There’s a viral video circulating of New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani shouting out “One Israel Fund” during an exchange with pro-Palestinian activist and actress Cynthia Nixon.
As the person who runs One Israel Fund, I assure you: This wasn’t a compliment. It was a public dressing down. A smear. An attempted takedown of our mission and of the more than 500,000 citizens of Israel who reside in Judea and Samaria — Israelis who live under daily threat, who bury their loved ones from terror attacks far too often, and who continue to build their communities with courage, not hate.
Mamdani didn’t “shout us out.” He spat on us.
Let me be clear. One Israel Fund has one primary mission: to protect Israeli civilians living in the biblical heart of their ancestral homeland. We provide surveillance camera systems, thermal drones, emergency response tools, and other life-saving resources to civilian security teams solely for the protection of their communities — the teams often serve as the first line of defense when terror strikes.
This equipment is used defensively to detect potential terrorist infiltrations from those throughout the area who wish to do them harm.
Candidate Mamdani, on the other hand, has made a name for himself championing slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” which calls for the extermination of Jews worldwide as well as attacking the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state. He has refused to denounce calls for violence, defended antisemitic incitement, supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and now he is accusing One Israel Fund of enabling criminal behavior because a video we reposted in the aftermath of October 7, included someone who was later sanctioned by the Biden administration. That individual had nothing to do with our operations, but, at the time, was merely a community member sending his personal gratitude for the lifesaving work of One Israel Fund. It is a dishonest and disgraceful smear designed to score political points on the backs of dead Jews.
This is who wants to be mayor of New York City — the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel? A man who accuses an organization committed to saving Jewish lives of arming vigilantes? A man who has shown time and again that he doesn’t understand, respect, or care about the Jewish community’s safety, dignity, or history?
And it’s not just the Jewish community at stake. Not only does he wish to defund the police in New York City at a time when rising crime — especially hate crimes against Jews — is a serious concern, but he wants to fundamentally change the way policing is done in one of the largest and most dynamic cities in the world.
Let me say this bluntly: Zohran Mamdani has no business running New York City. His record is soaked in hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people. His rhetoric emboldens the worst actors. And his attack on One Israel Fund is not just an attack on me; it’s an attack on the thousands of families who live in harm’s way and dare to keep living.
If that weren’t enough, the New York Times editorial board — never an entity mistaken for a prominent supporter of Israel — stated in the runup to the mayoral primary, “Mr. Mamdani would also bring less relevant experience than perhaps any mayor in New York history. He has never run a government department or private organization of any size. As a state legislator, he has struggled to execute his own agenda.” The board further wrote, “We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty.”
You don’t get to vilify Jews and then ask for their votes. You don’t get to mock our grief and then pretend you’re standing up for justice. And you don’t get to call out our name like it’s some kind of punchline, then expect a seat at the head of the most Jewish city on Earth.
We’ve seen this before — radical ideologues cloaking hatred in the language of activism. Mamdani isn’t a visionary. He’s a dangerous provocateur. He doesn’t build bridges — he burns them.
As the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, is often quoted as saying, “The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.” New Yorkers need to take heed when casting their votes this upcoming November. Zohran Mamdani will be a terrible choice for the Jews, but more importantly, he will be a terrible choice for New York and the Democrat party.
New York deserves better. Its Jewish community demands it.
Image: Billie Grace Ward via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
