They tried to smear him as an antisemite but Mayor Zohran Mamdani walks in a rich Jewish tradition | Molly Crabapple

"Billionaires raised fortunes against him. The president threatened to strip his citizenship. Mainstream synagogues slandered him as the spawn of Osama Bin Laden and Chairman Mao. But today, Zohran Mamdani became the first socialist mayor of New York City. For all the hysteria, when I look at Mamdani, I didn't see some radical departure from the past. I see him as the heir to an old and venerable Jewish tradition that of Yiddish socialism which helped build New York."

"In some cases, the link is direct. Bruce Vladeck, a member of one of Mamdani's transition committees, is a well-respected expert on Medicare, but for the sake of this article, his credentials matter less than his surname. Vladeck is the great-grandson of Baruch Charney Vladeck, a Marxist troublemaker from the Pale of Settlement, a tract of land in the Russian empire where Jews were permitted to live at a time of rampant antisemitic oppression."

Zohran Mamdani won election as New York City's first socialist mayor despite intense opposition from billionaire-funded campaigns, presidential threats, and denunciations from mainstream synagogues. He is connected to a lineage of Yiddish socialism through figures like Bruce Vladeck, whose great-grandfather Baruch Charney Vladeck emigrated from the Pale of Settlement, fought after the 1905 revolution, and served in New York municipal roles. The Jewish Labor Bund's secular, anti-Zionist slogan "here where we live is our country" is cited as resonant with Mamdani's vision. Early 20th-century New York housed nearly 600,000 Jews in crowded tenements who became a radicalized proletariat.

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