Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist front-runner in the race to become New York City’s next mayor, has no shortage of fans—just ask any of his 50,000 campaign volunteers. But he is also attracting more critics, including those now trying to expose or accentuate his weaknesses. A few of those appeared this weekend.
On Friday, as Mamdani rubbed elbows with voters at a Fourth of July cookout in southeast Queens, a bomb dropped from The New York Times: “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application,” the headline read. The article revealed that as a high school senior, Mamdani had selected his race as both “Asian” and “Black or African American” in his 2009 application to Columbia University. The Times noted that Columbia practiced “race-conscious affirmative action admissions” at the time—meaning that his selections would have given him an advantage over other applicants.
Any advantage gained by Mamdani wasn’t enough to win him admission to Columbia, where his father, Mahmood Mamdani, was and is a professor. Zohran Mamdani wound up at Bowdoin College in Maine.
But had Mamdani misled the Columbia admissions committee—or simply selected the most-fitting options for his background, since he was born in Uganda to Indian parents?
To Mamdani, if he was guilty of anything, it was the latter. “Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” he told the Times. The Mamdani campaign didn’t respond to questions from The Free Press over the weekend.
Mamdani is also facing new questions about a post on his account on X from last December. He wished his followers a “Happy 3rd night of Hanukkah from Astoria and Long Island City” by posting a video of Indian performers covering the holiday tune “Hey Hanukkah.” In the clip, four bearded men—two of whom wore curly-haired wigs and were identified in the video as the Geeta Brothers—sing in Punjabi accents while spinning dreidels.
Online commenters were quick to point out that Mamdani’s post seemed to betray his own stance against cultural appropriation. In 2014, he hosted an event on the appropriation of Native American culture as a student at Bowdoin, an elite private institution that costs more than $93,000 a year to attend. At the event, one student admitted to her “hurtful” decision to wear Native American garb for Halloween, according to the college newspaper. Since then, Mamdani has continued to hammer against cultural appropriation, posting to X in 2021 that his “culture is not a costume.”
Mamdani has adamantly denied throughout his Democratic mayoral campaign that he is antisemitic. He has said that if he is elected, he would increase funding for hate-crime prevention by 800 percent, though it is unclear how he would address antisemitism, given that he believes it is entirely distinct from anti-Zionism.
“Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing,” Mamdani said during an interview last year.
Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, was largely ignored by the political establishment when he was polling at just 1 percent early this year. Now, he is expected to become New York City’s first Democratic Socialist mayor.
Mamdani’s father shares similarly radical anti-Israel politics, along with a distaste for the West. A video clip of Mahmood that resurfaced over the weekend shows the Columbia professor claiming that Adolf Hitler drew inspiration from America’s treatment of Native Americans, including that the “Nuremberg laws were patterned after American laws.” Other clips of him from the past few years show him railing against “Zionist power,” calling October 7 a “military action,” and calling Israel a “neo-Nazi solution.”
Mamdani, a 33-year-old state assemblyman, was largely ignored by the political establishment when he was polling at just 1 percent early this year. Now, he is expected to become New York City’s first Democratic Socialist mayor unless anti-Mamdani voters unite behind one candidate or his campaign stumbles. An American Pulse survey released last week showed Mamdani with 35 percent of support from voters, ahead of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo with 29 percent, Republican Curtis Sliwa with 16 percent, Mayor Eric Adams with 14 percent, and independent Jim Walden with 1 percent.
