After a day partially spent celebrating Eid al-Adha with Muslims across the city, Zohran Mamdani sat inside a West Village church on Friday for a friendly town hall on confronting corporate greed.
Roughly 10 minutes in, a protester loudly disrupted the event. When he was done, a second protester jumped in. Both took offense at Mr. Mamdani’s position on the Israel-Gaza war; his characterization of Israel’s actions as a genocide has become a wedge issue in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.
But the protesters complained that Mr. Mamdani had not gone far enough. They said he was too soft on Israel, objecting to his stance that Israel had a right to exist as a nation. Mr. Mamdani, they said, had strayed from his Muslim roots.
The candidate took immediate offense.
“To call into question how I consider myself Muslim,” he said, “is a step too far.”
For Mr. Mamdani, running to be New York City’s first mayor of Muslim faith has involved a delicate balancing act, especially as the war in Gaza drags on. His faith has always been a central part of his political identity, dating to his first campaign for State Assembly.
But his various stances related to the war — he supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; believes the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, should be arrested; and does not equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism — have proved divisive during the campaign and have sometimes drawn attention to his religion.
Mr. Mamdani has been attacked by both Zionists and supporters of Palestinians, by rival mayoral candidates and by super PACs ready to spend millions of dollars on negative advertising in the last weeks of the campaign.
Right-wing social media accounts have used dog-whistle language to attack his identity. Vickie Paladino, a Republican councilwoman from Queens, called for Mr. Mamdani to be deported, questioning whether he had been a citizen long enough to be elected mayor. (Born in Uganda, Mr. Mamdani has lived in New York City since he was 7; he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018.)
And last week, a man was arrested after he lunged toward Mr. Mamdani at a news conference and berated him about his positions on Israel. In a subsequent scuffle, police officials said, the man bit the hand of one of Mr. Mamdani’s volunteers. Mr. Mamdani now travels with security.
“We know that to stand in public as a Muslim is also to sacrifice the safety that we can sometimes find in the shadows,” Mr. Mamdani, wearing a teal kurta, said Friday morning to hundreds of worshipers at the Parkchester Islamic Center in the Bronx. “I know what our community wants is what every community wants and deserves: safety, equality and respect. But in this city, in this country, you are not given those things; you have to win those things. And one of the clearest ways you win is at the ballot box.”
The early morning service was one of four Eid prayers and festivities that Mr. Mamdani attended that day. After he spoke, one of the leaders of the mosque reminded attendees that early voting begins on June 14 and asked those who were citizens and able to vote to raise their hands.
Mr. Mamdani’s path to victory relies in part on rallying the city’s dormant Muslim voters.
According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, more than 350,000 of New York’s roughly one million Muslims are registered to vote, but only about 12 percent cast ballots in the last mayoral election.
Mr. Mamdani has visited dozens of mosques since January; filmed himself breaking the Ramadan fast on the subway by devouring a giant burrito; and used one of his first campaign videos to talk about the city’s affordability crisis by breaking down the rising cost of a meal from a halal food cart.
Imam Khalid Latif, a former Police Department chaplain who is now the executive director of the Islamic Center of New York City, said he has seen an imbalance in how Muslim candidates like Mr. Mamdani are treated.
“I don’t see anybody asking anyone else to qualify their stances on Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiment,” he said. “No one is asking anybody, what do you think about what’s happening to Muslims right now?”
Mr. Mamdani faces a challenge even among some Muslims. He is a democratic socialist, and some of his policies, like supporting legalized marijuana or L.G.B.T.Q. rights, do not align with more conservative mosques’ thinking.
Ashraf Chowdhury, a volunteer for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign who is a member of the Parkchester Islamic Center, said it had taken work to persuade members of the mosque, which considers itself somewhat conservative, to consider the candidate given his other positions.
“It’s really hard to convince people, because obviously Zohran is representing all New Yorkers,” Mr. Chowdhury said. “So some of the selling points have to be: We support all the Jewish people, we support all L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. people.”
At the same time, Mr. Mamdani has not centered his campaign on his religion or his stance on Israel; rather, his focus has been on making the city more affordable through proposals like free buses and city-owned grocery stores.
“Zohran has been incredibly shrewd to have a laser focus on affordability, which is something that unites everyone and is something the mayor of New York actually has a say in,” said Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist who has served as an adviser to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “He hasn’t been talking about Israel or foreign policy unless people ask him about it. It’s not on the literature.”
But in a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, criticism of his positions on the country inevitably arises.
During a mayoral forum on Jewish issues on Sunday, Whitney Tilson, a rival candidate whose wife and three daughters are Jewish, accused Mr. Mamdani of being a “primary inciter” of what he called antisemitic “mobs” that make Jews feel unsafe on college campuses and elsewhere, apparently referring to pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Mr. Tilson’s remarks echoed a similar attack line that he used last week in the race’s first debate.
Mr. Mamdani responded that much of the language he uses to describe Israel’s conduct has been used by prominent Jewish leaders in the United States and Israel. He added that while he was comfortable with disagreement, Mr. Tilson’s comments “broached into a new area, one where the language is less of humanity, more of ‘someone is at the gates,’ almost painting me as if I am an animal.”
Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of strategic communications at Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a left-wing Jewish organization that has endorsed Mr. Mamdani, said that some of the criticism is rooted in an “extremely biased and prejudiced idea that Jews and Muslims are somehow inherent enemies.”
Indeed, Mr. Mamdani has stressed that if he were elected mayor, he would do everything in his power to “protect Jewish New Yorkers,” and said that his campaign had proposed spending more money to fight antisemitism than any other campaign has.
His arguments seem to have persuaded many Jewish voters. Mr. Mamdani, who is second in polls behind former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, is polling third among Jewish voters, according to a recent Marist survey, behind Mr. Cuomo and Brad Lander, the city comptroller, who is a reform Jew and also a Netanyahu critic.
Mr. Mamdani said his inspiration for staying true to his roots came from his work in 2017 for the City Council campaign of the Rev. Khader El-Yateem, an Arab American Lutheran pastor in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
“I ran my whole campaign with my collar on,” Pastor El-Yateem, now the executive director of service and justice for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said in an interview. He recalled receiving death threats, which he views as an unfortunate byproduct of being Arab or Muslim in American public life.
Mr. Mamdani said the campaign had provided him with a valuable lesson.
“I had thought that I would have to give up some part of myself to be a part of this world,” he said in a recent interview. “To see a candidate who was proud of the things that I had been told to hide, who stitched together a vision that showed the coherence of so many ideas that I had been told were disparate, showed me my own place in this work.”
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
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