The skinny undergraduate from New York City was no one’s picture of a campus radical.
He wore an L.L. Bean jacket and a broad smile, sometimes broke into rap to get a rise out of friends and wrote self-deprecating columns for the college newspaper expounding on, among other things, the ethics of grinding on the dance floor.
But to friends and classmates who knew Zohran Mamdani at Bowdoin College in the early 2010s, there was no mistaking the intensity with which he took up his chosen cause: Palestinians’ struggle with Israel.
On a New England campus known more for athletics than activism, he founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine long before the group became a polarizing national force, and led a campaign to persuade Bowdoin to join an academic boycott of Israel’s “oppressive occupation and racist policies.” (The college president said no.)
He was willing to engage with different perspectives — but only so far. When a spasm of violence shook the Middle East in 2012, classmates persuaded him to team up on a joint educational event with J Street U, a liberal pro-Israel group that supported a two-state solution.
To them, the session felt like a promising model for future collaboration. Attendance was strong. Everyone smiled for a photo.
Yet afterward, Mr. Mamdani politely shut the partnership down, according to his counterpart at J Street U, Judah Isseroff. It was nothing personal, he remembered Mr. Mamdani had explained, but Students for Justice in Palestine followed a policy of anti-normalization, meaning it would no longer be working with groups that supported Israel.
“It never got acrimonious. Anti-normalization didn’t mean we didn’t have lunch anymore,” said Mr. Isseroff, who now teaches Jewish thought and politics at Washington University in St. Louis. “But I found the position kind of self-defeating.”
A little more than a decade later, Mr. Mamdani, 33, has risen like a comet in New York City politics, emerging as the Democratic nominee and front-runner for mayor on the strength of his easygoing charisma and focus on the city’s affordability crisis.
But in a race full of fights over rent freezes and policing, his longstanding beliefs on Israel and Palestinians have been a singular lightning rod — a galvanizing force behind his early support, but also one of his biggest vulnerabilities.
Mr. Mamdani’s unapologetically pro-Palestinian platform would once have been almost unimaginable for a leading mayoral candidate. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack tipped the region into all-out war, he has accused Israel of committing genocide, vowed to arrest its leader and said he could not support the country as long as it is an officially Jewish state that gives lesser rights to Palestinians.
On the two-year anniversary of the massacre this week, the Israeli Foreign Ministry issued an unusual denunciation, calling him “a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda” despite his condemnation of the terrorist group’s massacre. Yet polls suggest that as the war drags on, New Yorkers are moving toward Mr. Mamdani’s position, which was once far outside the mainstream.
And at a time when Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, is trying to reassure New Yorkers that he is open to compromise, it is the biggest issue on which he has not budged.
To understand why, and how one of the most combustible topics in global politics became so central to his ascent, requires looking beyond the present race, to the rarefied milieu where the only child of celebrated intellectuals formed his view of the world — and to the campus where he began to put it into action.
It is a story that begins in Uganda and South Africa, where Mr. Mamdani was first taught to see the plight of Palestinians in the same tradition of anticolonial struggle that shaped his father’s Muslim family.
It features up-close encounters with Edward W. Said and other leading Palestinian American thinkers who were frequent guests at the family home. It helps explain how Mr. Mamdani became an organizer, lost faith in mainstream Democratic politics and joined the Democratic Socialists of America.
And a month before Election Day, it may foreshadow one of the central conflicts if he is elected mayor, between the beliefs and instincts of an activist and the unrelenting practical demands of running a diverse city of eight million people.
Mr. Mamdani has acknowledged that many New Yorkers see the conflict differently and has vowed to be their mayor, too. But in an interview, he said he had been struck from a young age by “a glaring inconsistency,” where the rights and interests of Palestinians were pushed to the margins to justify the American-Israeli alliance.
“The worth of a politics comes from its application to all, and I think part of why so many have lost faith in politics is the absence of that consistency,” he said.
‘People to whom I owe everything’
Even for a precocious elementary school student already devouring Harry Potter books, Zohran Mamdani caught his father by surprise with a request: Would he begin reading aloud to him from his scholarly work?
“When my efforts to explain that my kind of writing would not make ideal bedtime reading were unsuccessful, I looked for portions that could be read to an 8-year-old without harm,” the candidate’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, reminisced in a 2001 book.
