NEW YORK — Taking to the stage at his victory party in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani heralded his election win in revolutionary terms, declaring a “mandate for a new kind of politics,” to wild cheers from his adoring supporters.

“I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity,” he said. “The future is in our hands.”

The mainstream of the city’s more than 1 million Jews, the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora, also viewed his stunning rise as a groundshaking political transformation, but with foreboding. Jewish New Yorkers will be confronted with an anti-Zionist mayor who many view as a threat for the first time.

Mamdani’s win marks a sea change for New York City’s Jews, putting the community in uncharted waters.

Unlike other major US cities, New York’s Jews are numerous enough to be a force in citywide elections, and support for Israel was long seen as a requirement to win. Mamdani shattered that view, building out a coalition that did not include the Jewish mainstream, and riding on anger at Israel among Democrats over the war in Gaza.

His critics fear his anti-Israel rhetoric could spur hostility toward pro-Israel Jews, and that his policies and personnel appointments will be at odds with the mainstream community’s beliefs and priorities.

Antisemitism is a central concern because the city’s Jews are targeted in hate crimes far more than any other group. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Upper East Side’s Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue said Mamdani “poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community” in a Shabbat sermon last month. More than 1,000 rabbis signed a letter warning about his candidacy.

Despite those fears, Mamdani is popular among leftist Jews and recent polls have put his Jewish support at 10-33%. He has leftist Jewish allies who vouch for him, and he has repeatedly pledged to protect Jewish communities and denounced antisemitism, including in his Tuesday night victory speech and in his first press conference after the win on Wednesday morning. He has met with Jewish leaders around the city, although the content of the meetings has been kept off the record. His condemnations are solely aimed at Israel and Zionism — not at Jews or Judaism — but the distinction is not reassuring for most Jews. Societies that have embraced anti-Zionism, from the Soviet Union to Iran, have become inhospitable to Jewish life.

Many Jews view Mamdani’s sunny exterior with apprehension, and it’s clear that the majority of Jews are not in his camp. Mamdani’s leading rival, the pro-Israel centrist Andrew Cuomo, had the support of more than 60% of Jews, according to recent polls, despite his political baggage, particularly among Orthodox Jews. In some Orthodox areas of Brooklyn, Cuomo won more than 96% of the vote.

A series of statements by leading Jewish groups after Mamdani’s win made the concerns clear, as the UJA-Federation of New York, the Anti-Defamation League and the Union for Reform Judaism held off on congratulating Mamdani, and respectfully vowed to hold him accountable. At the same time, Mamdani’s anti-Israel allies have also said they will make sure he sticks to their agenda.

Tensions had already surfaced on Wednesday morning, when the ADL announced a “Mamdani monitor,” and the mayor-elect said he didn’t trust ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt due to some of Greenblatt’s past comments.

Mamdani’s controversies surrounding Israel include his defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” blaming police violence in New York on Israel, refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, repeated accusations of genocide against Israel, and vows to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite lacking the authority to do so. This week, his campaign partnered with the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn, another far-left anti-Israel activist famous for dragging the British Labour Party through a series of antisemitism scandals.

Before running for mayor, Mamdani identified as an anti-Zionist and voiced support for the so-called Holy Land Five, activists who are in prison for funding Hamas. He is a longtime supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel.

His supporters have decried the focus on Israel from his critics, but Mamdani has made clear that pro-Palestinian activism is central to his identity, often highlighting that the issue brought him into politics and the far-left Democratic Socialists of America. “It is Palestine that brought me into organizing, and it is Palestine that I will always organize for,” Mamdani said in 2021, adding that he was an anti-Zionist and that the state government, where he served at the time, was a “bastion of Zionist thought.”

Mamdani has sought to moderate on some issues, for example, by vowing to keep the respected NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, in office. He has stood firm on his anti-Israel policies, though, or been evasive about his stance. Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week about the double standard of marching in a parade for Pakistan, but not Israel, Mamdani did not address the contradiction. “I believe in equal rights for all people,” he said. The Israel parade is the de facto annual march for the Jewish community and has been attended by every mayor for generations.

In some concessions, Mamdani said he would “discourage” calls for an intifada after coming under massive pressure and that his administration will not have an Israel litmus test when it comes to hiring.

‘Worried about the indoctrination’

It’s unclear what anti-Israel policies Mamdani could enact. His vow to arrest Netanyahu appears to be unworkable. The mayor’s legislative power is limited and Mamdani has a thin record as an assemblymember in the state legislature. He twice proposed legislation that would strip charities of their nonprofit status if they had connections to Israeli settlements; both efforts fizzled. The legislation still sparked alarm among Jews — including leftist critics of the Israeli government — who argued that the measure would hamper Jewish philanthropy at large because some charities, such as social services, operate over the Green Line, even if they do not support settlement activity.

