is right. Plenty of people in his coalition would never stand under a banner with the word “Israelis” on it. He stood there while people waving Hamas flags called him a coward, and he did not leave early. That counts for something.
It just would have counted for a lot more if, nine hours earlier, he had typed one word. Jews. Hamas crossed that border to kill Jews, and it killed everyone in its way while it was at it, including Thai farmworkers and Bedouin Israelis. Naming that is not a concession to Netanyahu or to anybody else. It is just saying what happened.
Thursday: the follow-up
He got his chance to fix it on Thursday morning at a press conference in Bushwick with Julie Menin. It was officially about nonprofits. The reporters did not want to talk about nonprofits.
Here is what he said, per amNY, JTA and the Times of Israel. He was “proud to attend last night’s vigil, as I did last year.” On the people who called him a traitor: “I am the mayor of New York City and this is what I signed up for.” On the statement: “There must be room to mourn the lives of the more than 1,100 Israelis that Hamas killed three years ago.” Reporters asked whether he would change anything in it, and he would not name a single thing. They asked why he made a Nakba Day video but nothing like it for October 7, and he said it is “critically important to be able to mourn for all of those who were killed and have been killed since.”
So. No word. Not in the statement, not at the podium. None of the coverage I could find shows him touching the Greenblatt line at all, and none of it shows him saying anything about the Hamas flags or the “Long Live Hamas” chants amNY reported. “This is what I signed up for” works fine as an answer to people calling you a sellout. It does not work as an answer to people waving the flag of the group that did October 7 at an October 7 memorial.
You know who did say something about that? Governor Hochul. According to JTA, she called the disruption “despicable” and said “Jewish New Yorkers deserve to mourn in peace, free from hatred and intimidation.” Look at that. First sentence, and she said the word. It is giving bare minimum, and somehow she still outperformed him.
Menin, standing right next to him, said “October 7th should remain about October 7th” and compared it to September 11 and Pearl Harbor. When reporters asked about the word genocide, she said “I’m not going to comment on terms that the mayor is using or not using,” which is the most polite possible way to say a lot. She and Comptroller Mark Levine have also proposed a permanent October 7 memorial in Brooklyn. The mayor’s answer on whether he supports it: “our administration is reviewing it.” Groundbreaking.
I will be honest. I did not expect him to rewrite the statement. I did think that with a day to sit with it, he might at least say the word out loud. He had a podium, a room full of reporters and a Jewish council speaker standing next to him. As far as anyone has reported, he still did not say it.
