Talking NYC Politics with a Bisexual Israeli on the Eve of the Mayoral Primary

Is it futile to discuss the NYC mayoral race the day before the primary? Let's try anyway.

Hey everyone,

I had originally planned to share my Long Island weekender, but between getting called an edgelord on Friday and my date with a bisexual Israeli on Saturday, I felt like I should probably make sure I close out Pride month discussing the New York City mayoral primaries from the most countercultural POV of all: the bisexual Jew lens.

I’m not even going to say queer because apparently bisexuals are now the most hated letter in the alphabet, according to every discussion I’ve seen on Threads over the past month. If there’s anyone getting 86’d from an event, it’s probably going to be a bisexual Jewess with a nuanced opinion.

Yesterday, writer Haley Nahman added her two cents about Zohran Mamdani, the hopeful socialist candidate currently going toe-to-toe against noted sexual predator and former dynastic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. Young, charismatic, brown, Muslim, and an immigrant, Mamdani has become a media darling as a controversial symbol of resistance to the status quo.

Never mind that in the last mayoral race, a Black woman, a Latina, and an Asian American man all ran on equally progressive platforms and were largely ignored. Or that during the last two presidential cycles, leftists encouraged voters to abstain rather than support two qualified women who stood to make a far bigger impact on policy than this local figurehead.

Everyone, Nahman included, seems to have overlooked the six other candidates on the ballot, some of whom are arguably more qualified. Instead, she’s joined the now-familiar liberal pattern of backing a polarizing figure as a political messiah during a critical election cycle, even though that strategy has consistently blown up in the left’s face for the past decade.

True to form, she ended with a footnote that she would not be entertaining any messages about Mamdani being pro-Hamas, citing Jewish Currents and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) as her sources for her political stance on the conflict. On one hand, I understand the defensiveness; some right-wing Jews weaponize rhetoric against other Jews with a hostility that mirrors how some anti-Zionists target Zionists. But it’s as if no one can fathom holding a neutral view of the guy, let alone assessing him objectively.

(See for yourself where you align with the candidate platform quiz!).

Mamdani, for his part, has been getting dragged for his noted associations as co-founder of the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at Bowdoin College where he graduated in 2014 and attending rallies held by Within Our Lifetime (WOL), whose protests included standing outside the Nova exhibit honoring the nearly 400 people who were killed, chanting: “Kill another Zionist now.”

Even when presented with a cross-endorsement opportunity with current NYC comptroller Brad Lander—who I genuinely believe is a stronger candidate—Mamdani made a giant gaffe by refusing to outright condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” while he was a guest on a podcast, comparing it to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisings.

On the podcast, Mamdani was asked if the terms "globalize intifada" and "from the river to the sea" made him uncomfortable.

"The very word has been used by the Holocaust museum when translating the Warsaw ghetto uprising," Mamdani said. "What I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights."

EH—wrong answer! Meanwhile, the Holocaust Museum had no problem immediately condemning this comparison:

"Exploiting the museum and the Warsaw ghetto uprising to sanitize 'globalize the intifada' is outrageous."

It wouldn’t kill him to get some more media training. I get that being raw and unfiltered is trendy, but governing in the real world requires earning favor, building coalitions, and working with people you might not like. Otherwise, you’re not practicing democracy, you’re auditioning for an authoritarian regime (kinda like the one currently fucking up our country).

To be clear, I don’t think that’s his goal—I see that he’s trying. He’s incredibly charismatic, and that’s a big part of why he’s so likable. I believe his heart is in the right place, and it is satisfying to see him make Cuomo sweat. But he’s also green, has limited experience, and will need to work ten times harder to prove he can actually do the job.

And part of that means working with Jewish communities and we’re a complicated bunch. Every misstep will be judged because you can’t just get one synagogue to sign off and call it a day, especially at a time when antisemitism is surging and Jews make up 12% of New York City’s population. It’s not even just a misstep—it’s dangerous for these communities when words have meaning and consequences, and they’re right to be concerned.

While it’s easy to reduce the Jewish perspective as ancillary, it’s really the test case for how he handles vulnerable, diverse communities. It’s a question of political viability and whether symbolic ideology can hold under the weight of real-world governance. That matters for everyone. He’s just getting so much heat around Israel because it’s the only thing anybody is talking about and everyone hysterical about accountability.

