With the debut of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new ad featuring keffiyeh-clad door knockers, New York City Jews are wondering if the mayor of the Big Apple is hell bent on offending them.
In the video, two youngsters, one of whom is wearing a keffiyeh, knock at Gracie Mansion, whereupon they are welcomed inside by Mamdani, who asks them about their upcoming testimony at a hearing regarding rent increases.
An Israeli media outlet that interviewed leaders of NYC’s Orthodox Jewish community found similar reactions across the board.
Benny Polatsek, a Hasidic Jew who worked in the administration of former Mayor Eric Adams, asked if Mamdani is deliberately “going out of his way to offend the Jewish community.”
He said that, in the creative communications department at City Hall where he worked, they were not allowed to publish anything in any media format that even hinted at the possibility of offending any segment of the many minority and religious groups living in New York City.
“If we had produced anything like this, I would have been fired the next day,” he said.
“The message being sent to me and every other Jewish person by this video is that, ‘I’m going to trigger you and make you remember Oct. 7, the biggest pogrom to face the Jewish people since the Holocaust,’” said Moshe Spern, a public high school teacher and president of United Jewish Teachers.
“They can try to spin this if they want to and say it’s about bringing people together,” he added. “But you are the mayor of New York City and should respect the million-plus Jews here.”
Jews are objecting to the video because the keffiyeh represents the “resistance,” and anti-Israel demonstrators use it to mask their faces.
People took to X to slam the ad.
“This kid is wearing a keffiyeh,” wrote one Russel Drew. “I won’t even listen to another thing he says. Or anybody else who wears a garment associated with terrorism. Zohran Mamdani doesn’t care. He knows what he’s doing. Everything he does is about Palestine. ‘Affordability’ is his Trojan Horse.”
To a lot of New York Jews, it seems that if the mayor wants to fight antisemitism, he has an unusual way of going about it.