Q&A | Errol Louis on the NYC Mayoral Race

Errol Louis is a longtime political journalist and anchor at NY1, where he hosts Inside City Hall, a nightly program about New York City politics. He is the director of the Urban Reporting program at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, has moderated countless candidate forums in New York and nationally, and even has run for office himself a time or two. I asked him for some wisdom on the increasingly contentious (even for New York) politics surrounding Jewish voters and the campaign of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist who supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and, if elected, would be New York’s first Muslim mayor. 

A fairly moderate Modern Orthodox rabbi I follow on Facebook recently posted a bitter denunciation of Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, a liberal Upper West Side synagogue that hosted a candidate forum you moderated. He was angry at the synagogue not for hosting the forum but for inviting Zohran Mamdani to participate, given some of Mamdani’s comments about Israel. Some of his congregants pushed back, saying in essence, “The guy’s a candidate for mayor. How can you not want to hear what he has to say?” You’ve covered a lot of New York campaigns, and there’s always a lot of Jewish involvement. But this split in the community, is that something new?

That is new, because no matter what happened in the past, you almost never heard a focused attempt to disqualify and exclude a candidate altogether. It’s one thing to say, as Mayor Ed Koch famously did in the 1988 presidential campaign, “You have to be out of your mind if you’re Jewish to vote for Jesse Jackson.” That was considered the outer fringe of what you could say; typically, you can disagree, but you don’t disqualify. And in fact there were conversations at the B’nai Jeshurun forum that I moderated about whether or not Mamdani should be disqualified. 

Some of the comments he’s made and some of the positions that he’s taken, for example around BDS, are ill-advised politically—positions I’d assume he’d need to modify to win.  But I didn’t think that there was anything to be gained by saying, “We will not let you darken our doorstep.” That’s not normally how it works, and frankly, he’s got enough support behind him that you’re going to have to deal with the guy, even though it’s a bitter pill for some people to swallow. You can keep him out of any given room, you can try and disqualify him, but he’s got a lot of support, and not all of it is coming from antisemites.

Is the Jewish community itself unanimous on excluding someone who has been so publicly critical of Israel?

I know people from that congregation, and it’s about as liberal as it gets. Some are going to ride that reform train to the end of the earth. But they’ve never been confronted with somebody like Mamdani.

“Here’s a leader who is talented, charismatic, and closing in on the lead for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City—and he’s 33 years old and also happens to be Muslim. Nobody had that on their Bingo card.”

I think probably the events of the last year, such as the attacks on campuses, probably sobered people up. We’ve got something changing here that not just the Jewish community but the city as a whole is going to have to reckon with.

What do you think is changing? Is it mostly that people feel that antisemitism is really a thing to reckon with?

I was talking with Bruce Ratner, the billionaire philanthropist. He was somebody who had been part of the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia back in 1968, I think as one of the law students providing legal defense. And he said, “I support anybody’s right to take over Hamilton Hall or anything else,” but, he said, the thing about antisemitism is, it’s like an evil genie, and once it’s out the bottle you can’t put it back in. And I think that has happened. You’re probably more up on this than I am, but I know that there has been a focused effort, some of it with roots in the Middle East, to seed campuses with an anti-Israel message. I mean, I know community organizing when I see it. So when a bunch of people all jump out on campus and simultaneously are saying the same thing, you know that there’s some hand behind it. It’s not evil. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just good political organizing, and I think it took New York a little bit by surprise.

One thing people often miss about Mamdani—he’s said it at some point, it’s not a secret—is that his first formative political organizing experience was around BDS. If you compare it to the activism of my generation, I first heard the name Nelson Mandela on campus when somebody handed me a pamphlet. And next thing you know, I’m doing a hunger strike for divestment and writing editorials. So with Mamdani, maybe somebody put a pamphlet in his hand that explained BDS, and it was formative for him. To me that’s what’s interesting and noteworthy, not just that he holds a certain position or won’t say certain things, or that he won’t visit Israel.

Is this partly just a demographic change, that a generation ago you didn’t have all that many Muslim students on campus, so now both sides of the argument are passionately represented? 

That’s true, but what’s unusual is here’s a leader who is talented, charismatic, and closing in on the lead for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of New York City—and he’s 33 years old and also happens to be Muslim. Nobody had that on their Bingo card. It’s remarkable.

Has anyone in your memory ever run as a mainstream candidate in New York who explicitly supports divestment from Israel? 

Absolutely not. In my mind, here’s how we got here: A few cycles ago, maybe four or eight years ago, somebody noticed and reported that Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was circulating an endorsement questionnaire. And one of the questions on which it was clear their endorsement would hinge was “Will you agree not to visit Israel?” I thought it was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard, but there were a number of candidates, I think these were City Council candidates, who actually signed the darn thing. Now, a local politician who may be naive or is desperate to get elected will say anything to anybody, right? So on one level, you don’t necessarily take it that seriously. But I thought the ask was not just inappropriate but problematic and deeply stupid. I don’t know if Mamdani actually signed such a pledge. I do know that DSA was the first group to endorse him. 

