New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood at a City Hall lectern Monday and refused to back away from remarks that provoked condemnation from some of the nation's most prominent Jewish organizations, instead reframing his denunciation of AIPAC as a broad indictment of super PAC spending and what he called a "status quo of immorality" in American politics.
The press conference followed a Thursday Get Out the Vote rally in Brooklyn where Mamdani, stumping for a slate of progressive congressional challengers, described unnamed forces as "monsters" who "move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another." The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and multiple Democratic members of Congress interpreted the language as an echo of longstanding antisemitic tropes about shadowy Jewish financial control, and said so publicly.
Mamdani insists the shoe doesn't fit. The question is whether the mayor of the largest Jewish community outside Israel can keep wearing it.
At the Brooklyn rally, Mamdani appeared alongside Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York's 13th District, as well as congressional candidates Brad Lander and Claire Valdez. The mayor has made no secret of his effort to reshape New York's congressional delegation by backing left-wing primary challengers against sitting Democrats.
At the rally, Mamdani trained his fire on AIPAC and its affiliated super PAC, the United Democracy Project, accusing them of flooding airwaves with "deceptive and misleading ads" to protect incumbents. He invoked the word "monsters", a term he later attributed to Italian Communist Party founder Antonio Gramsci, to describe those standing in the way of what he called "the birth of a new world."
By Sunday evening, the backlash was in full swing. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, posted on X:
"Swap 'AIPAC' for 'Jews' and it's the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books. That's not criticizing a lobby. That's laundering antisemitism from your podium as Mayor of a city with more than a million Jews."
AJC CEO Ted Deutch was equally direct. "Mayor Mamdani, referring to fellow New Yorkers as 'monsters' is outrageous and dangerous," Deutch wrote on X, "and the impact of your words extends far beyond politics." ADL leaders also condemned the remarks, warning of the danger of such rhetoric from the mayor of a city home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
Rather than walk back the comments, Mamdani leaned in. At his Monday press conference, he recast "monsters" as a catch-all for super PACs, not a reference to any ethnic or religious group. He told reporters:
"I used the term to describe all those who are preventing the birth of a new world, not solely AIPAC, but frankly super PACs at large, who are spending millions of dollars in deceptive and misleading ads that are blanketing airwaves, not just in the case of Darializa Avila Chevalier, but also we see that kind of PAC spending when it comes to oppose Brad Lander, who's running for Congress, as well as Claire Valdez, as well as a number of other races."
He went further, tying his AIPAC criticism to the ongoing conflict in Gaza. "I think that it is important that when we ask ourselves how such death and destruction is happening overseas, we also name those who allow it to take place," Mamdani said. He cited the Palestinian Ministry of Health's claim that more than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza since a ceasefire went into effect in mid-October.
Mamdani also described AIPAC as "an organization that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people, not just in Palestine, but frankly, through much of the region." CNN reported reaching out to AIPAC for comment but received no response.
Federal Election Commission filings show that AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project, made two political contributions last month totaling more than $600,000 to BOLD America, a group that has been funding ads supporting Rep. Espaillat in his primary fight against Avila Chevalier. That spending is at the center of Mamdani's complaint, and it is real money in a real race.
But critics argue the mayor's language went well beyond standard objections to outside spending. Gottheimer's charge, that Mamdani's framing of AIPAC as a dark-money puppet master mirrors centuries-old conspiracy theories about Jewish financial manipulation, is one that other Democrats have raised about their own party's left flank with increasing frequency.
The pattern is not new. AIPAC has spent millions this cycle to boost pro-Israel candidates in congressional primaries across New York, often running ads that focus on domestic issues rather than foreign policy. Progressive candidates and their allies have responded by casting AIPAC as a corrupting force, language that Jewish advocacy groups say crosses a line even when the target is technically a lobbying organization rather than a people.
The "monsters" episode did not emerge from a vacuum. Just The News has reported that Mamdani has deep, years-long ties to Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, who stepped down from leading the Women's March in 2019 over allegations of antisemitism and connections to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mamdani and Sarsour share organizational networks including the Muslim Democratic Club of New York and MPower Change. The day after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, in which militants killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, Mamdani made no mention of Hamas, instead condemning "Netanyahu's declaration of war" and calling for an end to "the occupation."
