100 Days
of Zohran

Mamdani’s record on Israel and Palestine is the longest- running political vulnerability in his file. As an assemblymember he introduced the Not on Our Dime Act in Albany alongside State Senator Jabari Brisport. He has used the word genocide for Israeli military conduct in Gaza. “Globalize the intifada,” which he defended in a 2025 primary debate as legitimate political speech, became a sustained line of fire from the ADL and parts of the UJA-Federation through the general.

The mayoral file opens loud. Hours after taking office on January 1, Mamdani signed executive orders rescinding two of Adams’s pro-Israel decrees — the IHRA antisemitism definition order and a 2024 directive barring city contracts with companies that boycott Israel — a move Palestine-rights advocates praised and the Israeli Foreign Ministry and Trump administration promptly condemned. The same day, in his inaugural address, he addressed Jewish New Yorkers directly: If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor. Regardless of whether we agree, I will protect you, celebrate with you, mourn alongside you, and never, not for a second, hide from you. The Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh read the passage as Mamdani trying to lower the temperature after a polarizing campaign. A month later, he tapped Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of the liberal Zionist group New York Jewish Agenda, to run the city’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. The candidate who ran on Not on Our Dime kept the antisemitism office open and staffed it with someone the UJA can pick up the phone to. Jewish Insider’s Will Bredderman reported the same week that the choice drew immediate concern from Orthodox and Hasidic leaders, who pointed to Wisdom’s openness to questioning the IHRA definition.

That is the public stance work. The mayoral speech itself — five Israel-and-Palestine segments since the inauguration, against three from the campaign — is too small a corpus to read magnitudes from, and an earlier version of this analysis had to be inverted when a keyword leak (the word settlements, which matches both Israeli settlements and tenant-lawsuit settlements) was caught and corrected. What the corpus can describe is what he said. A March press conference repudiated celebrations of Hamas. An April address opposed the sale of land in the occupied West Bank. A town-hall remark defended student protestors at Columbia and CUNY. The segments are short, careful, and consistent with each other.

The spring brought four tests in five weeks. On March 7, two Pennsylvania teenagers, eighteen and nineteen, allegedly hurled jars of explosive material toward an anti-Islam demonstration outside Gracie Mansion; neither device detonated, no one was hurt. Federal prosecutors later charged the pair with attempting to support the Islamic State. (Their April 15 not-guilty plea drew the cameras the alleged incident itself had not.) On April 22, Comptroller Mark Levine and Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal — the city’s two most prominent elected Jewish Democrats — publicly urged Mamdani to recognize Israel’s centrality to Jewish identity. Two days later came the first veto: Mamdani rejected a Council bill imposing protest buffer zones around schools, citing the bill’s broad definition of “educational institution” — which would have swept in universities, museums and hospitals — while allowing a parallel bill covering houses of worship, passed 44–5 and veto-proof, to become law. The veto drew an immediate joint condemnation from eleven Jewish organizations including UJA-Federation, ADL New York/New Jersey, the Orthodox Union and the Union for Reform Judaism, reported by the Algemeiner. Two days after that, the special election for outgoing member Erik Bottcher’s West Side and Chelsea seat: Bottcher’s former chief of staff, Carl Wilson, beat Mamdani-endorsed Lindsey Boylan in the first round of ranked-choice tabulations, 43% to 25%. It is the first concrete electoral signal that the mayor’s coalition has limits.

The story most observers expected was the embrace. Mamdani had once shared a stage with defund the police; by the general election he was talking about “safe streets for everyone” in a measured register. Then in November came the announcement that Adams’s commissioner Jessica Tisch would stay on into the new administration. The first thing the new mayor did with his unique authority over the department was decline to use it. The press shorthand: insurgent makes peace with NYPD.

What the shorthand missed is the substitution that happened underneath. The words changed; the sentiment held steady. Late in the campaign Mamdani spoke about policing the way candidates speak about programs they intend to fund: community mental-health response, summer youth jobs, the Office of Community Safety. The thirty-two post-inauguration segments — the largest sample on any topic in the corpus, because a New York mayor cannot decline to address policing — sit at almost the same temperature as those campaign segments. What did move is the lexicon. He talks now about deployment cycles, commissioner staff meetings, response times, the precinct council in Bushwick. “Public safety” sits in the place where “defund” used to be.

The pattern shows up most clearly in what he declines to talk about. On January 16, Streetsblog’s Nolan Hicks and Sophia Lebowitz reported that the new mayor refused to discuss the NYPD’s criminal-summons crackdown on cyclists, a position he had publicly opposed during the campaign. He hasn’t warmed to the department. He has stopped fighting it in public. As a candidate he treated public safety as a campaign issue; as mayor he has stopped treating it as one. He is running the department now, not running against it.

Of the two outcomes the campaign could have produced — full embrace or pivot to management — he chose the second. He has not become the police-supporting candidate his opponents predicted. On this topic he has become a manager.

On the wealth tax, where the pen is in Albany, the rhetoric softened. On rent stabilization and the bus pilot, where the pen is in his own agencies, the rhetoric held. On policing, where the relationship to the department is daily and personal, the language cooled to something procedural. On the grocery program, which required a sublease, an RFP, a community-board pass and a nonprofit operator, the policy disappeared from public speech until those pieces fell into place. The pattern is structural rather than characterological.

The nearest historical analog is Bill de Blasio in 2014: a left progressive whose millionaires’ tax for universal pre-K got rerouted by Cuomo into an existing state appropriation. The pre-K program shipped; the tax never did. De Blasio’s vocabulary softened in the same direction the data show Mamdani’s softening now.

Mamdani’s April 12 100 Days Address, with a surprise appearance from Bernie Sanders at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, leaned on the same theme he had been hitting on the grocery program in interviews: I look forward to the competition.

The reading is testable. The Rent Guidelines Board votes on the next stabilization range in late June; its members are mayoral appointees, and the pen is entirely his. If the structural reading is right, his rhetoric on rent through May and June stays confident — even confrontational toward landlord groups — because softening buys him nothing. The Albany wealth-tax fight runs the other way: the state budget is a month overdue, the pied-à-terre piece is in but the millionaires’ surtax is not. If the structural reading is right, his public posture toward Hochul stays conciliatory through May while the underlying ask stays on the table. We will know which by July.

None of this tells you what Mamdani believes, what he will do the first time a cop is shot, or whether the rhetorical softening turns into policy retreat by day 365. The corpus is what was said in front of a microphone, scored by three independent measurement systems whose direction had to agree before a fourth video-language model could surface the anchoring quote and timestamp. That is a smaller claim than the ones being made on cable. It is also the one we can defend.

The underlying meetings, press appearances, and rally footage are searchable on myhamlet.com/search — every clip cited in this article is grounded in a timestamped transcript with a video URL.