When I’ve asked him about it—I’ve interviewed him a few times—he says he is not going to go to IsraeI. I happened to interview him a couple of days after October 7, and I even tried to engage him a little bit off camera. “Look,” I said, “I’ve only been to Israel three times, I don’t feel like I really know all that much about what’s going on, but fact-finding always helps.” And it just seemed I wasn’t getting through to him. A lot of the “Don’t visit Israel” messaging has focused on asking, “Will you promise not to take the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) trip?” because it’s a well-known trip that they’ve been doing for over a decade now. I’ve tried to tell people that when my wife and I went on the JCRC trip, they made a point of sending us across the barrier to some Palestinian counterparts, so we could go to Bethlehem and see the West Bank for ourselves. My own takeaway from doing that was that people were living under shockingly bad conditions and that the situation was unsustainable. But the trip organizers arranged for us to go in good faith, to see whatever we were going to see, and I appreciated that, both as a journalist and as a person. 

So frankly, I think Mamdani backed himself into a corner. The only reasonable position for somebody who’s going to lead New York City is to talk to all of the tribes of the city and negotiate and keep the peace between them, and be like our own little version of Teddy Kollek, and make the thing work. And that is just absolutely incompatible with BDS. You can’t do both.

So, what would happen if he won this election and was confronted with doing this task?

Mamdani was first elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020, under total COVID  lockdown conditions. I remember interviewing him from my living room, and I believe he was in  his living room, because nobody was campaigning in person at the time. He’s charming. He’s friendly, he’s likable, he’s charismatic. There are a lot of people like that, but he had a quality that I’ve only seen a few times, which is that he can actually send it through a screen.  That’s unusual. And if he wins, I’d urge him not to rule out that that quality was a factor in his victory, or to assume ideology is driving this, even though a lot of people will be tempted to say, “Socialism won!” People like me will pull them aside and say, listen, this is not what you thought it was. This was not an ideological struggle. And we’ll tell him, you won this race—you now have a new responsibility. The campaign is over, the governing has to start, and that means talking to and challenging a lot of groups that you maybe didn’t want to talk to at all.

Zohran Mamdani. Dmitryshein, CC BY 4.0

I think he’s smart enough to keep learning and maybe leave behind some of the dead ends. Because I think BDS in general is problematic, but for governing New York, BDS is a dead end. There’s too much money. You know how much money is invested in Cornell Technion, or the tech companies like Waze? I mean, there’s so much economic connection with Israel. And family connections. I ran into one of my neighbors in the lobby of the King David Hotel. It really is the sixth borough of New York, like they say. So you’re going to have to figure out something a little bit more intelligent than “I’ll never go to Israel.”

Do you think he’s doing well in spite of his views on Israel, or because of them? 

Definitely not because of it. Well, let me put it this way. I think that’s what got him started. There is a faction of protesters or activists here within the Democratic base who think that Israel is a settler colonial project that has to be challenged, if not eliminated. There are some people who really believe that and, more importantly, who have built their politics around it. 

Some of those people are just trying to make a point. I think they started throwing around the word genocide just because they knew it would shock people. I condemn the use of that word for exactly the same reason. I mean, if you want to do shock value, do it in the street, have fun, whatever. But if you want to talk about governing the city, if you know there’s a word that is going to cause your listeners so much pain that the conversation can’t continue, the burden is on you to decide whether or not you want to use that conversation-ending word or not. So far he’s not really had to confront that in a real way. If he gets the nomination, or if he stays in this game much longer at this level, he’s going to have to rethink that.

Do you think if he doesn’t get the nomination he’ll continue to be a force?

There’s a scenario developing for November that’s far from unlikely—in fact, it’s actually the one most newsrooms are planning for—that Cuomo gets the Democratic nomination. There’s already a Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa—there’s been no primary there. Mamdani takes the Working Families Party line, and our very troubled incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, is on the ballot having created his own Independent line. So we’re going to have a sitting mayor, a Democratic nominee, a Working Families Party nominee and a Republican nominee. It is very likely that there will be a seriously contested four-way race for mayor in November. And the scenario I just described is not going to be good for the Jews, shall we say. 

I think if Mamdani and Cuomo essentially have a rematch in the fall with an incumbent mayor in there, it’s going to make things a lot more complicated. As the former Brooklyn borough president, Adams has long-standing relationships with a lot of Orthodox Jewish leaders in Borough Park and in Williamsburg. So he’s not going away. He’s even got a fair amount of support in Crown Heights. Where does the Upper West Side go? I don’t know. 