As mayor, he needs to reel that in. He’s being tested, but so is everyone else. They just had a better stock answers, which is pissing off people who think Jews receive special treatment—while ignoring that the special treatment is often hostility, scapegoating, and hate crimes. DOJ hate crime statistics illustrate antisemitic hate crimes have outpaced every other hate crime exponentially each year in New York alone—many of the attacks being coordinated by individuals who don’t even live here.

I’m not buying the idea that ranking him is tantamount to Jewish suicide, though I understand where that panic comes from. There’s real fear driving that question. But demanding he give a yes-or-no answer on whether Israel should exist as a Jewish state is really unfair as a litmus test in a mayoral race. I can’t help but feel for him because that’s kind of a bullshit question and not the right one that needs to be asked about how he plans to protect Jewish New Yorkers against threats and discrimination.

Still, the way he keeps dodging the question isn’t calming anyone down. (Have you ever tried telling a Jewish person to calm down? If there’s one thing that Jews and Arabs have in common, it’s that they’re both crazy and won’t be told to calm down. I know he’s not Arab, but this is a challenge he’s faced with).

This isn’t some random small-town race. He’s vying for one of the most visible mayoral positions on the planet and he needs to be able to play hardball. If you really wanted to go full counterculture-for-the-people, Deirdre Levy—a passionate special ed teacher—ran for mayor with no political experience beyond a desire to make a difference. Turns out, a lot of voters do prefer a seasoned politician; they just want one who’s charismatic and tells them what they want to hear.

Here’s the thing: I don’t believe Zohran is willfully antisemitic. He has vocally condemned antisemitism and tried to meet with certain Jewish leaders (revealing the overall dysfunction of what “Jewish community,” representation, and “the Jewish vote” mean in a place as diverse as New York City among a population that can never agree on anything). His platform is undeniably progressive, and there’s a lot on it I support. Free buses, childcare, and rent freezes—all sound great.

But nearly identical policies appear on the platforms of at least five other candidates—candidates who’ve done a better job addressing concerns, which is how they built broader coalitions. Yet they’ve barely registered a blip in the conversation. Mamdani has the aesthetic advantage: branding, buzz, outsider mystique. But charisma without political fluency and diplomacy is a dangerous game and I can’t help but feel skeptical.

---

So it’s worth asking: what would it actually look like if he won? Realistically, it’s not going to be the socialist utopia people are projecting onto him. Being mayor of New York City is really more about managing dysfunction—the ability to negotiate with entrenched city agencies, a combative City Council, state oversight, budgetary issues, and public scrutiny from all directions. None of that gets solved by moral clarity alone, but I guess a lot of people seem to know and be OK with that.

Even his most ambitious goals—free public transit, universal childcare, rent freezes—require serious coalition-building and budget maneuvering. When your entire political brand hinges on being an industry outsider shaking things up, anything short of utopia starts to look like a betrayal. The question is whether he has the political agility and humility to implement his bold ideas in a city that eats idealists alive.

• Scenario 1: The Optimistic One
  He becomes a symbolic figurehead of progressive ideals with limited executive power. NYC is a massive bureaucracy, so he’d likely face pushback from city agencies, governor's office and state legislature, budgetary constraints and public-private gridlock. Even if he makes headway in his ambitious goals, the city wouldn’t become some socialist utopia. He’d be forced to learn diplomacy fast or risk internal revolt and burnout—still a real possibility.

• Scenario 2: The Learning Curve
  More realistically, his first term would be a series of harsh lessons. Between media scrutiny, opposition from within City Council and NYPD, and dealing with the everyday shitstorm of governing this city (e.g., MTA meltdowns, asylum seeker housing, school budget issues), he’d have to pivot hard to crisis management. Likely, he’d face backlash from both moderates and far-left critics for compromises he’ll have to make, resulting in a chaotic but not catastrophic administration, likely plagued by communications missteps, morale issues, and a city that feels exhausted by perpetual culture war cycles.

