The Author, the Artist, and Mayor Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani has only been in office as New York City’s first Muslim mayor since January 1. In that short time, Mamdani has landed in trouble which just might bring down his administration almost before it has begun.

It’s not trouble over anything Mamdani himself has done. A headline in the Jewish Insider tells the story: “Mamdani’s Wife [Rama Duwaji] Liked Social Media Posts Celebrating Oct. 7.” October 7, 2023 was the date when Hamas, the Islamic militant group which controls Gaza, carried out a series of surprise attacks on Israel. Hamas slaughtered 1,195 people—at least 828 of them civilians—and took another 250 hostage.

Duwaji “liked” an Instagram post from the day of the attack. The post is by the Slow Factory, which describes its mission as “designing and building infrastructure for cultural freedoms for Indigenous & Global South-led communities.” The Slow Factory’s post accuses Israel of “apartheid” and declares: “Gaza has been aptly described as the world’s largest and longest-standing open air prison for millions of people who have committed no crime and have had no trial.” That’s true, but Zionists don’t want us to say it.

The Slow Factory post continues: “Nearly 40% of Gaza’s population lives in poverty—isolated and segregated, intentionally kept in poverty, blockade, occupation, and often, heavy military attack. Over half of the population of Gaza are children: … [my emphasis].”

Duwaji also liked a post from the Peoples Forum. The Peoples Forum is one of those self-styled “anti-imperialist” groups which gives a pass to any dictatorship that is anti-American. Its criticisms of the US, however, are mostly valid. The post announced a pro-Palestine rally for October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas massacre. The post said that the purpose of the event is to demonstrate opposition to Israel’s “apartheid, occupation, & oppression” of Palestine. What the post actually demonstrated was the Peoples Forum’s gross insensitivity in holding a rally in support of Palestine when the bodies of Hamas’ victims were barely cold.

Rama Duwaji “liked” a post by an X.com user calling himself @zei_squirrel. Zei_squirrel’s post dismisses as a “’mass rape’ hoax” “fabricated” by the New York Times reports that Hamas committed wide-scale sexual violence on October 7, 2023. (The United Nations and the International Criminal Court say otherwise.)

There may be additional relevant posts. Olivia Reingold, for one, claims that there are. Reingold is a writer for the right-wing Free Press. The Free Press was founded by Bari Weiss, currently the editor-in-chief of CBS News, who is so Zionist that she makes Moses look like an Episcopalian. Reingold has tweeted that she had “found 70+ radical anti-Israel posts liked by Rama Duwaji….” I guess Reingold means us to take her claim on faith seeing as she has provided no evidence that these 70+ posts exist. Nor has she answered my email asking about this. All the articles I have seen about Duwaji’s “likes” quote the same two or three social media posts.

Susan Abulhawa: Every Moment Is a Life

Mme. Mamdani is a professional artist whose work has appeared in Vogue and The New Yorker. Besides her likes on social media posts, Duwaji is catching flak for an illustration she made for Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide (2026), an anthology of writing by young Palestinians. I am taking bets on how long Amazon will continue to offer the book.

The collection is co-edited by Susan Abulhawa. Abulhawa is Palestinian-American and is the author of the acclaimed 2006 novel Mornings in Jenin. I cannot recommend her novel too highly. The collection Every Moment Is a Life resulted from eight writing workshops Abulhawa, who lives in the US, conducted during two trips to Gaza in 2004. The young Palestinian writers traveled to the workshops at considerable risk to themselves. Abulhawa calls them “beautiful, courageous individuals.”

Abulhawa’s social media posts are, if anything, even more scathing than the ones Duwaji liked by other people. One Abulhaw post thunders that “the whole world is zionist occupied, except Palestine.” On August 25, 2025, Abulhawa wrote that “Israel is a cancer.” And: “Israelis should not feel safe anywhere in the world.” She demands: “Wipe that vile colony from this earth.”

