Simmering Democratic disagreements over the war in Gaza burst to the forefront of New York’s mayoral primary this week, rattling the final days of an already chaotic contest.

Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the race’s front-runner, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, his chief rival, have long differed over U.S. support for the war. But as voting approaches, they have traded increasingly pointed accusations that touch on antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The tension escalated on Tuesday, after Mr. Mamdani, a critic of Israel, was asked during a podcast interview if the phrase “globalize the intifada” made him uncomfortable, and he declined to condemn it. Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews consider it a call to violence invoking resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.

In the interview with The Bulwark, Mr. Mamdani said he believed the phrase spoke to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He said the U.S. Holocaust Museum used a similar Arabic term for “uprising” to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, and stressed his own commitment to nonviolence and fighting antisemitism.

The blowback was swift. By Wednesday morning, the Anti-Defamation League; Representative Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat; and other Jewish leaders had condemned the phrase, and some tied it to recent spasms of anti-Jewish violence in Washington and Colorado. The Washington-based Holocaust Museum weighed in, too, calling Mr. Mamdani’s remarks “outrageous and especially offensive.”

Mr. Cuomo, who is seeking to blunt Mr. Mamdani’s rise in the polls, immediately began fanning the sense of outrage, saying his rival defended words that “fuel hate” and murder. Mr. Mamdani, who would be the city’s first Muslim mayor, pushed back, calling the former governor’s response insincere and designed to score “political points.”