“I've just returned from a brief stay in the U.S. On every European's lips -- in conversations, on the news, on social networks -- there's only one subject: next Tuesday's election, which may make 34-year-old Zohran Mamdani New York's mayor.
Mr. Mamdani has no substantial political past. Apart from a few demagogic, populist resolutions that are unworkable without the cooperation of the state Legislature, he has no program.
Nothing indicates that he is capable of managing a $110 billion budget, of steering 300,000 municipal employees -- in short, of running the state within a state that is the city of Fiorello La Guardia, Ed Koch and Michael Bloomberg.
Last but not least, he has made statements of unheard-of violence about Israelis and Jews, similar to those of France's extreme leftist politicians Rima Hassan and Jean-Luc Melenchon.
The man the polls say is the likely next mayor is a resolute supporter of boycotting the only Jewish state on the planet. He denies that the country the survivors of the pogroms and the Shoah have built over the past 77 years has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
He doesn't hide that he came to politics through the Palestinian cause and thanks to it. He adopts as his own, without qualms, the lies that Israel has engaged in organized famine and genocide. He has said he would order the prime minister of Israel arrested if he comes to the city for the United Nations General Assembly. He compares Palestinian terrorists to the insurgents of the Warsaw ghetto.
He condemns the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023 -- but only halfheartedly, and also condemning, in the same breath, the "occupation" and "apartheid."
Subscribing to the theme that Jews are the source of the world's problems and pulling strings everywhere, he is able to make this moronic statement about the New York City Police Department and the Israel Defense Forces: "When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF."
He finds nothing to object to in the project to "globalize the intifada" which implies he wouldn't be unfavorable to the idea of seeing Jewish civilians targeted anywhere, including in New York.
When he commemorates the anti-American atrocity of Sept. 11, there is only one victim who seems to provoke a tear from him -- not the thousands murdered in the burning twin towers, but his aunt, or maybe it was a cousin, who, because she wore the hijab, no longer felt "safe" on the subway in the weeks after the terrorist attack. And then he buckled down to insist that this brouhaha around his comments only proved that Islamophobia runs wild in New York.
To be sure, the die isn't cast. His two challengers, Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, can still form an alliance and erect a blockade. The great rabbis of New York, starting with Elliot Cosgrove at Park Avenue Synagogue and Ammiel Hirsch at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, have spoken out. Their warnings will, I believe, grow louder in the days to come.
Perhaps statements by business leaders, who are the real providers of jobs, letting it be known that they won't hesitate to leave the city if an antisemitic mayor comes to the helm, will make voters think before committing the irreparable.
But the most likely outcome is that people will brush these warnings aside and answer them with braggadocio of the type "America is not for sale."
It would be a black day for the Jews of New York. An insult to the memory of Saul Bellow, Elie Wiesel and Leonard Bernstein. A spit in the face of Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words of welcome to the humiliated, afflicted, nameless and stateless who arrived at Ellis Island are engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
It would be a beginning of rupture of the age-old pact between the world's most cosmopolitan city and the people of the Book. It would be an earthquake in the history of Judaism: At the hour when the threat of annihilation was everywhere, New York was the last place on the planet where Judaism and Jews could not only be saved, but reinvented.
Beyond the Jews, it would be the entire Democratic Party turning its back on the legacy of Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton to rally to a faction that, under the cover of "intersectionality," confuses the green flag of Hamas with that of the workers.
America is caught in a vise -- on one side, "America first"; on the other, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her crowd, whose New York breakthrough would strengthen totalitarian temptations. If New York falls, the entire free world may again totter on its foundations.
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Mr. Levy is author of "Israel Alone." This article was translated from French by Emily Hamilton.” [1]
1. Europeans Watch New York's Mayor's Race With Fear. Bernard-Henri Levy. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 30 Oct 2025: A15.
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