New English Review

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This may have been among the worst New Year's of my life.

The only thing missing was Leni Riefenstahl’s camera to capture the symbolic pageantry of this second inauguration, a record of the grandiose promises made and cheered.

NYC's new mayor is an out-and-out Islamist even more so than a democratic socialist. This is what the Red-Green alliance looks and sounds like. On Mamdani's very first day in office, he jettisoned the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism/anti-Zionism and lifted preexisting restrictions on boycotting Israel.

Excuse me? How will doing so improve housing and childcare in NYC? Then again, Mamdani is a smooth, ambitious, and charismatic figure--and he knows exactly to whom he is pandering.

The loudest and longest ovation Mamdani received was when he referred to the Palestinian communities in Bay Ridge Brooklyn as if they were forgotten, under represented, or the victims of "Islamophobia" (a false concept but no matter). He failed to describe them as having been among the loudest and most visible of Jew and Israel haters in the city. What he said, exactly, was this: "Palestinian New Yorkers in Bay Ridge will no longer have to contend with a politics that speaks of universalism and then makes them the exception."

Unless I missed it, Mamdani said nothing about the rise in attacks on Jews in our once fair city; he did mention pastrami on rye and having enjoyed lox and bagels in his formative years--as if such food is all that Judaism is about. Harmless enough. Nothing else to see here.

But if, or rather when, the mayor fails to deliver on all his pie-in-the-sky promises, he has two ready-made scapegoats to blame and to feed to the rage of the masses: The millionaires, the billionaires--and the Jews.

Our new mayor said nothing about the massive looting, the street- and train-based violence, or the fetid encampments that have sprung up like poisonous mushrooms. All he mentioned was something rather Orwellian about dealing with mental illness. Mamdani will "create a new Department of Community Safety that will tackle the mental health crisis and let the police focus on the job they were signed up to do." And how, Sir, do you plan such a "tackle"? Given that there are no medications or therapies that can turn around schizophrenia and other serious forms of psychiatric illness?

The man-of-the-hour did not mention women's rights--not once. Have I missed that too? What new executive orders has he issued concerning sexual harassment, rape, abortion rights (it remains legal in NYC), domestic battering, sex trafficking and prostitution? Ah yes, I remember he is in favor of decriminalizing prostitution. Makes sense. More tax dollars for the city. (I am not judging those who are prostituted--only the larger system that allows this extreme form of violence against women ((against men too)) to fester, even flourish.) Of course, of course, Mamdani is on record supporting reproductive prostitution--namely surrogacy, a "job" undertaken mainly by very poor women for wealthy infertile women and wealthy gay men. But, absent other skills and absent available employment, these two forms of prostitution are the ways in which Mamdani is offering "jobs" to poor women as a way of putting food on the table.

When Mamdani ran for the Assembly, he said so--that he will support the decriminalization of prostitution and the legalization of surrogacy.

This brings me to another reason New Year's Day 2026 was rather awful for me.

The same kind of women who insist on wearing hijab as a form of resistance to racism are among Mamdani's staunchest supporters. Yes, even as Iranian women are fighting against forced veiling (and Afghan women can only dream of doing so), American girls and women do not seem to support such a heroic fight--or the Muslim and ex-Muslim battle against Islamist Jihad that so many such dissidents have launched. To my great sorrow, some feminists of my generation are also lauding Mamdani on social media--they see him as the man who will right their senior-age poverty, their housing crises, their sense of failure and impotence.

He takes them back to their glory days, their Red Diaper baby ways, the time of raw, youthful hope when they glamorized violence in the name of the "people." They loved Che, Fidel, and SDS and, even though they truly were feminists, they never really gave up their loyalty to the overriding concept of class war, oppressor vs. oppressed, the victimization of the "working" poor and of the impoverished. One such woman wears "Free Luigi" buttons. Another is thrilled that the song "Bread and Roses" was sung. A third strongly shares Mamdani's verbal commitment or rather promise to make the "rich" pay more for the "poor."

Let me be honest: Yes, housing, food costs, transportation are all beneath contempt in NYC. However, I wonder whether freezing rents will also mean freezing the costs of repairs and upkeep? Yes, crime is out of control--but what exactly does Mamdani propose to do about it? Only this: He vowed to tax "rich" New Yorkers even more than the 48% they currently pay to subsidize the city.

On New Year's Day, 2026, I also attended a private Zoom call that featured Muslim, Christian, and Jewish pro-Israel speakers. The Muslims, by and large, were magnificent (Sheikh Musa Drammeh, Mansour al Hadj, Simon Deng, Soraya Deen Anila Ali). Two of the Jewish speakers were the excellent Naya Lekht and the excellent young Jewish "queer" student Misha X. Otherwise, sorry to say, the other Jewish speakers were more concerned with racism/Islamophobia, so eager to demonstrate their fondness for "Palestinians." So many of my people are lost, truly lost. Still, I hope that the organizers make such forums more available in the future

Listen, New Yorkers: Be afraid, very afraid, but gird your loins for battle. It is not one that we can afford to lose.