Rabbi’s Update 11/7/2025

Dear Friends:

On Tuesday, as you certainly know, Zohran Mamdani was elected as Mayor of New York City, with 50.4 percent of the vote. Prior to the election a lot of pressure had been placed on Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa to drop out in favor of ex-governor and independent candidate Andrew Cuomo due to fears that they would split the vote and let Mamdani win with a plurality, but as it turned out he won a bare majority.

I spent the first eight years of my life in New York City, my father worked there his entire career and lived there all but about 15 of his 92 years, and my brother works there now, but I have never been a New York City voter. I thought that all three of the major candidates had serious issues and I would have been unhappy voting for any of them.

My biggest concern after the election is not what the Mamdani administration is going to look like or what policies he will follow. Rather, I’m concerned about the ability of the American Jewish community to remain one community and not be permanently split after a divisive campaign which became nationalized.

On October 18 Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue gave a sermon urging his congregants (and the 62,000 people who have watched the sermon on YouTube) to vote for Andrew Cuomo because of the danger he believes Mamdani poses to the New York Jewish community. Shortly thereafter about 1000 rabbis all over the country (and many people who were not rabbis, not American, or neither) signed a “Rabbinic Call to Action” opposing Mamdani’s campaign. In response, another letter was circulated which also drew several hundred rabbis and many others, decrying both antisemitism and Islamophobia and stating that Jewish safety requires a shared future. I did not sign either letter, both because I partially agreed and partially disagreed with both and because I did not see any reason for Jews outside of New York City to take sides in a New York mayoral election. 

On Wednesday I attended a meeting between rabbis, other Jewish leaders, and several members of the Maryland legislature where one of the most prominent local Jewish leaders told the legislators that “the Jewish community” was devastated and terrified by Mamdani’s win. While this is no doubt true of many Jews in New York and elsewhere, exit polls indicate that Mamdani received about a third of the Jewish vote and about twice that among Jewish voters under 29. Are we to write out of “the Jewish community” a third of Jews and the vast majority of those under 29?

The NYC mayoral election was bound to be divisive but I think that the divisiveness was exacerbated by the phenomenon of rabbis endorsing candidates (particularly when done so from the pulpit) and the recruitment of rabbis all over the country to take sides in a local election. Whether or not a rabbi signed one or another of these letters has become a litmus test often dividing congregations to no real purpose. It is conceivable, albeit in my opinion unlikely, that someone might decide who to vote for based on their own rabbi’s opinion. Since my dad died four years ago yesterday, I cannot imagine a single eligible voter in New York City deciding their vote based on my opinion. While I have often spoken about specific issues and shared my analysis of what Jewish teaching has to say about them, I have never endorsed a candidate in my professional or even in my private capacity, even when my wife Keleigh ran for the Board of Education when we lived in Norwich, CT (and she managed to win the election even without my endorsement!) I would urge rabbis to continue to speak in terms of Jewish values rather than endorsing specific candidates.