By Abe Greenwald
Friday, July 24, 2026
Last Thursday, the New York Times released an
interview with Zohran Mamdani in which the New York City mayor said that he was
figuring out the legalities of ordering the NYPD to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu
on his next visit to the city. On Tuesday, Mamdani released a video statement saying
that while he didn’t have the power to arrest Bibi, the prime minister is a war
criminal, and New Yorkers should protest his appearance at the UN. The video
received more than 90 million views, and many of us warned that Mamdani was
summoning certain violence against Jews.
It didn’t take long.
Yesterday, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a man
yelling “Allahu Akbar” allegedly stabbed two men. One victim was Moshe Yezhak
Grunhaus, a visibly Jewish man (he wears a yarmulke) coming from Tisha B'Av
services. Afterward, Mamdani made a boilerplate statement about the perils of
mental illness and hate having no place in this city.
Today, local Jewish community figures and elected
officials held a press conference outside of the Jewish Center, the Modern
Orthodox synagogue where Grunhaus had prayed before the attack. New York State
Assemblyman Micah Lasher and others urged Mamdani to “take the temperature
down.”
On social media, I’ve noticed many outraged calls for
Mamdani to respond to the security needs of New York’s threatened Jews. And in
the wake of today’s press conference, some were equally outraged that Mamdani
hadn’t appeared outside the synagogue standing in support of the Jewish
community.
A lot of people continue to miss the point of Mamdani’s
mayoralty.
The prospect of Mamdani arriving at the scene of an
anti-Semitic hate crime put me in mind of a comic event from my youth. There
was a very wild and reckless kid in my high school—bad grades, drinking, drugs,
the works. One day, he was told that he was so low on community-service credits
that he might not be able to attend graduation. So he scrambled to join
whatever student club meeting was being held that afternoon and start racking
up points. It was a meeting of Students Against Drugs, and when he walked in
the door, the entire room froze for a second, stared at him, and then broke out
in hysterical laughter.
Mamdani’s appearance at the scene of the crime would be a
joke, an opportunistic ploy for community-service credits. But, unlike most
politicians, he doesn’t seek such credits.
Mamdani sought the mayoralty in order to raise the
temperature. That was the idea, and it’s going according to plan. He wants
to make the city—and the world—unbearably hot for Jews. He’s been deliberately
raising the temperature since he took office. His office accused a synagogue
under attack of encouraging the violation of international law by hosting an
event on the practicalities of making Aliyah. He refused to attend the Israel
Day parade. He’s called AIPAC “monsters,” set the pitchfork brigade on
Netanyahu, and much more.
The movement to globalize the intifada is itself already
global. It’s reached every corner of the world. But it requires people to serve
in command positions at the local level. In New York, that’s Mamdani.
Yes, he was elected as the head of the city’s government.
Accordingly, he lives in Gracie Mansion and works out of City Hall, so people
expect him to act in keeping with the responsibilities of the office. But it’s
less valuable to think of Mamdani as a mayor than as the regional emissary of
the worldwide campaign to globalize the intifada. He’s the local face of a
global enterprise. Mamdani has alluded to it himself. When he said on Wednesday
that his embrace of a “universal politics” is behind his push to arrest
Netanyahu, he was consciously speaking the rhetoric of a borderless ideological
movement.
His first allegiance is to that movement, and his
mayoralty is devoted to advancing its aims. Judged by that standard, he’s a
runaway success.
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