At the time, Professor Mamdani was finishing a study of the Rwandan genocide. It was typical of the interests — the legacy of colonial and settler power, the conflicts left in its wake and how victims of violent repression could become perpetrators — that brought him from Kampala, Uganda, to South Africa in the immediate aftermath of apartheid and, around the turn of the century, to Columbia University in New York.
Attention on Mr. Mamdani’s early life has tended to focus on his famous mother, Mira Nair, an award-winning filmmaker who has worked with Denzel Washington and Disney.
But Mr. Mamdani’s engagement with his father also helped form his outlook. Though too academic to win a truly popular following, Professor Mamdani was part of a group of historians and theorists, many centered at Columbia, whose work has reshaped how some Westerners — especially on the left — have viewed race, colonialism and state violence.
His colleagues were fixtures in a family life that revolved around a faculty apartment on Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights. Mr. Said was the most prominent advocate for Palestinian independence in the United States before his death in 2003. Rashid and Mona Khalidi, prominent Palestinian American academics, were close family friends, too.
“It was definitely a context in which eighth-, ninth-, 10th-grade kids were as much a part of the conversation as the adults,” said another Columbia colleague, Timothy Mitchell.
Mr. Mamdani has been clear about his close identification with his parents. “These are people to whom I owe everything — not simply the person that I am, but the thoughts that I have,” he said in 2020.
In the interview last week, he said that it took him time to fully appreciate that fixtures of his childhood had been political figures, too. “Part of my growing up was understanding who had been at the table years ago,” he said.
Certain messages, though, filtered through.
Professor Mamdani said that the first work he shared with his young son included passages from his most personal book, “From Citizen to Refugee.” It was an accounting of how Indians like their family came to East Africa under British colonialism and, years later in the 1970s, were expelled from Uganda under threat by its military dictator, Idi Amin. (Mr. Mamdani also described a close bond with his grandfather, who he said became “a shadow” of himself after the displacement.)
In the early 2000s, the Second Intifada, a yearslong uprising of Palestinians that included suicide bombings by militants and retaliatory strikes by the Israeli military, served to renew international interest in the Palestinian cause, and the Mamdanis did not sit on the sidelines.
In 2002, Professor Mamdani signed onto a faculty petition demanding Columbia divest its endowment from companies that sold weapons to Israel. (Decades later, amid a national wave of protests against the war in Gaza in spring 2024, he led a teach-in for Columbia students who had launched an encampment demanding divestment.)
In 2013, Ms. Nair publicly turned down an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival in an act of protest, directly comparing the situation there to South Africa under apartheid.
“I will go to Israel when the walls come down,” she wrote. “I will go to Israel when occupation is gone.”
By the time Mr. Mamdani was a teenager, his father had begun exploring the conflict in his academic work.
The book that eventually grew out of it, “Neither Settler Nor Native,” is a comparative study, tracing the creation of modern nation states, colonial power and the modern world. But it advances a view of Israel that breaks from that of the Israeli and American governments.
Professor Mamdani writes that the conflict in Israel, which traces back to the early 20th century, is not primarily a clash “between Jews and those who hate them,” but rather “between settlers and the community they dispossessed.”
In his accounting, Zionists — proponents of creating an explicitly Jewish state — went from being victims of the Holocaust to oppressors themselves, taking Palestinian land and creating a legal architecture to make them second-class citizens.
Critics have argued that any settler-colonial framework applied to the Middle East unfairly casts a group of Jewish refugees as malevolent actors, while discounting the long history of Jewish life in the region and minimizing the hostility of Arabs toward Jews.
In his book and in talks, Professor Mamdani has called for the creation of a single, secular democratic state in the region modeled on South Africa, where he taught in the aftermath of apartheid. Some defenders of Israel argue this would leave Jews in the region vulnerable to violence; Professor Mamdani argues that a political solution may be the only path out of it.
“The Palestinian challenge is to persuade the Jewish population of Israel and the world, that just as in South Africa, the long-term security of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine requires the dismantling of the Jewish state,” he said in a 2014 talk.
Mr. Mamdani said that he had only “engaged with portions” of his father’s book on the subject and has drawn on other sources. But there are clear parallels between his father’s thinking and his own discussion of the conflict.
“I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” Mr. Mamdani said in a June TV interview.
He has also drawn inspiration from Mandela, who became a leading supporter of the Palestinian cause. He said in the interview last week that he remembered “the way he would speak about Palestine in the sense of universality as being a compass for me.”
