PART TWO: THE MAYOR, THE RABBIS, AND THE BILLIONAIRE IN SHANGHAI

The mayor solved the Jewish question. He just used the wrong Jews — and deleted the definition of antisemitism on the way in.

Two weeks before ISIS-inspired bombers showed up outside Gracie Mansion, protesters marched through Manhattan chanting "We support Hamas here" outside a synagogue in Queens. It was the first significant protest of Mamdani's mayoralty. He said he discouraged the language. He did not say Hamas. He did not say antisemitism. He moved on to the next iftar.

This is the pattern, and it is worth understanding before we get to the Jewish question, because they are the same question. A mayor who cannot name the ideology that sent bombers to his front door also cannot name the ideology that sends mobs to other people's houses of worship. The omission is not situational. It is structural.

On his first day in office, Mamdani repealed the executive order his predecessor had signed adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, the standard used by governments and institutions across the Western world to identify and prosecute Jew-hatred. He did this on inauguration day. Then he announced he was keeping the Office to Combat Antisemitism. The office now operates without a working definition of what antisemitism is. This is not a clerical oversight. The mayor of the most Jewish city on earth runs an office charged with fighting something he has officially declined to define. He then hired someone to run it.

Mamdani appointed Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the New York Jewish Agenda, to lead the office. Religion News The New York Jewish Agenda is a progressive organization but a Zionist one. It supports Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and opposes the BDS movement. Jewish Telegraphic Agency On the surface this looks like a reasonable appointment from a reasonable person. Below the surface are two problems that were not going to stay there.

Wisdom opposes codification of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The Forward The person now running the antisemitism office agrees with the mayor that the standard definition should not be used. Between the two of them they have produced an office that combats a thing neither of them will define. Meanwhile, Orthodox Jews account for 90% of antisemitic attack victims in New York City. JNS.org And the Orthodox community has years of accumulated grievance against Wisdom because she previously ran the government affairs operation at Yaffed, an organization that campaigns for secular education oversight in Hasidic schools, which the Hasidic community regards with deep institutional enmity. Jewish Insider "Picking Phylisa Wisdom to run an office tasked with combating antisemitism is probably the biggest gaslighting Mamdani has done so far," said Yaakov Kaplan, vice-chair of Brooklyn Community Board 12. "90% of all antisemitic attacks were against Orthodox Jews. Picking someone for this office that Orthodox Jews see as an adversary is mind-boggling." JNS.org

The community bearing the heaviest burden of antisemitic violence in New York considers the mayor's antisemitism director their political enemy. The mayor signed off on it and moved on to the next press release.

Now for the coalition itself, which is the real story, and which requires understanding who actually built it.

The "Jews for Zohran" campaign was run out of JFREJ, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Its political director is Alicia Singham Goodwin. Singham Goodwin is the niece of Neville Roy Singham, a Marxist billionaire who moved to Shanghai after selling his software company Thoughtworks for $785 million in 2017 and has since bankrolled organizations aligned with Beijing's agenda. AOL Singham's wife is Jodie Evans, the founder of CODEPINK AOL, the same CODEPINK whose comrades were sipping mojitos in Havana while the mayor was hosting iftars.

The network is smaller than it looks on a map. Singham funded The People's Forum, the New York nonprofit associated with organizing pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses. Wikipedia He has been named in money laundering investigations in India for allegedly funding media outlets to promote a pro-Beijing narrative. Senate Republicans have called for him and Evans to register as foreign agents acting on behalf of China.

Singham Goodwin served as political director of JFREJ, which launched Jews for Zohran in January 2025. "We had our own voter file," she told WBAI radio, "and for phone banks that were only Jewish voters, had Jews talking to Jews." AOL The operation was designed specifically to give Mamdani cover from antisemitism accusations and to create the visible appearance of Jewish communal support. It worked, in the sense that photographs were taken and stories were written. Whether it reflected the actual views of Jewish New York is a different question, with a documented answer.

More than 1,000 rabbis signed a letter opposing Mamdani's candidacy. Aish Orthodox, Conservative, Reform. Communities that have disagreed about nearly everything since Sinai, briefly in agreement about one man. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue stated plainly: "I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the New York Jewish community." Aish Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of Central Synagogue, the largest Reform congregation in New York City, said from the pulpit that Mamdani had contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism. Jewish News Their reward was not being invited to the breakfast.

At Mamdani's first interfaith breakfast, the ADL, UJA-Federation of New York, and the Jewish Community Relations Council did not sponsor the event, after having done so each of the previous three years. Jewish Voice for Peace attended for the first time since the tradition was started by Mike Bloomberg. Jewish Telegraphic Agency The Anti-Defamation League was absent. The explicitly anti-Zionist organization that does not believe Israel has a right to exist was at the table. This is not a coincidence of scheduling. Every seat is a decision.

The Satmar endorsement, the most photographed credential of the Jewish outreach operation, was built on a similar foundation. Hours after Satmar spokesperson Rabbi Moshe Indig declared his community would support Mamdani, the official Board of Directors of the same faction distributed messages urging people to back Cuomo. The faction's leader had instructed the community to remain neutral. Indig's declaration was described as totally unauthorized.

Jewish News The endorsement was repudiated within hours by the community it claimed to speak for. The photographs were already filed.

The evening Mamdani won the election, JFREJ hosted a victory call featuring Linda Sarsour, Jamaal Bowman, and Rabbi Ellen Lippmann to discuss, in their words, what their organizing could look like moving forward. Jews For Racial & Economic Justice Sarsour has argued publicly that Zionism is incompatible with feminism, has praised Louis Farrakhan, and was pushed off the board of the Women's March over antisemitism concerns. She was the headline guest at the Jewish organization's election night celebration. The irony appears to have been invisible to everyone in the room.

Then in March 2026, protesters marched through Manhattan on Al-Quds Day chanting "We support Hamas here, we support Hezbollah here," "Death to America, death to Israel" in Farsi, and "Khaybar, khaybar, O Jews," a chant referencing an ancient massacre of a Jewish tribe that is widely understood as a contemporary threat. The Times of Israel

The march started in Times Square. This was not an isolated event. It was the visible surface of a political environment that had been under construction for months, in which the mayor of New York had spent his first weeks in office establishing which expressions of communal identity were welcome in civic life and which were an unfortunate provocation.

The ADL launched a Mamdani monitor to track the new administration. Jewish Telegraphic Agency Not a congratulations letter. Not a request for a meeting. A monitor. The organization that has existed since 1913 to track threats to Jewish life in America looked at this mayor's first moves and concluded that surveillance was the appropriate response.

This is what has been built. An antisemitism office with no definition of antisemitism. A director the most-targeted Jewish community considers an adversary. A Jewish coalition operation run by the niece of a China-based Marxist billionaire whose wife founded CODEPINK. A Satmar endorsement repudiated by the Satmars. JVP at the interfaith table for the first time in the event's history while the ADL, the Federation, and the JCRC stayed home.

A victory celebration at a Jewish organization that featured Linda Sarsour. A mayor who discouraged language outside a synagogue but could not name Hamas. A mayor who named ISIS suspects but could not name the ideology. And in Times Square, on a Thursday in March, several hundred people chanting for the murder of Jews in the street of a city whose mayor is too busy, or too careful, to say what that is.

The bombs outside Gracie Mansion did not go off. Something else is building. And the man responsible for this city has spent seventy-eight days making sure everyone knows his name and faith while making equally sure no one knows what he thinks about the faith of the people trying to kill his constituents.

That is not a coincidence either.