• Scenario 3: The Worst-Case One
  If he governs like he’s still an activist with no adjustment for scale, responsibility, or nuance, he could alienate every key voting bloc except the DSA core and lose the support of Black and Brown working-class communities who feel abandoned in favor of performative leftism, triggering backlash from the press, unions, business community, and outer borough voters. This would pave the way for a reactionary moderate or conservative mayor next cycle, using his tenure as a warning sign (“Look what happens when you experiment with ideology!”). This has already happened in San Francisco and LA to a degree.

  ---

Let’s be honest: Even the Squad is losing favor with their own base, accused of being ‘counterfeit anti-imperialists’ and ‘war hawks’ (LOL). If even they can’t hold the trust of their most ardent supporters, what makes anyone think this strategy will win over skeptics? After all, they’ve never been favored by many Jews for their inability to discuss Israel with finesse, ignoring the hostages, or make Jewish constituents feel protected as our communities are under attack—but think that taking the time to wish us a Happy Hanukkah on social media makes everything OK.

They started the revolution but don’t know how to handle it—which is unfortunately is severely weakened and practically useless under the authoritarian political climate in which we now find ourselves. (Perhaps they shouldn’t have kicked out all of those Jewish feminists from their “intersectional” movement, huh?)

Socialism has always been a hard sell—ironic considering Israel was founded mostly on utopian socialist principles, including the idea of kibbutzism, a place where peace activists were brutally murdered on October 7 as a result of a rise in extremism on both sides. Zionism, too, wasn’t always the monolith people imagine today: it was once Labor Zionism/Socialist Zionism—at odds with Jewish Marxists, religious orthodoxy, and other factions within global Jewry. Today, most Jews see the term as a shorthand that Israel should exist because they feel unsafe elsewhere (I wonder why).

While I’m not about to do an entire political theory in global Jewry thread in a mayoral race newsletter (especially not online, where half the discourse comes from someone who just listened to a guy ramble on a podcast for two hours), it does underscore how easily words get distorted and weaponized. Politicians need to handle that with clarity, even if they’re full of shit. (For what it’s worth, no one in my family has ever used the word “Zionism” in my entire life.)

Maybe in a less volatile political era, symbolic stances and purity tests could rally progressives without blowing everything up. But we’re not living in that era. This country has never liked socialists and it’s always been willing to show that with force. Honestly, that might be the strongest case yet for investing in public education because a lot of people are out here making incredibly bad decisions and doubling down with confidence. People may be fed up, but they can’t keep pinning all hope for change on messiahs.

I understand why many Jewish voters are wary of him, why his vagueness plays well with antisemitic audiences, and why his inability to navigate the topic of Israel is a liability not just to his campaign, but to the broader causes he claims to champion. The media has decided to frame this primary as a two-pronged battle where he’s the only candidate worth watching and it’s a disservice to everyone.

On one hand, Israel really shouldn’t be a central issue in a local mayoral race. On the other, this is how he’s generating press and doing a poor job of mitigating that. The same voters who think he is being unfairly made the target of Zionist propaganda are specifically ranking him number one because of it. Either way, it obscures what the job entails and the possibility of handing it to someone who can actually get it done.

Anyone who dares raise even mild questions about inconsistencies or failures in communication is immediately met with hostility—not unlike in 2016, when Hillary supporters were screamed at by Bernie Bros for being neoliberal shills. And no, it’s not lost on me that Bernie has endorsed Mamdani.

The plea to rank Mamdani to oust Cuomo feels especially rich coming from people who proudly opted out of voting against literal fascism in the last election, claiming they were “voting with their conscience.” I’m not exactly eager to help them sleep better at night over a mayoral primary after spending years showing up to vote for these wildcard candidates who never win while getting screamed at for being a tool of the system and a thorn in the side of collective liberation. Oh yes, it’s totally me that’s the problem, and not your racist Republican dad.

This is the problem with liberal idealism: it ignores reality that requires strategic thinking. You can’t walk into a chess match with a bunch of checkers, but this keeps happening. The Republican ticket has one guy: Curtis Sliwa, a conservative radio talk show host and recurring ballot runner best known for his ‘80s movie vilian beret and sharing his studio apartment with 16 cats. Meanwhile, this makes Cuomo the de facto bipartisan option for anyone trying to hedge their bets. Checkmate.

