On Sunday, Mamdani will be celebrating himself at a rally in Queens to be stocked mainly with unionized teachers. Derek French/ZUMA / SplashNews.com Mayor Zohran Mamdani just passed his 100th day in office. The metropolis has survived.
But antisemitism in our city of 1 million Jews flourishes as never before.
Tolerance for it is so pervasive that some longtime restaurant customers skipped Passover meals this year for fears of being targeted, according to my friends in the business.
How much worse will it be in Mamdani’s 1,360 days in office to come?
On Sunday, he’s celebrating himself at a rally in Queens to be stocked mainly with unionized teachers.
Self-adoration comes easily to Mamdani, a child of privilege who speaks, acts and grins as if he earned it despite having not worked a day in his life (including his term in the state Assembly, where he did less than nothing).
Mamdani has made himself remarkably unpopular in his first few months. His 48% approval rating is embarrassing compared with predecessor Eric Adams’ 61% approval at the same point in his mayoralty.
The mayor’s famous smile, it would seem, can only go so far to appease his easily led base.
On certain public-policy issues, Mamdani’s been disarmingly — blessedly — ineffectual.
He all but gave up on his free-buses-for all lunacy.
He got cold feet about axing the NYPD’s gang database and Strategic Response Group.
If he truly means to dismantle them, he has only to tell NYPD boss Jessica Tisch; he is, after all, her boss, with the power to overrule her — as he took pains to tell The New York Times this week.
He changed his mind about never again doing homeless sweeps and ceding mayoral control of schools.
He took a few positive steps on zoning to promote new housing construction. He set up a Coney Island Business Improvement District with a $1 million grant.
To wishful-thinking Mamdani foes, such backtracks and small actions signal a belated recognition of reality.
Who knows, maybe he’ll one day embrace free-market capitalism!
Meanwhile, his horrified true believers regard Mamdani’s occasional tiny real-world forays as a grave betrayal.
In fact, Mamdani remains hell-bent on wrecking the economy and housing market in the name of progressivism.
After his notion for the city to raise property taxes proved too reckless even for the far-left City Council, he hasn’t given up trying to persuade the state to raise taxes on corporations or wealthy individuals.
But he wants to blow a hole in the city treasury — to substantiate his view that the city needs more dough from Washington and Albany.
His scheme has support in the Legislature, but Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed to block it.
We can only hope her sudden onset of guts will survive past this year’s election, unlike her 180 on congestion pricing.
His other pillar campaign pledge — to freeze rents on 1 million stabilized apartments — is up to the city Rent Guidelines Board, which will vote in June.
Mamdani appointed six of the panel’s nine members; it will take courage for them to deny him his wish.
Should he prevail, there’s no telling the damage it would do to middle-class housing stock already reeling from recent Albany restrictions on yearly rents, evictions and landlords’ right to pass along the costs of capital repairs and upgrades to tenants.
Mamdani’s performance has been even more dismaying on an issue at the heart of the city’s soul: By his actions, inactions and words, he has made antisemitism respectable.
Once merely a fringe phenomenon, haters now feel comfortable attacking and harassing Jews on the streets and at synagogues.
His animus is not limited, despite his claims, to his detestation of Israel, which is reflected in his renewed threat to have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested the next time he’s in town.
(Just try it, President Donald Trump and the NYPD itself must be thinking).
Mamdani claims he doesn’t object to Israel’s existence but only that it’s a Jewish state. He’s against a “hierarchy of citizenship based on religion or anything else.”
Curiously, he has yet to utter a peep about the Islamic Republic of Iran, Afghanistan or Indonesia’s sharia-enforcing Aceh district, where the least departure from extreme Islam’s strictest dictates can lead to imprisonment, flogging or stoning to death.
Mamdani won’t even unequivocally renounce the views of his wife Rama Duwaji, an unreconstructed Jew-hater who essentially endorsed the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorists’ slaughter and rape of innocent Israelis.
His excuse that she’s a “private person” with “no formal position” in government suggests she has no, zero, influence on him —- an impossibility in a marriage or any long-lived intimate relationship.
One thing only prevents Mamdani’s approval rating from plummeting further: The remarkable decline in violent street crime, which only right-wing nuts deny.
Murders and shootings are on track for their lowest numbers in history.
There were 2,262 murders in 1991 but only 309 in 2025. Homicides this year are 24.1% fewer than at the same time last year.
Should the mayor dump Commissioner Tisch for a successor more concerned about criminals’ rights than about victims, count on New Yorkers who voted for him — despite their qualms over his inexperience, puerile ideology and antisemitism — to finally say, “Enough!”