Perhaps Abulhawa’s most egregious remark is in an opinion piece she posted on the Electronic Intifada website less than a week after the Hamas attacks. Here she salutes the Hamas attackers as “brave Palestinian fighters.” Brave? Only if you are untroubled by rapes and murders. Otherwise, you will agree with an open letter to Duwaji which appeared in the Jewish Journal. The author, a neuropsychologist who treats 10/7 survivors, wrote: “Mass murder can still be reframed as resistance. Rape cannot.”

Mamdani vs. Abulhawa

At a March 13 press conference in Brooklyn, Mayor Mamdani was asked about his wife’s illustration for Every Moment Is a Life. The reporter who asked the question said that some of Susan Abulhawa’s social media posts refer to “at least some Israeli citizens as parasites, cockroaches, demons.”

The Mayor might have answered that Israelis have said the same and worse about Palestinians:

• Palestinians are “human animals.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

• Palestinians are “beasts, they are not human.” Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan. 

• Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, annoyed at a British journalist asking him about civilians in Gaza: “We’re fighting Nazis.” Many more examples can be found in the articles I have linked to.

Instead, the Mayor merely replied that “I think that rhetoric is patently unacceptable. I think it’s reprehensible.” He said that “as is common with freelance illustrators,” Duwaji had been commissioned to provide an illustration by a third party. Mamdani stated that his wife “has never met with or engaged with the author,” nor had she seen the posts referred to.

Mamdani said that his wife was not involved in his mayoral campaign or in his administration. His wife, he says, is a “private person.” Not any more, she’s not. Their political enemies will continue to smear the Mamdanis—both of them—as anti-American pro-Hamas radical Islamists. The Mamdanis’ enemies may even believe this. Yet I can’t help thinking that what really gives the Right the vapors is Mamdani’s socialist policies. I suspect that wealthy New Yorkers would vote for Osama bin Laden if he’d cut their taxes.

Abulhawa Responds

Susan Abulhawa responded to Mamdani in a video she recorded on March 14, 2026, the day after Mamdani’s press conference. She does not condemn the mayor, but she’s clearly not pleased at Mamdani’s dismissing her statements as “patently unacceptable” and “reprehensible.”

“I want to speak about this accusation of antisemitism against me and also about the nature and requisites of racism in general. At the most basic level, I’ll start with the word semite. Unlike the White Ashkenazi Jews attacking me, I am an actual Semitic person. Semitism is just another part of our identity that they have stolen. Zionists have dispossessed us of our homes, our heritage, our land, our ancestral cemeteries, our orchards, our artefacts, our books, archives, photos, resources, and so, so much more.”

On August 25, 2025, she posted: “I also don’t give a shit if people collapse the distinction between zionists from jews—not when 82% [at least] of Jewish Israelis and the same percentage of American Jews support this holocaust” (brackets are in Abulhawa’s post). This is harsh, and it comes close to saying that there are no innocent Jews, just as many Jews say there are no innocent Palestinians. However, Abulhawa does list a small number of what she calls anti-Zionist Jews—Ilan Pappé, Richard Falk, Mark Perlmutter, Katie Halper, Aaron Maté—in her March 14 video.

Abulhawa declares that what the oppressed feel for the oppressor isn’t racism. It can’t be. Racism requires a “power differential”: “racism is unidirectional; it can only flow from those who have power.”

Maybe. Yet the expressions Abulhawa uses—“Jewish supremacist demons”, “Jewish supremacist vampires,”“rootless, soulless ghouls,” “parasites”—are standard antisemitic tropes. Abulhawa may not be a antisemite, but she sure hates Jews. In any event, her criticisms of Israel are well taken.

In the 2008 comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Adam Sandler plays a top Mossad agent (who dreams of one day becoming a hairdresser). Over dinner with his parents, Zohan asks how much longer can the Arab-Israeli conflict continue? Zohan’s mom cheerily answers that “They’ve been fighting for two thousand years. It can’t be much longer.” I don’t think there’s anyone who believes that. Still, we can hope.

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