Major Jewish organizations took notice long before this week's rally. After Mamdani won the mayoral race, groups including UJA-Federation of New York, the ADL, the AJC, and the New York Board of Rabbis issued a joint statement saying his beliefs were "fundamentally at odds" with their community's values, as Fox News reported. The ADL went so far as to launch a "Mamdani Monitor" initiative and tip line for antisemitic incidents to track his policies and appointments. AJC CEO Deutch said at the time that Mamdani's "refusal to condemn 'globalize the intifada' and use of the term genocide when describing Israel's defensive war against Hamas is chilling."
Rep. Dan Goldman, a two-term Democratic incumbent, declined to endorse Mamdani in either the primary or general election of last year's mayoral race, citing concerns about Mamdani's stance on antisemitism. Goldman's past AIPAC support has since become a campaign issue in his own race, where Lander is challenging him from the left.
The progressive challengers Mamdani rallied with Thursday carry their own controversies. Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack. Rep. Espaillat accused her of attending to "celebrate the death of innocent people in Israel right after the attack." At a debate earlier this month, Avila Chevalier pushed back:
"I would never celebrate the death of any human being. I was there at that rally on October 8 because I remembered what happened in 2014 and I knew that the reaction would be an outsize reaction that would cause the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people. And that is what I was there to protest."
The New York Post reported that Mamdani and his endorsed candidates appeared at the Brooklyn rally alongside radical influencer Bartley Blakeley, who has openly supported Hamas and compared Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to Martin Luther King Jr. The company a mayor keeps at a public rally is not a minor detail.
Brad Lander, meanwhile, canceled his membership with the Democratic Socialists of America earlier this month after the organization promoted the October 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally. That Lander felt compelled to distance himself from DSA over the same rally his fellow Mamdani-endorsed candidate attended says something about the coalition the mayor is assembling.
It is worth noting that other Mamdani-aligned candidates across the country have faced similar scrutiny for inflammatory rhetoric they later struggled to defend.
What is playing out in New York is a concentrated version of a fault line running through the Democratic Party nationwide. On one side stand progressive activists and elected officials who view AIPAC as a tool of an unjust foreign policy and a corrupting force in domestic elections. On the other stand Jewish community leaders, moderate Democrats, and advocacy organizations who say the rhetoric being deployed against AIPAC is functionally indistinguishable from historic antisemitic tropes, and that the distinction between "criticizing a lobby" and "demonizing Jewish political participation" has grown dangerously thin.
Mamdani occupies a unique position in this fight. He is not a backbench state legislator or a fringe activist. He is the mayor of New York City, a city whose Jewish population exceeds that of most countries. When he stands at a podium and calls the forces arrayed against his candidates "monsters" who use "dark money" to "turn us against one another," the words carry institutional weight. That is precisely what Deutch, Gottheimer, and the ADL are warning about.
The mayor's defense, that "monsters" was a Gramsci reference aimed at super PACs broadly, not at Jews, asks his critics to ignore the specific context in which the word was deployed: at a rally organized around opposition to AIPAC spending, in races where AIPAC is the named antagonist, by a mayor whose record on Israel and antisemitism has been a source of concern since before he took office. Some Mamdani-endorsed candidates have already shown a pattern of ducking hard questions about their most provocative positions.
AIPAC has not publicly responded to Mamdani's attacks. The congressional primaries Mamdani is trying to influence are approaching, and the ad spending he denounces shows no sign of slowing. FEC filings confirm more than $600,000 in United Democracy Project money flowing to BOLD America for the Espaillat race alone, and Mamdani has claimed similar spending is targeting the Lander and Valdez races as well, though specific figures for those contests are not yet public.
The open questions are straightforward. Will Mamdani's intervention help or hurt his endorsed candidates in districts with significant Jewish populations? Will Democratic leaders beyond Gottheimer and Goldman draw a clearer line? And will the mayor of New York City acknowledge that his language carries consequences in a city where more than a million Jewish residents are listening?
Quoting a Communist theorist to describe your political opponents as "monsters" is a choice. Doing it from the mayor's office of the most Jewish city in the Western Hemisphere is a different kind of choice entirely.