A who’s who of Columbia’s most prolific Israel-haters—who sought to legitimize Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack weeks after the terror group’s massacres—has poured thousands of dollars into socialist Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York, a Washington Free Beacon review of public records shows.
Mamdani, 33, has refused to support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, supports the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement against the country, has falsely accused the country of committing genocide, and has vowed to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he arrives in New York City.
He recently declined to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada"—a call for violence—instead describing it as "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian rights." Mamdani also compared the concept of "intifada" to Jewish resistance to Nazi Germany, saying that "the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means ‘struggle.’"
The comments earned Mamdani a rebuke from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which issued a statement Wednesday morning.
"Exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize ‘globalize the intifada’ is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors," the statement reads. "Since 1987 Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history."
A number of Columbia faculty members who have donated to Mamdani’s campaign signed a letter just weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in which they attempted to contextualize the slaughter.
"One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation," the missive reads.
Among the signatories were Katherine Franke, Lila Abu-Lughod, Reinhold Martin, James Schamus, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Mamdani’s father, Mahmood.
Mahmood Mamdani has pumped $2,100 into his son’s mayoral campaign, with an additional $8,880 over the years for his state assembly races in Queens, city and state donation records show. The elder Mamdani is currently the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, a chair named for the noted Jewish banking heir and Zionist, and has publicly advocated for Palestinian violence.
"The resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond," he wrote on X during a spate of violence in May 2021 that left more than a dozen civilians dead. "This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifadah against settler colonialism!"
Mahmood Mamdani has called for "the dismantling of the Jewish state" and was an active participant at Columbia’s Hamas-supporting Gaza solidarity encampment in 2024.
Franke—who "retired" from Columbia this year in the wake of an investigation into discriminatory harassment—is among Mamdani’s strongest allies at the university, donating more than $2,800 to his campaigns over the years.
She participated in a November 2023 pro-Hamas demonstration with Jewish Voice for Peace that shut down the Manhattan Bridge and was an active and vocal supporter of the encampments on Columbia’s campus. Israel banned Franke from entering the country in 2018.
Lila Abu-Lughod, meanwhile, has donated more than $1,600 to Mamdani’s campaigns over the years. She is currently Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science in the Department of Anthropology, and like Mahmood Mamdani occupies a chair named for another notable Jewish Zionist.
Abu-Lughod has supported academic boycotts against the country since at least 2014.
She has played an active role in radicalizing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) against Israel over the years. In 2016, she was involved in efforts to have the AAA adopt a position supporting boycotts, an initiative which failed at the time. The AAA did ultimately adopt a BDS resolution in July 2023.
Martin, an architectural history professor, participated in the encampments and described them as part of a "peaceful environment" modeled on Occupy Wall Street. He told reporters that criticisms of the movement were simply a "political attack from the right," and that the "far right" had "captured the message."
Martin has donated more than $2,700 to Mamdani’s campaigns for mayor and state assembly over the years, records show, while Schamus, who is affiliated with Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies, has given Mamdani over $1,400 in donations over the years. Spivak, a "Marxist, Feminist, Deconstructionist" professor at Columbia, has given Mamdani over $2,800 in campaign contributions over the years. She signed another letter in addition to the faculty missive in which she accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people. In February 2024, she dismissed the Holocaust as "a legislative excuse for violence."