‘An amateur polemicist’
For Mr. Mamdani, who had spent his childhood in New York City, Africa and on far-flung film sets, freshman year on Bowdoin’s frigid, mostly white campus in Maine was a sharp break.
At almost $60,000 a year, the college had a reputation as one of the nation’s leading liberal arts schools, but it was also known for its gourmet dining options and a sports culture so dominant that non-athletes dubbed themselves NARPs, Non-Athletic Regular Persons.
Mr. Mamdani threw himself into campus life. He acted in a play and joined the staff of the student newspaper, The Bowdoin Orient. In one piece, he recounted the time he got caught stealing a table to play beer pong in his room.
“Not a drinking game though, because that would be against the rules, so we play with water,” he wrote. “Just as much fun with twice the hydration.”
Friends and professors said Mr. Mamdani almost never discussed his parents’ jobs. But when he returned for his junior year, after an intensive summer Arabic language program and a road trip with his father and uncle in East Africa, he flashed a new rigor and direction that would pull him closer to their work.
He switched his major from government to Africana Studies, an interdisciplinary program combining the social sciences and humanities. He was drawn to the work of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and theorist whose provocative writing on colonialism and the cycle of violence it unleashed has spawned generations of intellectual fights.
“He consistently raised questions and wanted to explore topics related to justice,” said Brian Purnell, the professor who oversaw Mr. Mamdani’s capstone project connecting the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the social contract with Fanon.
Mr. Purnell told The Free Press in an earlier interview that he also debated “the necessity of violence in anticolonial struggle” in the Israel-Palestinian context with Mr. Mamdani. He declined to talk about it further with The Times, other than saying it was “a thoughtful academic discussion between a student and a teacher.”
Outside the classroom, Mr. Mamdani became increasingly involved in activism. But rather than join a larger contingent of students organizing around divesting the school’s resources from fossil fuel companies, Mr. Mamdani set himself a more ambitious task: trying to raise awareness about the conditions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as Israel consolidated regional power.
“In a way, Bowdoin being very conservative, and wealthy, WASPy — it almost made sense to be doing that kind of activism because people didn’t know about it at all,” said a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, Sinead Lamel, who is Jewish.
Mr. Isseroff, the J Street U leader, said he found Mr. Mamdani’s engagement earnest even after their groups stopped working together. The two students, and a few others, would meet sometimes to debate the conflict over lunch. (Mr. Mamdani did not dispute his account of the brief collaboration with Mr. Isseroff’s group, but said he did not remember the episode.)
“We were a bunch of half-precocious, half-serious college kids, so we were kind of performing the roles we wanted,” Mr. Isseroff said. “It was sort of normal to be an amateur polemicist.”
Mr. Mamdani’s activism came to a head his senior year, when Students for Justice in Palestine launched its campaign to persuade Bowdoin to join a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Mr. Mamdani, who photos show stuck an “End Israeli Apartheid” sticker to his laptop and sometimes wore a kaffiyeh, wrote that the institutions “are both actively and passively complicit in the crimes of both the Israeli military and the Israeli government in all its settler-colonial forms.”
The goal was to change conditions not just on campus but in the United States, which Mr. Mamdani called the “primary accomplice in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
“It’s becoming a mainstream issue,” he said in a polished interview with a local public radio station. “You can’t be progressive anymore on everything but Palestine.”
The initiative was part of a broader Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. Modeled on divestment campaigns around South African apartheid, it aims to build international pressure on Israel to end the occupation of land it captured in 1967; grant Palestinians “full equality”; and ensure a right of return for Palestinians displaced in the wars that led to Israel’s founding. (Critics of B.D.S. have argued that singling out Israel in an effort to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state is antisemitic.)
The campaign failed. Bowdoin’s president, Barry Mills, rejected the academic boycott, saying it would result in “stifling discussion and the free exchange of ideas.”
For Mr. Mamdani, though, it was a formative lesson in the power of organizing — one that he would soon take to a much bigger stage.
“I went from having Facebook arguments and long back-and-forths with friends about it, never making any headway,” he later told The Orient, “to realizing that just an active group of 10 people can totally change the discourse on a campus.”
An activist and activist lawmaker
In 2015, a year after he graduated, an article in the Village Voice caught Mr. Mamdani’s attention. It was about a Pakistani American lawyer, Ali Najmi, running to be the first Muslim on the City Council. He happened to have the backing of a rapper Mr. Mamdani liked, Heems.
