How a real journalist covers Zohran Mamdani and the Jewish/Israeli Questions.

The Guardian's Noa Yachot interviewed nearly two dozen people who have had some involvement in Mamdani’s Jewish outreach, along with other sources. A revealing piece of serious journalism.

Noa Yachot/ ACLU and Zohran Mamdani/ Dmitryshein via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t know how many readers of “Words for the Wise” are following the New York City mayoral election campaign, although it obviously has national implications for a number of reasons. The only serious opponent to Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic Party primary and is the party’s official candidate, is former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who was soundly defeated in that same primary and is now running as an “independent.”

Cuomo is a sexual predator and all-around dishonest and opportunistic scumbag who has had no real connection with the Big Apple for many years, but is of course now Donald Trump’s favored candidate. Trump has even threatened to invade New York City if its voters make the “mistake” of democratically voting Mamdani into office.

Mamdani’s opponents (which appear to include almost every billionaire in the known universe, who are largely bankrolling Cuomo’s campaign) are attacking him on two main fronts: First, that he is an avowed socialist whose ideas for making the life of New Yorkers easier and more affordable are “unrealistic” and too costly (as if the current challenges that New Yorkers face trying to survive are just God’s plan); and second, that he opposes Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, as if not allowing Israeli Jews to kill innocent Palestinians violates some immoral code that they want us to live by.

Okay, my overheated rhetoric above will come as no surprise to readers of this newsletter, but at least it is fully accurate.

There have been a lot of articles (hundreds at least) published over the past several months about how Jewish New Yorkers are divided, conflicted, anguished, etc., at the prospect of having Mamdani as mayor—even though he is clearly not an antisemite of any kind, and his criticisms of Israel are based on solid facts. As a Jew myself, I have written many times, here and elsewhere, that Israel’s actions violate Judaic principles of social justice and reverence for human life, even if it is Jews themselves who are violating them.

Nevertheless, tribalistic loyalty to Israel has deep roots, and has to be understood in light of the Holocaust and earlier persecutions of the Jews over the millennia; for that reason, I agree with those who think that it has to be taken seriously as much as I might condemn the results of it.

To parse these conflicts takes certain skills which journalists, as well social scientists and other scholars, are trained to employ. As a journalist myself, I am interested in how well our field is doing in this regard. The New York Times has been chronically poor in its coverage, because its multi-generational biases in favor of Israel are only thinly covered by the attempts of its reporters and editors to pretend they are not biased. (That said, the paper is getting a bit better lately, now that Democrats can blame Trump for the continuing genocide and don’t have to lay it at the feet of where it really belongs, the Biden-Harris administration.)

So it was a real pleasure to read reporter Noa Yachot’s October 26 piece in The Guardian, “Jewish New York’s reckoning with Zohran Mamdani: ‘He’s become a vehicle for our tensions.’” I hope some of you have already read it, but if not, or if you have not seen it, one of the many roles of this newsletter is to alert wise readers to things they might not know about.

Noa Yachot is currently a senior editor for news and features at the Guardian US, and a former editor for the ACLU and for the excellent joint Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine. Some might think that these affiliations make her biased too, and perhaps they do in a way. But opposing genocide or advocating for justice is just the kind of “bias” we need in a reporter who is looking for the truth about social and political affairs, rather than trying to make excuses or provide rationales for murder.

In other words, you have to have a sense of justice to recognize injustice; you have to value human life to recognize murder; and so on. The issue of false objectivity in journalism is beyond the scope of this post, but it has been under discussion for a long time. When I taught journalism to graduate students at New York University, it was a regular topic of conversation.

Anyway, I am not going to give you a synopsis of Yachot’s piece here, as much as I hope you will read it. But what I will do is list the names of the people that she talked to or otherwise quoted for this fairly long article. That already says a lot, and I would invite readers to compare her work to that published recently in the New York Times or other mainstream media on Mamdani’s campaign for mayor.

As part of her reporting, Yachot interviewed “nearly two dozen people who have had some involvement in Mamdani’s Jewish outreach – including undecided voters, rabbis who have hosted him in their synagogues (along with others who would never), and community leaders who have brokered outreach.”

Here are the sources who are actually named in the story, and either quoted from Yachot’s interviews or from other statements they have made publicly. They include people on all sides of the Mamdani question, from opponents to supporters and in between. Quotes from Mamdani himself, who was not interviewed for the piece, are interspersed throughout the article.

— Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Conservative Upper East Side Park Avenue Synagogue.

— Phylisa Wisdom, who directs the New York Jewish Agenda.

— Andrew Cuomo, candidate for New York City mayor.

— Elise Stefanik, Republican member of Congress from New York.

— Laura Gillen, a Democratic member of Congress from Long Island.

— Ellen Lippmann, the founder of Kolot Chayeinu, a Brooklyn congregation that has hosted Mamdani.

— Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ.)

— Alicia Singham Goodwin, JFREJ’s political director.

— Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and Mamdani’s former rival in the mayoral race.

— Comedian Ilana Glazer.

— Documentary film-maker Sandi DuBowski.

— Rabbi Amichai Lau Lavie, the leader of Lab/Shul.

— Senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim.

— Mik Moore, one of the creators of the original Great Schlep led by comedian Sarah Silverman, who now leads a similar effort called “Mensches for Mamdani.”

This is my idea of in-depth reporting. Count the number of sources in any recent New York Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, or other mainstream newspaper and see if they can match it.

As you probably know, or should know, while recent polls show that Mamdani has not won the hearts of a majority of New York’s Jews, he is leading among younger Jewish voters, and some Hasidic leaders have actually endorsed him as well. As for the rest of New York City’s voters, the polls also continue to indicate that Mamdani has a comfortable lead against Cuomo, even if it has tightened somewhat in recent weeks (the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, has shown no signs of bowing out, despite pleas from Cuomo supporters that he clear the field for the former governor.)

New York’s Jews will do just fine under a Mamdani administration. Why? Because unlike Cuomo, whose Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani have accelerated in recent days in tandem with those of the billionaires, Mamdani is actually opposed to bigotry of all kinds. That goes a long way.

Let’s talk again about all this after Tuesday.

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