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NEW YORK — Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, a leading figure in the US Reform movement, warned Friday about threats posed by New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and about divisions in the local Jewish community wrought by the contentious election.
“Some fear that in the most Jewish city in the world, we are becoming strangers once again. I share many of those fears,” Buchdahl told her congregation, the Reform Central Synagogue in Manhattan.
She expressed fears about the normalization of anti-Zionism, the demonization of Israel, of children feeling ashamed to identify as Zionist or wear Jewish symbols, and how anti-Zionist rhetoric and antisemitism have caused deadly anti-Jewish violence.
“Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” Buchdahl said, pointing to Mamdani’s 2023 accusation that Israel was responsible for police violence in New York, which recently received media attention.
“This crosses the line clearly into antisemitism — not only demonizing Israelis but echoing the age-old antisemitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problems here,” she said, also denouncing Mamdani’s “false claims of genocide” in Gaza, his unwillingness to condemn the phrase “Globalize the infidada,” and his opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.
“It is hard not to fear that the environment we witnessed for our Jewish children on Columbia’s campus after October 7 [2023] could be a preview of the way that New York City could start feeling for all Jews,” she said.
Buchdahl said the “hateful ideas” were not limited to Mamdani, but were part of a broader trend to delegitimize Jewish peoplehood and Israel, driven by an oversimplified, binary view of the world between oppressors and the oppressed, and an ignorance of Jewish history.
She said she has also met with younger Jews who are sympathetic to Mamdani and feel alienated from the Jewish community.
In addition to the external threats, Buchdahl said she fears “what has happened within our Jewish community.”
“It endangers all of us. It’s the way we are trying to impose a litmus test on other Jews, essentially saying you’re either with us or you are against us,” she said. “Too many in our community are no longer willing to sit at the same table with people, even family members, who disagree with them.”
“The Jewish community faces real threats, and we need to confront them without turning on one another,” Buchdahl said. “This divides us and hurts us all. That would be the true danger — a fracture in our Jewish family.”
“Like Abraham and Sarah, many of us feel we’ve entered uncertainty. We are walking through the wilderness again, but we have walked this path before — and we will find our way forward if we walk it together,” she said.
Mamdani is a far-left anti-Israel activist and the heavy favorite to win the election in the city, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel. His leading opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo, is a pro-Israel centrist. Far-left Jewish groups have campaigned for Mamdani, while centrist and Orthodox Jews have largely lined up behind Cuomo. The Republican Curtis Sliwa trails Mamdani and Cuomo.
A poll released this past week showed that Cuomo was far ahead among Jews, with 60% support compared to Mamdani’s 16%, although the poll had a relatively small Jewish sample size with a ±9.2% margin of error for Jewish respondents.
Other leading rabbis from the city and the US, including other Reform leaders, have issued warnings about Mamdani ahead of Tuesday’s election, including in a letter signed by more than 1,000 rabbis.
Buchdahl did not sign that letter, a choice she explained in a message to the synagogue, saying the clergy there have spoken against antisemitism and anti-Zionist rhetoric, but stressing the importance of “separation of church and state.”
“There are political organizations, including Jewish ones, where electoral politics is the core mission. Get involved,” she wrote. “Central Synagogue, however, is a Jewish spiritual home and we want to keep it that way. It remains our conviction that political endorsements of candidates are not in the best interest of our congregation, community, or country.”
The Shabbat sermon was a response to feedback she had heard from the community for that message. She had received both messages of support for refraining from signing the letter, and respectful disagreement, she said. She did not make any specific endorsements or issue voting recommendations during the sermon.
“We are a people who hold moral nuance, that holds love and critique together. To love Israel is not to deny its flaws, to criticize Israel is not to deny our people’s right to exist in safety and sovereignty,” she said in the Friday sermon. “Antisemitism flourishes when the world loses its capacity for that complexity — and we must not lose it ourselves.”
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