During the mayoral campaign, I spent more time than I’d have liked trying to address the hysteria about the risks of a Zohran Mamdani mayoralty. The issue of Israel came up constantly and my argument was that what any mayor thinks about the Middle East is irrelevant and what matters is how he protects Jewish New Yorkers.
But when I watched Mamdani engage with President Trump in one of the most brilliant bouts of political theater I’ve seen in years, it occurred to me that maybe just protecting Jewish New Yorkers is setting the bar too low. Maybe Mamdani could do even more.
New York has had its share of ethnic tensions, but overall, our city has been an incredible melting pot for hundreds of years. While there are incidents like the terrible woman on Staten Island who recently tried to bully an elderly Jewish couple into saying “Free Palestine,” people like her are more the exception than the rule. By and large, here in New York, Jews and Muslims co-exist just fine.
But what if Mamdani helped make it more than fine? What if he actively showed that Jews and Muslims can work together and live together peacefully and cooperatively here in New York and that can be a model for how Jews and Muslims engage everywhere? London and Paris are rife with tension. We could show them a better way.
The first step is to bring together a group of, say, a dozen Jewish leaders and a dozen Muslim leaders. It can’t just be the most progressive rabbis from Park Slope and the most progressive imams from Jackson Heights. The group has to be a mix of Jewish and Muslim leaders of all denominations and not just clergy. It has to be a real mix of people — business leaders, civic leaders — with a variety of views and constituencies.
The next step is to find where they agree — issues like protecting houses of worship, funding of religious studies, affordable housing, doing business together, ensuring a supply of kosher and halal foods and others. Why not host a series of podcasts and events with leaders from each group to discuss where they agree, where they disagree and how to move forward? They don’t need to solve the Mideast — just how members of two different religions can live peacefully and productively together in cities like ours.
After that, let’s teach our kids. Bring Muslim leaders into yeshivas and Jewish leaders into madrasas — and bring them both, together, into public schools. We don’t have to raise kids to inherently distrust anyone different from them. We don’t have to teach kids to adopt a zero sum mindset where it’s everyone for themself. Most people ultimately believe in being kind and generous, in having a life more focused on love than hate. Why can’t we teach more of that?
Ideally, the end product shows not only that the two groups can work well together, but also hopefully show many of Mamdani’s supporters that being antisemitic is neither progressive nor acceptable (nor is the inherent intolerance for anyone who may disagree with you), and show that Islamophobia is equally unacceptable. Hate is hate, regardless of who you aim it towards.
I understand that some will see this argument as soft or unrealistic or “just not how the world works.” We have chosen to distinguish people based on their race or beliefs or gender, but that’s a choice we’ve made and a choice that can change. There’s no law of nature that says that Jews and Muslims or Hindus and Muslims or Blacks and whites or gays and Christians have to hate each other. If you insist on clinging to that, you’re just dooming yourself to a life of misery. What for?
The jury is still out on whether Mamdani will be a good mayor. I do know that his election signals a real desire for change. Change doesn’t just have to mean free buses or city-owned grocery stores. It can mean changing the way we see each other.
And because Mamdani represents change, because he is Muslim, because he surely wants to show that he is not antisemitic, he has a unique opportunity to do more than just move policies and funding to the left. He can take on the way we live together. He can show the world what New York really is — the best city on the planet. After all, isn’t that why we live here?
Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist and philanthropist.