Mamdani looks good on paper with his cool graphics and appeals to disillusioned young voters eager for fresh talent, but like many rising progressives before him, he underestimates just how much of New York City politics run on murky handshake deals, backroom negotiations, and entrenched competing interests. Ideological purity doesn’t mean you can actually get things done. I say this as someone who lived in Chicago, a union-backed city in a state that’s logged nearly 2,000 public corruption convictions since the 1970s, including 4 of its past 10 governors who went to prison.

Nothing surprises me. I don’t blindly romanticize grassroots movements that treat unions as a beacon of hope in a capitalist hellscape. Everyone is complicit. Politicians are politicians. New York isn’t exceptional, it just has more international baggage and messier factions to juggle. Someone had the nerve to tell me “dare to dream,” as if this country isn’t being steamrolled by fascism and electing Mamdani will suddenly mean everyone gets a local co-op. Turnout was roughly 26% for the mayoral primary in 2021, which is why we currently have Eric Adams—what’s the excuse there?

I don’t co-sign Netanyahu’s cabinet, their reckless handling of the hostage negotiations, or the way diplomacy has been all but obliterated on every front. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the trauma is generational on both sides. It’s horrific and heartbreaking. Drawing new borders or trading ceasefires won’t fix that if everyone still raises their kids on revenge.

Activists who keep pushing the term “intifada” and expect Jews to just trust that it doesn’t mean bombing random buses and grocery stores need to accept that is not going to happen and can’t be surprised about pushback. Artists have faced public backlash and attempted cancellations for using that word precisely because neither they nor their JVP counterparts seem to grasp how their rhetoric lands with the very people they claim to stand in solidarity with. This is the term Mamdani would not denounce and why he is getting so much shit for it.

When people call for ‘any means necessary,’ they often forget it works both ways. The blowback usually falls hardest on the people they claim to protect, making it harder to get anything done—unless you go full radical and think this is not a pattern. That includes impeding Mamdani, who’s running to work with the messy factions of New York City politics, not to be crowned King of New York.

Reactionary politics aren’t efficient. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall when there’s a door right next to it. Today, that door now has a ton of unchecked power blocking it, which anyone could have seen coming from a mile away.

I don’t even mind having a DSA candidate in office. Political diversity is essential. It’s just that they always seem to show up at the most critical, high-stakes moment—and then wonder why no one wants to gamble. This is how we got a conservative majority and all the fascist countries laugh at us while the people we spent the last century trying to advance are once again being pushed into second-class status. Call me cynical; I’m just being realistic.

Mamdani’s refusal to address this tactfully while his leftist fanbase insults the intelligence and humanity of those they seek solidarity from is where many Jewish voters lose confidence, and honestly, I can’t blame them. Even a UJA insider I recently spoke with doesn’t believe he’s antisemitic, just deeply frustrating in his refusal to use his words. Seriously, man. We could root for you if you weren’t being so obtuse.

I truly do not care that he doesn’t want to visit Israel. I don’t understand why Israel is as heavily involved in U.S. politics as it is and completely understand why tax payers don’t want to fund or fight this. I struggle tremendously with how the right wing administration has created such an unsafe environment for the entire Jewish diaspora while being in bed with the evangelical Christian Zionist agenda for years—and in doing so, somehow remains the only safe space for Jews protected by entities invested in our demise. His criticism does not bother me, but the language he uses to explain that does—as well as many other Jews who are taking it a lot harder than I am.

It should go without saying, but it’s not that difficult to understand why Jews are especially sensitive about sanitizing the second intifada with a Holocaust comparison—especially while people are being shot in real time by extremists chanting that same phrase. If you can’t grasp that as a baseline level of diplomacy…I don’t know what to tell you. There were so many other ways Mamdani could have criticized Netanyahu (who has an epically low approval rating) or made a compelling case for distancing from Israel’s current government without that. But he didn’t and doesn’t seem very concerned. (To be clear, I do not believe he deserves threats in retaliation for this).

