In June, after Zohran Mamdani somehow bulldozed through the New York Democratic mayoral primary and seized the nomination, I was walking through my neighborhood — I live just north of Manhattan — when a friend saw me and deadpanned: “So when Mayor Mamdani makes the buses free, can we ride them on Shabbos?”
This was classic “Purim Torah” — a real question of halakhah, Jewish law, wrapped in a premise so absurd that it could only be a joke. None of us actually believed that a proud, self-professing socialist who rejected the Jewish people’s right to a state in our ancestral homeland and who had trouble bringing himself to condemn the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust could ever win the mayorship of the most Jewish city in the world outside of Israel. It felt as impossible as snow in August.
Yet here we are, six months later, and the snow is piling up. Mamdani is the mayor-elect. The joke is now the law. And every New Yorker, Jewish or not, is asking the same question: Now what?
The coming Trump-Mamdani cage match
The night of Nov. 4, 2025, might one day be remembered the way Oct. 25, 1917, the occasion of the Bolsheviks’ storming the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is remembered in other contexts: the moment the temperature changed. At 11:47 p.m., with 97% of scanners reporting, the Associated Press called it: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, 34, a state assemblyman from Astoria and a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had beaten former Gov. Andrew Cuomo 50.4%-46.1% in a general election with turnout in the Bronx and upper Manhattan rivaling presidential-year numbers…