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.