A lot of leftists are either in denial or deeply uninformed about how the intifada shaped policy, which is why I couldn’t stop face palming student activists last year with the fucking encampments and faculty blockades. I don’t have an issue with student activism. Young people organizing around injustice deserve to be taken seriously, but that doesn’t mean every tactic is above critique. And some of these tactics that collapse complexity into slogans and refuse dissent are torching bridges.

Screaming “there is only one solution/intifada revolution” while blocking faculty and students from entrances with a thumbs up from the ayatollah is absolutely unhinged. This is the same regime whose morality police throw women into vans to hang alongside queer people for singing in public or showing their hair. Not only was it a terrible strategy, it alienated the very people who could have helped and wanted to. Peace activists doing the actual work on the ground were ignored, disinvited, then turned into scapegoats. None of it improved the image of Palestinian advocacy.

While it's easy to block people online and pretend they don’t exist, it’s painfully clear in hindsight that surrounding yourself with ideological clones builds echo chambers ripe for disappointment at the polls. Some people voted to burn down the country by unapologetically abstaining. Let them clean it up.

Many Israel peace activists—not just Jews, but Arab, Druze, and other Israelis—have been completely barred from these spaces, even though this is their struggle, too, and they are invested in change. JVP Jews, pushing a position of moral superiority from their self-imposed alienation as activists, have only deepened the divide by insisting there’s no antisemitism problem and refusing to address it. If they did, they’d probably notice some of these people are not their friends, just like the rest of us.

While businesses were being tagged with antisemitic graffiti, others had the gall to hang signs in their windows reading “Zionists not welcome here.” Hostage awareness posters have been torn down, defaced, or destroyed. Bathrooms are littered with swastikas and Holocaust inversion rhetoric. Not to mention all of the physical hate crimes that have resulted being harassed, threatened, maimed, and murdered. There are no intersectional marches against antisemitism, just a lot of unified comments saying, “Well, can you blame them? They deserve it.”

Just yesterday, anti-Jewish protestors disrupted The Great Nosh—a Jewish food festival hosted by the Jewish Food Society—with signs claiming all Jewish food across the diaspora is fake. A grotesque, absurd, and deeply revealing example of how this isn’t some abstract ideological debate. It’s happening constantly, in intimate and disorienting ways. And still, we’re told to stay calm, not overreact, let it shape how we vote or who we trust.

I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? When this kind of hate repackaged as activism is happening every single day, it’s not unreasonable to ask a mayoral candidate where he stands. If Mamdani can’t—or won’t—clearly distance himself from rhetoric that emboldens this kind of daily degradation, how exactly are Jewish voters supposed to trust that he can govern with all of us in mind?

Activism has become so extreme, so singularly focused on Gaza as the epicenter of global injustice, that a disturbing fringe subset of extreme leftists online are now unironically cheering on the ayatollah. There is a growing mainstream conflation of Iranians and Arabs and outright refusal to listen to Iranians. It’s embarrassing. Aligning yourself politically with these people does not help when trying to appeal to an entire city of constituents. This is why I don’t have confidence in him, no matter how many people try to paint a utopian image of a socialist New York City (LOL, as if).

Every piece of information is labeled hasbara before it’s even considered. That’s why this movement keeps running into the same dead ends and cycles that others were already trying to break. Believe it or not, some of us are sentient beings—not propaganda-regurgitating Mossad agents.

What we’re seeing now isn’t just a crisis of policy, it’s a crisis of trust, narrative, and lived experience. Marginalized identities are being weaponized as symbols, cast as either resistance or oppression, instead of being listened to as people.

---

Which brings me back to my sexy little forbidden queer date. Unfortunately, geopolitics is there, too. For Pride, I decided to engage with the most illicit corner of the queer shame galaxy: Jewish bisexuals. Truly the most reviled subgroup. Accused of being genocide-loving, men-centering, STI-carrying, hasbara agents of chaos—and yet we persist.

I haven’t been dating lately, in part because dating apps have been extra stressful over the past few years, amplified by antisemitic rhetoric introducing so many potential love un-matches. “Firmly leftist. No Zionists, TERFs or SWERFS” followed by a stream of watermelon, rainbow, and snarky little smiley face emojis—as if these are all mutually exclusive labels. It’s almost like it doesn’t matter how many times Jews try to explain that the Jewish definition of Zionism is not the Christian one, people would rather shut down a conversation before they have the chance to think differently.

