The Orthodox world thought they fought their battle with the state during COVID. They burned masks, blocked buses, rallied on 13th Avenue. But that was just about public health policy. This is about the erasure of their identity.
Remember when Orthodox Jews in New York thought Andrew Cuomo was the worst thing to hit their neighborhoods since Bloomberg’s soda ban? Back then, Cuomo was the overreaching tyrant who dared to shut down synagogues while keeping liquor stores open. He was the guy who sent inspectors to religious schools but let riots go unchecked. In Williamsburg and Boro Park, he became the face of state-sanctioned hypocrisy, the man who tried to teach Jews how to daven six feet apart while he packed his Emmy shelf and harassed half the women in Albany.
But Cuomo was just the warm-up act.
Enter Zohran Kwame Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist from Astoria — the one-man wrecking ball of everything Orthodox Jews hold dear. If Cuomo tried to regulate your Purim party, Mamdani wants to cancel your homeland. If Cuomo was a nuisance, Mamdani is an ideological crusader on a mission to “liberate” Palestinians by throwing Israel — and the Jews who support it — under the bus.
Cuomo may have closed synagogues. Mamdani wants to close your voice, your values, and your Zionism.
Let’s be clear: Zohran Mamdani is not your typical New York liberal. He’s not just some progressive who wants bike lanes and rent control. No — he’s the poster boy for a new wave of anti-Zionist orthodoxy where Jews are tolerated only if they apologize for existing as a people with a state. He’s proud to back BDS, calls Israel apartheid, and has no problem standing with fringe Jewish groups who think the IDF is worse than Hamas.
And he’s not in a Tel Aviv café shouting into a megaphone — he’s in the New York State Assembly, shaping discourse, rallying young voters, and signaling to your kids that supporting Israel is a sin, but smashing capitalism is a mitzvah.
The Orthodox world thought they fought their battle with the state during COVID. They burned masks, blocked buses, rallied on 13th Avenue. But that was just about public health policy. This is about the erasure of their identity.
Mamdani doesn’t care how many Holocaust survivors live in Midwood. He doesn’t care about rockets on Sderot. To him, Israel is a settler-colonial project and Jewish safety is negotiable. The Jewish story, as far as he’s concerned, needs to be retold — minus the part where Jews fought for survival in their ancestral homeland.
What’s worse? He doesn’t need your vote. He doesn’t want your vote. And he’s not scared of your rabbis, your press releases, or your donor dinners.
Orthodox leaders thought they had seen hostility before. They’ve dealt with tone-deaf bureaucrats, smug liberals, and yes, even self-hating Jews. But Mamdani is a different breed: young, charismatic, and utterly indifferent to Jewish outrage. If anything, Orthodox opposition boosts his street cred.
So now what? You tried working within the system. You backed Eric Adams. You got photo ops with Hochul. But the Zohrans of the world aren’t running to make friends — they’re running to replace you.
If Cuomo was a battle, Mamdani is a war — not on religion, but on the legitimacy of your place in progressive America. A war where the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism gets blurrier every day — and no one on the Left seems to care.
Orthodox Jews in New York once rallied against a governor who locked their doors.
Now they face a movement that wants to erase their voice.
And if they don’t wake up fast, Zohran Mamdani will be just the beginning.
Good Shabbos Comrades.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/satmars-agudaniks-yeshivaniks-lend-me-your-hats/