Mayor Zohran Mamdani helped propel three left-wing candidates with sharply critical views of Israel to primary victories in House races on Tuesday, reshaping New York City’s political landscape and confronting pro-Israel Jewish leaders with the prospect of an increasingly pro-Palestinian congressional delegation.
The candidates’ success represented a striking contrast with the political status quo in New York, which is home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel and where support for that country has for decades been the default for elected officials and office seekers.
The war in Gaza and subsequent Israeli conflicts elsewhere in the Middle East have changed that political calculus, a shift demonstrated by the candidates who won on Tuesday: the former city comptroller Brad Lander, the activist Darializa Avila Chevalier and the state lawmaker Claire Valdez.
Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, which backed Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier, celebrated on Tuesday night.
“Tonight there was a pro-Palestine sweep of New York City,” she said, adding, “The Democratic establishment would do well to pay attention.”
Each of Mr. Mamdani’s preferred candidates won a primary in a very progressive district, making them the heavy favorites to win the general election in November. Pro-Israel Jewish leaders in New York have said they are alarmed by the prospect of Mr. Lander, Ms. Valdez and Ms. Avila Chevalier representing New Yorkers in Washington.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis and senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a Reform temple on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said the political shifts in New York had made many pro-Israel Jews feel like “something about America that we so supported and so idealized is beginning to slip through our fingers.”
“Something a lot of American Jews are waking up to this morning is a sense of sadness, a sense that we’re losing something important,” the rabbi said on Wednesday.
Ms. Valdez defeated Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president who has also criticized Israel, in a race that turned more on demographic shifts than on ideology. But Mr. Lander and Ms. Avila Chevalier unseated incumbent House members, Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, who both have records of voting in support of Israel and accepting donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the hard line pro-Israel lobbying group that has been increasingly shunned by Democrats. Both of those challengers emphasized their opponents’ friendliness to AIPAC during the campaign.
All three winning candidates have said that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, backing the findings of Israeli and international human rights groups and two United Nations commissions, one of which released its report on Tuesday.
Polls show a majority of Americans now hold a critical view of Israel; that includes 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, according to the Pew Research Center.
Mr. Lander, who is Jewish, summarized the new political dynamic while canvassing voters in the East Village this month: “There’s no doubt that the landscape has moved dramatically away from sympathy for Israel as Israel has acted in utterly unsympathetic ways.”
On Tuesday, he directly addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a speech to his jubilant supporters, telling them that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s approach to Israel’s war in Gaza was “a catastrophic mistake” that had “made us complicit in genocide.”
He added, “We cannot keep paying for Netanyahu’s wars with our tax dollars,” referring to the Israeli prime minister. “Democratic voters are saying this, loud and clear.”
When Ms. Valdez addressed supporters after her win on Tuesday, she said she would “continue to call for Palestinian liberation.”
“We will stand up to the genocide, we will refuse to abide by apartheid and we will use our money to improve lives here instead of destroy them abroad,” she said.
And at the victory party for Ms. Avila Chevalier, who helped lead protests at Columbia University against the war in Gaza, chants of “free Palestine” repeatedly broke out among the crowd.
When Mr. Mamdani introduced her from the stage, he described Ms. Avila Chevalier as someone who supports “a foreign policy of investing in babies and not bombs.”
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Chelsea, said on Wednesday that she thought talk of an anti-Israel sweep of the primaries was overblown. She pointed out that both Mr. Lander and Micah Lasher, who won a Manhattan primary without the mayor’s endorsement, supported Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
“I am hopeful that the candidates who our mayor endorsed now go about doing the work of building coalitions,” she said. “We need everybody to reach out beyond their comfort zones and figure out how we can bring New York together, and I am counting on elected officials to help do that.”
Mr. Mamdani and his allies have rejected accusations from Jewish leaders and other supporters of Israel that their criticism of the country sometimes drifts into antisemitism.
Mr. Goldman, who is also Jewish, warned supporters in his concession speech on Tuesday about the dangers of antisemitism, days after a Brooklyn coffee shop publicly said he was not welcome there because of his support for Israel.
And he told reporters that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had played an “outsized role” in the race, repeating a complaint he made frequently during the campaign that the issue was distracting from voters’ concerns about topics like affordability and President Trump’s agenda.
“It obviously was a focus of my opponent,” he said of questions about Israel. “It was a focus of the media. It was not as much of a focus of, certainly, the families who are struggling day to day.”
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, the senior vice president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in the United States, said his organization was “deeply concerned by public leaders who vilify Jews and others who support Israel, including many who also strive for peace, support Palestinian rights and mourn the suffering of innocent civilians.”
Rabbi Andy Bachman, a former rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn and the Jewish Community Project in Lower Manhattan, said he was “deeply disappointed but not surprised” by the results on Tuesday night.
Rabbi Bachman now lives outside the city but has been an outspoken opponent of Mr. Lander and Mr. Mamdani. He attributed the success of the mayor’s endorsed candidates to “a sea change in American politics” that has seen both far-left and far-right groups gain support in response to widespread economic discontent.
But “the thing that is most disturbing” about Tuesday’s results, he said, is that they suggested to candidates that “if you declare genocide in Gaza, despite a distinct lack of experience compared to people that you’re running against, it can win you an election.”
Rabbi Bachman said the primary results might also be an expression of a decades-long pattern among Jewish Americans, which he characterized as “an erosion of attachment to a sense of Jewish peoplehood, language, culture, land — the things that really bound us together for generations.”
“When those wear away, what’s left are universalist values,” he said. “And Israel doesn’t represent universalist values for a whole swath of younger American Jews.”
Mr. Lander pushed back on that sentiment in his victory speech on Tuesday, saying he wanted to stand up for the rights of both Jews and Palestinians as a member of Congress. “Those are not two different jobs,” he said. “They are the same job.”
He added: “You can criticize Israel and not be antisemitic. You can be an anti-Zionist and not be antisemitic — many Jews are, and non-Jews too.”
That is an argument that left-wing Jewish groups have long made, and on Tuesday they celebrated the victory of Mr. Mamdani’s slate. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a progressive group that has supported the mayor and Mr. Lander, said the primary had been “a fight for both the future of the Democratic Party and the future of the Jewish community.”
“It was a fight between an out-of-touch establishment and a Jewish left with a real vision for our community that is grounded in human rights and dignity for all,” the group said. “And tonight, just like we did last June and this past November, the Jewish left won.”
Ashley Ahn contributed reporting.
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