Oddly, queer spaces that claim to be inclusive have become more hostile and antisemitic than cis straight spaces. Organizations like Shalom Dykes, Queers Against Antisemitism, and A Wider Bridge have all had to create their own separate events, often sharing location details only a few hours before to prevent guests from being doxxed and harassed. For my part, I found myself filtering my search settings to Jews for the first time in my entire life because I was tired of the hassle.

Recently, I matched with a gorgeous Israeli bisexual working in sustainability and labor—areas where my own work overlapped. We chatted briefly and I invited her out for a sunset date along the Hudson with a bottle of rose (organic, of course!) and a little nosh. It was a breath of fresh air having this disarming date, where we could center ourselves as Jewish women and discuss our perspectives—hers being from the Middle East and mine from the Middle West—as we met in the center of it all in New York City (where neither of us understands New Jersey). (Take that, lesbians on the internet who claim bisexuals only center men!)

While Israel may be more progressive in some ways by permitting queer relationships and women in the military, it’s still deeply sexist and homophobic like everywhere else. If anything, the fragmentation within liberal circles where Jews are routinely alienated only adds more layers of labor for Jewish progressives who were already doing the work within our own communities, all while being expected to offer one-sided allyship to everyone else.

Because she has the lived perspective of someone attuned to the things that can’t be said and the things no one sees on the internet, I learned a lot. Some of it I already knew: the Israeli government has become increasingly right-wing, especially in the wake of October 7. That day ripped open generations of shared ancestral trauma, pushing the country even further to the right, heightening security, and making cross-cultural exchange—efforts that were already fragile—even harder to sustain.

Today, Israel currently operates under a culture of surveillance, bolstered by government tech and intelligence, where posting online can pose a risk for phone inspections at the airport and being denied entry. Ironically, in a country that once offered refuge to so many fleeing the USSR, this new social repression mirrors what’s unfolding in the U.S.—where leftists have taken their rights for granted, only to hand them over to conservatives through a series of absolutely terrible electoral decisions. And as always, there's a convenient scapegoat: Jews.

Similarly, I spent most of my life downplaying my background and Jewish identity here in the U.S. after years of enduring antisemitic moments that no one wanted to talk about before October 7 and who immediately distanced themselves after. My fears around the Christian fetishization of apocalyptic fantasies—ones that have been financially underwriting this entire situation—come from that lived experience.

Despite coming from entirely different parts of the world, we shared a mutual understanding: not knowing where we fit within the second-largest Jewish population outside Israel, still reduced by everyone outside of us.

Either way, we knew we were both fucked, and watched the sunset while she checked her family’s WhatsApp chat for updates on the latest rockets fired since this spiraled into open conflict with Iran. In the scheme of things, the Mamdani martyr complex felt like a sad reminder that so many people still don’t get it, and worse, don’t care.

It might surprise some people to know that she said if she could vote, she probably would rank him. I am still on the fence, but would probably rank him three or four because, again, I think Lander and Myrie objectively have stronger platforms with more detailed, implementable plans and broader coalition support. But I can understand why many don’t care. After all, I am obviously a genocide-enabling asshole and hasbara-guzzling robot who takes glee in the murder of 50 million babies, etc., etc.

I hate how FUBAR everything feels right now. Even now, plenty of leftists still insist things would be the same, as if Kamala Harris would’ve just bypassed Congress to bomb Iran by executive order like the situation we’re currently dealing with—and they keep doubling down on that. In response, they’ve uplifted Zohran as a savior and symbol, fully aware he can’t deliver on most of his promises, especially compared to the guy with an actual plan and experience as comptroller. It’s nihilistic.

At some point, we all have to reckon with how much certain words actually mean. I knew, even before Israel retaliated, that we were fucked, and that a whole new generation was about to inherit another layer of ancestral trauma on both sides that probably won’t be resolved in our lifetime. But at least now, everyone has someone to blame (and it’s never themselves).

---

MORE FROM PIPE DREAMS BY THE WEED WITCH

Pride Was A Riot, But It Shouldn’t Be

Happy Jewish American History Month — Who Do I Call To Free Palestine?

Embracing My Edgelord Era