As mayor, though, Mamdani will oversee the city’s massive bureaucracy and hundreds of thousands of employees, with the power to appoint high-ranking administrators, from city agencies responsible for law enforcement, education and other fields.

“He has hundreds of appointments that he can make, and he can heavily influence the boards and commissions that effectively control the funding for much of the city’s financial infrastructure, and that’s not just public programs and public projects, it’s also non-for-profit programs,” said Sara Forman, the head of the New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel political group in the city.

At Cuomo’s concession speech on Tuesday, Jewish supporters said they feared anti-Israel protests run amok, changes to education, hate crimes and harassment.

“I’m worried about the indoctrination of kids hating Israel, thinking that Israel is a pariah, thinking that Israel commits genocide, something that Zohran has gone around saying for two years,” said Moshe Spern, who runs a group supporting Jewish teachers. “I’m concerned about the education and how the next generation of kids are going to think and vote.”

An Israeli-American at the Cuomo event said Israelis in the city were in shock and that many will likely consider leaving the city. Israeli businesses that support tens of thousands of jobs and contribute billions to the city’s economy could be dissuaded from opening shop in New York, and Mamdani’s campaign has said it will “assess” Technion University’s presence in the city.

His mayoralty could also widen divides in the Jewish community. During the campaign, his candidacy already scrambled politics for many Jews and opened fissures in Jewish communities, from soaring Reform synagogues in Manhattan to Hasidic shtiebels in Brooklyn. One of the city’s leading Jewish Republicans, city councilmember Inna Vernikov, broke ranks with the party to endorse Cuomo, and rabbis took risks at the pulpit by wading into politics.

Over the weekend, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, one of the nation’s most prominent Reform leaders, warned that Mamdani had contributed to “abhorrent antisemitism,” but added that the “true danger” was a “fracture in our Jewish family.”

Barbara Schwartz, a Jew from the Upper West Side who has attended services at different denominations around the city, said at Cuomo’s concession that she had stopped speaking with a close friend who had brushed aside concerns about Mamdani’s anti-Zionism.

“We all were unified here as Jews, and to see that and those supporting him are just making me feel very crushed in my heart, that they went along with him. I can’t even understand how they could do that at all,” she said.

Forman said she thought the election had prompted an awareness and political unity in centrist, less religious Jewish communities in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side.

“There has been a great awakening of civic engagement,” Forman said. “Having the Jewish community recognize that their voice matters and their vote counts is going to have lasting impact on elections for years to come. People are not going to be able to take this group of voters for granted anymore.”

When Mamdani takes office at the start of 2026, it will mark an abrupt turn from the tenure of Mayor Eric Adams, a pro-Israel stalwart with deep ties to Jewish communities reaching back to his police career in Brooklyn.

The two leaders’ response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel illustrates the divide.

While Adams, in public, provided unflinching support to the Jewish community, appearing at rallies mourning the Israeli dead, a lawsuit filed last month provided a behind-the-scenes look at his early response to the massacre.

In the lawsuit, Hassan Naveed, the former head of the city’s office to prevent hate crimes, alleged Islamophobia by Adams and his administration in the aftermath of October 7. Naveed alleged that Adams said the Muslim community “had failed to adequately condemn Hamas,” and that there had been no unified voice in the community distancing itself from the terrorist group. Adams said that, instead of condemning Hamas, Muslims were “too busy organizing protests for Palestine,” comparing the rallies to Ku Klux Klan events. The administration also worked closely with the Israeli consulate to seek advice on public responses to events and issues, the lawsuit said.

The October 8 rally that Adams condemned saw protesters celebrate the Hamas massacre, while mocking, taunting and threatening Jewish counter-demonstrators. Pro-Palestinian groups in the city never condemned Hamas or the October 7 attack.

That October 8 rally was co-sponsored by Mamdani’s party, the New York branch of the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani’s statement the same day focused on criticism of Israel, without mentioning Hamas.

“The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by dismantling the occupation and ending apartheid,” he said.

Adams dropped his reelection bid due to his poor polling numbers, dragged down by corruption allegations and his dealings with the Trump administration. He backed his former rival, Cuomo, citing Mamdani’s defense of the intifada slogan, among other issues.

Leaving his polling place on Tuesday, Adams told New Yorkers, “I’m leaving you a good city. Don’t fuck it up.”