Mr. Mamdani was living at home and working on one of his mother’s films, “Queen of Katwe.” He had time to spare, and so he found himself on the outskirts of Queens after a nearly two-hour trip from Manhattan.
Mr. Najmi remembers Mr. Mamdani showing up with a big grin, “an eclectic shirt” and no real experience. They knocked on doors together for two hours.
“He was like a sponge,” Mr. Najmi said. “He kept coming back, and I didn’t let go of him.”
The campaign ended in a loss, but something sparked for both men.
Mr. Mamdani saw the potential to build a city-scale politics of the sort he had been thinking about since he was young: unabashedly progressive, Muslim-friendly and pro-Palestinian. In the years that followed, he has said, his interest in B.D.S. brought him to the Democratic Socialists of America. He signed up to work as a canvasser on a string of progressive primary campaigns, where he also began to develop a broader set of priorities around housing policy and transportation.
Around the same time, Mr. Najmi recruited him to join a new political club, the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, that was trying to build political power for one of the city’s fastest-growing populations.
“We knew what we had in Zohran,” Mr. Najmi said, calling him a potential “Muslim socialist Ronald Reagan.” “We encouraged him.”
Still, even some of his early supporters were taken aback when Mr. Mamdani insisted on incorporating the Palestinian issue into local politics.
In a city that had long prided itself on a special friendship with Israel, where newly elected officials routinely took part in expenses-paid education trips there, most Democrats — even many Muslim ones — had seen criticizing Israel too harshly as a political third rail.
Beth Miller, the political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, a Jewish anti-Zionist group, recalled her reaction when Mr. Mamdani included the Palestinian cause alongside more local priorities at an event around his first Assembly run.
“I remember thinking, ‘You don’t hear this from a lot of candidates,’” she said.
After his election to the Assembly in 2020, Mr. Mamdani quickly developed a reputation as an activist lawmaker who was respectful but unsparing, traits he honed at Bowdoin. He largely worked within the system but understood the power of symbolism and rhetoric to shift debate — and it won him a following larger than a typical freshman state lawmaker.
“Every single one of us who is committed to dignity in Greenpoint has to be committed to dignity in Gaza,” he said at a demonstration outside Israel’s mission to the United Nations in May 2021, months into his first term.
“We will hold every single person who has power in this city, in this state and in this country accountable for their incomprehensible fealty to the Israeli state,” he said.
At a Jewish Voice for Peace rally around the same time outside the Brooklyn home of Senator Chuck Schumer, the country’s highest-ranking Jewish leader, he called the Assembly “a bastion of Zionist thought” and lamented that he had colleagues who could not see “that separate laws for separate people is not all right in this country or in any country.” (Mr. Schumer and Mr. Mamdani later worked together on a plan to provide debt relief for taxi and for-hire drivers.)
When Mr. Mamdani introduced state legislation threatening to strip New York nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if their funds were used to support Israel’s military and settlement activity, some Jewish groups called the bill antisemitic. He was unpersuaded.
Shahana Hanif, who in 2021 became first Muslim woman elected to the City Council, said she sat down with Mr. Mamdani when she was first thinking of running for office. “I remember very clearly him saying, ‘The issue I don’t compromise on is Palestine.’”
The stakes changed considerably after Oct. 7, 2023. Many Democrats initially assumed the events would dampen growing anti-Israel sentiment on the left and harm politicians like Mr. Mamdani.
His statement the day after the attacks drew sharp condemnations from some Jewish colleagues and other Democrats for making no mention of Hamas or those they took hostage. Mr. Mamdani wrote that he would mourn those killed “across Israel and Palestine” but went on at greater length lamenting Israel’s declaration of war and calling for “ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.” (As a candidate for mayor, Mr. Mamdani has denounced Hamas and called its attack a war crime.)
Mr. Mamdani traveled to Washington that November for a hunger strike outside the White House to build support for a cease-fire. The gesture again drew criticism.
But Ms. Hanif said she and Muslim New Yorkers saw something else — a powerful gesture that would soon raise Mr. Mamdani’s profile among a much wider circle of New Yorkers.
“Our community saw for first time an elected official speaking out about genocide and speaking for a permanent bilateral cease-fire,” she said, “and questioned: Where are our other leaders?”
Emma Goldberg contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
The post How Zohran Mamdani Came to Embrace the Palestinian Cause appeared first on New York Times.