As for Cuomo, he also has baggage. I asked him a question during the debate about the fact that in 10-plus years as governor of New York, he never once visited a mosque. I can understand why people would say that for a mayor of New York that kind of behavior is disqualifying. There are 1.4 million Muslims in New York State, 760,000 in New York City. Believe me, they feel very excluded. And so at a minimum, whether it’s Cuomo or whether it’s Mamdani, or however it goes, unless people come to their senses and grow up, we have set the stage for a lot of tension going forward.

The opposite of what a mayor is supposed to bring to the party, right? 

The mayor is supposed to be the peacemaker, not a divider. We’ve got two candidates who have yet to prove, at least to my satisfaction, that they understand that and are ready to do it. They certainly don’t have the track record.

Take Cuomo. Technically, he’s Catholic, so none of this is personal to him. But I suspect his views were forged in the 1980s, at a time when Muslim New Yorkers were not a political force, they had no political club, no representatives. Things have changed over the last 40 years, and now there are several Muslim representatives in the state legislature and on the city council. There are, as I said, three-quarters of a million Muslims who are living here. Take the Yemeni grocers, who run half the bodegas. They kept all of us alive during the pandemic, and they’ve got vertical integration in the form of supply chains that they’ve built up from the grassroots. They are part of New York, and they shouldn’t be excluded or ignored. They need to be embraced just like every other tribe, and it is the job of the mayor to do that. I don’t know if Cuomo accepts that, but I know that the people in the Muslim community are very wary of what he’s going to be like if he should become mayor. 

And that’s enough people to really influence the vote?

Of course. There’s a new balance for sure. Then there are nationality questions, and whether or not people are citizens and ready to vote. But we’ve seen the progression of different ethnic groups in this city for 400 years. When Egypt had its revolution a decade or so ago, we journalists said, “Oh, I bet there’s some kind of little Cairo in New York that we don’t even know about.” So we consulted the books, and 50,000 Egyptians live in New York, about ten times more than I would have guessed. And of course there are Lebanese merchants. If you’re just talking about religion, there’s this whole offshoot that I’ve been fascinated by, which is people who converted decades ago from Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam. They’re from South Carolina, or Mississippi, with American nationality going back five generations, but they happen to be Muslim.

One last thing. New York politics has always seemed like such a safe space for Jews and such a Jewish space. How much has that changed? And how much of it is policy differences since October 7, versus just ethnic reflexes, Jews’ difficulty in feeling safe with Muslims in the game?

There’s definitely some of that going on. Look at the muddled New York Times editorial that basically said, we don’t really like any of these candidates, but one and only one of them should absolutely be excluded, and it happens to be that young Muslim guy. Come on, guys. But I will say again that Mamdani, through his actions and his stances, has not made it easier for people to feel comfortable. Is it his job to make people more tolerant and mature? No, not particularly. But is it the Jewish community’s job to maybe extend some version of a welcoming hand? I would say, in the world of realpolitik, a little cooptation would go a long way. Buddy up to the guy, mother him, help him relax a little bit.

I think there’s added sensitivity in the Jewish community because people are still in shock, in the post-October 7 world, that people would say some of the things that were said on those campuses. I mean, I’m shocked too. 

What do you make of the cross-examination about whether he’s antisemitic? Most recently, about whether chanting “Globalize the Intifada” is antisemitic, which he refused to say. 

It’s terrible! He walked himself into a trap, because this is a political campaign. If his opponents want to pour literally millions of dollars into beating him up around this, well, this is what he signed up for. He could have stayed in the Assembly, and none of this would be happening. It’s unfortunate that he hasn’t figured out that he’s in an indefensible position.

My first visit to Israel, when I went with AIPAC, was during the second Intifada. They would inspect your bags every time you went into a store or a restaurant. We saw the blown-out spaces—they hadn’t developed any protocols for how you repair a place after a suicide bomber has come in and killed themselves and five other people. There was this big open gash of a wound along the row of storefronts, and there was a mutedness to it. People were worried and upset. But all of this was happening when Mamdani was probably in middle school, so he doesn’t know what the word Intifada means for other people. I’m not Jewish, I’m not Israeli, I just happened to be there during the Intifada, and I’m like, don’t throw that word around, man. You have no idea what kind of triggering response you are calling forward when you do that, and if you don’t understand that you have to work with words beyond some textbook kind of slippery bullshit, you’re not ready to be mayor. You should just exclude the word because the word is so painful for other people. You can get a pass the first time. But after somebody tells you, “This wounds me to my soul,”  and you choose to stick with it, then you’re telling us something, and it’s not a very pleasant thing.

I read his emotional response [in a viral clip] to being challenged on antisemitism as him kind of realizing he’s in a trap. He can’t speak what he thinks is his truth without wounding people deeply, and he doesn’t really know what to do about it.

So you don’t think he’s an antisemite?

I really have no idea. If he’s not, it’s almost worse, you know what I mean? Because if you mean no harm, but you’re doing so much harm, I mean, good Lord. 

Top Image: New York City. Credit: Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0