This article originally appeared on JNS.org on November 6, 2025.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York marks not only a political turning point for the city, but also a symbolic triumph for the Red-Green alliance that has been steadily taking shape across the West. This new coalition—of the radical left and the Islamist movement—has found fertile ground both in Europe and the United States.
Yet in Europe, its impact is even greater, the result of years of confused immigration policies, moral relativism and the naive illusion that multiculturalism could exist without values.
Mamdani represents the perfect embodiment of this alliance. His campaign was built on pro-Palestinian slogans and on the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. He has succeeded where others have merely experimented—by turning anti-Zionism into a mainstream political banner.
The shocking fact is that he won even a quarter of the Jewish vote in a city that, along with Jerusalem, holds the largest Jewish population in the world. That, more than anything, reveals how deep the moral disorientation has become. There are always Jews ready to go as sheep to the slaughter, convinced that universalism and tikkun olam (fixing the world) somehow mean denying their own peoplehood.
For European observers, this is a wake-up call. When a proudly Islamic mayor who refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization can rise to power in America’s most Jewish city, it tells us that anti-Zionism has become the most fashionable form of antisemitism.
Mamdani’s first pledges say it all: he aims to sever New York’s cooperation with Israeli institutions, including the successful Cornell-Technion partnership that has fueled dozens of startups; to boycott the New York City–Israel Economic Council; and to divest from Israeli pension funds.
He has not spoken of human rights, except when blaming Israel. He has never declared support for the Jewish state. On the contrary, he has praised and globalized the intifada against it.
In his youthful arrogance, he seems to believe he can reshape the moral compass of the West. His lineage—as the son of a famous director who banned her own films from being screened at Jerusalem’s liberal Cinematheque—adds to his aura among the “chic” intelligentsia of the left who prefer rebellion to truth.
Mamdani’s rise from campus activism, through founding Students for Justice in Palestine, to the mayor’s office of New York, shows how deeply the anti-Israel ideology has penetrated the cultural and political bloodstream of the West.
The consequences will not be merely symbolic. Jewish life in New York will no longer resemble the witty, vibrant, self-confident world of Woody Allen and Seinfeld. The schools, the cultural institutions and the public sphere will now be influenced by a leadership that views Jews as dhimmi, tolerated but inferior, whose existence must be justified through endless apologies for Israel.
Whether Mamdani will actually reduce rents or make buses free is irrelevant. What matters is that his rise will embolden a new generation of European politicians who have already noticed how effective antisemitic and anti-Zionist slogans can be in mobilizing crowds. They are learning fast that hatred of Israel is an easy ticket to power.
But this bus that Mamdani is driving is not free—not for democracy, not for freedom, and certainly not for the Jews who once made New York their proud home. It is heading toward a destination we have seen before in history. And this time, the ticket price could be the moral soul of the West itself.
