Across New York, a set of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani are challenging incumbents they say are not progressive enough on Israel.
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NEW YORK — Zohran Mamdani sent shock waves last year when he was elected mayor of the country’s most Jewish city while accusing Israel of genocide.
But a year after his insurgent win in the Democratic primary for City Hall, the new mayor — and the movement that brought him to that job — are looking to take that critique to a place with far more say over Middle East policy: Congress.
“I will join you in that fight to end occupation and apartheid and genocide,” Brad Lander, the former city comptroller and a candidate for the House, said at a rally over the weekend at a Brooklyn park, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mamdani and a Palestinian activist. “We’re going to keep building on that politics that we built last year when we elected Zohran mayor.”
Voters here will weigh that proposition in a Democratic primary Tuesday in which Lander is challenging Rep. Dan Goldman. It is one of several races that offers a window into how sharply the Democratic Party’s voters are turning against Israel, which until recently enjoyed broad bipartisan support.
Public opinion among Democrats and the U.S. more broadly has been shifting toward Palestinian sympathies, and Lander and other leftist candidates are challenging incumbents whom they accuse of being too cozy with Israel’s powerful U.S. lobby — or of otherwise failing to speak out against the war in Gaza.
And they’re doing so with the backing of Mamdani, who is putting his political capital on the line as he boosts them in rallies and Knicks-themed ads as the city’s “team.”
“It’s the first major test of the durability and power of left-progressive power in New York City,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic strategist in New York.
The districts in contention cut across demographic, geographic and class lines.
Goldman, a former prosecutor who helped lead the first investigation and impeachment trial against President Donald Trump, and Lander, who cross-endorsed Mamdani when they were both seeking the mayoral nomination, are both Jews who call themselves “liberal Zionists.” But they differ on what that means, with Lander saying Goldman’s views — including support for limited military aid for Israel — aren’t progressive enough.
Further uptown, Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D), the influential Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair, is facing a similar line of criticism from Darializa Avila Chevalier, a doctoral student who participated in pro-Palestine encampment at Columbia University and who has slammed the congressman for taking money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
There’s less division in a third race, to replace the retiring Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D), but the issue is being used there, too: State assemblywoman Claire Valdez has pointed out that she accused Israel of carrying out a genocide well before her opponent, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and falsely suggested last week he was receiving funding from an AIPAC shell group.
Scott Stringer, a former Manhattan borough president who has endorsed Espaillat and Goldman, said he is concerned about how a heavy focus on Israel and AIPAC across the primaries might inflame hatred — especially when they involve accusations of Jewish financial influence, an antisemitic trope. (Stringer is reportedly involved in PACs spending against some of Mamdani’s endorsed candidates.)
“There’s a fine line between a foreign policy discussion and just demonizing the Jewish community,” said Stringer, who is Jewish. “They’re going to do and say anything to win regardless of the long term ramifications of the city.”
Lander said he is uncomfortable, too.
But “the Democratic base doesn’t want to keep paying for genocide,” he said in an interview.
Meghan Marr, a 34-year-old consultant, she had stumbled upon Lander’s Brooklyn rally with Mamdani and the Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi.
Marr was already planning to vote for Lander, she said, because she admired his role as a “Jewish voice for solidarity” to end military aid to Israel.
“It’s at a point where we can’t look at it anymore, and not see the political power that AIPAC has and its far-reaching implications,” she said.
Around her, volunteers at the rally wore T-shirts with messages both metaphorical (“We have friends everywhere”) and literal (“Stop arming Israel.”)
Lander, standing on top of a picnic table, cited a line from the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who coined the term “genocide”: “Never again means never again to anyone.”
A 45-minute subway ride away, Avila Chevalier has been invoking a very different story as she seeks to topple Espaillat, a fellow Dominican American who became the first formerly undocumented person elected to Congress.
Lander’s downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn district is one of the wealthiest in the country. Espaillat’s district, which covers parts of the Bronx and uptown Manhattan neighborhoods like Harlem and Washington Heights, is one of the poorest.
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Roth Smith, the Democratic strategist, said that voters in these less affluent Black and Latino neighborhoods care more about social services than Middle East policy.
But Avila Chevalier has managed to weave the two together in her indictment of Espaillat, whom she notes has taken more than $350,000 from AIPAC over his five terms in office. (The group has also contributed heavily on a super PAC attacking her.)
A former organizing lead on Mamdani’s campaign, Avila Chevalier spent a summer in the West Bank in college and filmed her initial campaign videos wearing a keffiyeh, the scarf often used to signify solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
Handing out fliers on one morning last weekend, she pointed to a line on her campaign pamphlet — “Babies not Bombs” — and the argument that money spent on wars could be better spent on social services.
Maria Rodriguez, a 70-year-old mother of five pushing a cart to the grocery store, told Avila Chevalier in Spanish that she was most worried about immigration enforcement — but she didn’t like the war in Gaza, either.
“I don’t want to see any more people get attacked or bombed,” Rodriguez said. “It’s horrible.”
Espaillat and his allies have at times dismissed his opponent’s focus on foreign policy as the views of a transplant who is not in touch with the needs of longtime, working-class residents.
The district, home to large Dominican, Puerto Rican and African American neighborhoods, has been gentrifying from the arrival of the younger, Whiter, college-educated voters who overwhelmingly backed Mamdani in last year’s mayoral election. “I have been in the neighborhood all along,” Espaillat said in a debate last week.
Espaillat has tried to flip Avila Chevalier’s activism against her, calling attention to her presence at a controversial pro-Palestine DSA rally in October 2023, the day after Hamas attacked Israel.
And he’s also criticized her for a series of off-color comments that Avila Chevalier made on her since-deleted Twitter account, including one that said “F–k Kamala Harris” and others calling President Joe Biden a “rapist” and “war criminal.”
(She apologized to Harris during a recent televised debate, and said that her views have “evolved” since posting them.)
Goldman, for his part, didn’t mention Israel at a rally outside City Hall on the first day of early voting.
He said in an interview at a coffee shop afterward that the issue has taken on a “far, far outsized role” in his primary race compared to how much time he might spend on the matter in Congress.
“It’s counterproductive to get distracted by legal terms and buzzwords,” he said. “This is a very complicated issue and has been for decades, and it can’t be boiled down to one word or one term.”
Although Goldman has sworn off AIPAC money, some Lander supporters have attacked him from taking funds from a shell group that shares many of its donors with that PAC — a line of criticism that, along with the “genocide” label, worries Goldman, he said.
Antisemitic incidents have sharply risen over the last three years, and Jews remain “a very, very small part of the American population” — a reality that meant Jews need to be protected more than ever.
“We need allies, but we’re certainly not going to [get them] if we play into the divisiveness and the stereotypes,” Goldman said.
He accused Lander of pushing a “wedge issue” while not fully embracing an alliance with Avila Chevalier, who has appeared in ads and a rally with Lander and Mamdani.
After the congressman got up and left, a coffee-shop patron sitting nearby came up to a reporter.
“Was that Dan Goldman?” Stacy Kuo asked. “I’ve seen his ads on TV!”
But Kuo said they didn’t convince her. Her beloved mayor, she said, had endorsed Lander.
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