“There were rabbis from across the entire spectrum of our Jewish community, and yet no one gave the message to the mayor, ‘Everything is going great,’” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told the Forward in an interview after the meeting.
Jacobs said there was a “uniform sense” in the room that Mamdani needed to understand the impact of his frequent and harsh criticism of Israel, pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and call for protests against the country’s leader when he visits the city.
“Everyone agreed that the current course can’t go on,” Jacobs said. “The way he vilifies Israel, and so constantly, is really causing harm.”
Rabbi Rachel Timoner, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, offered a similar account of the meeting.
Even some of the progressive rabbis in the room, she said, told Mamdani that while they and their congregants agree with him on many things and want to work with him and support him, “they have concerns about the way he is speaking about Israel.”
Many of the rabbis, she noted, are themselves “highly critical of Israel,” but approach that criticism from a connection to the country. They urged Mamdani to highlight Israelis and Palestinians working together, acknowledge greater complexity in the situation in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, and consider moving the public conversation toward issues where City Hall and Jewish leaders can work together.
There's a pattern of Mamdani listening very genuinely to Jewish community leaders' concerns and then going on to do nothing about them (see: the buffer zone law that he literally pretended he thought was a good idea until non Jews started asking him about it), but I'm very glad he's still taking the time to talk with Jewish leaders across the spectrum.
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