Zohran Mamdani: Controversies and Criticism
Word count: ~1,200 Last verified: April 30, 2026
Mamdani has spent the last year and change as one of the most-covered politicians in the United States, and the volume of criticism aimed at him is correspondingly large. The list below sticks to controversies that drew sustained, sourceable criticism, usually with named critics, coverage from multiple outlets, or formal institutional response. Where the criticism comes mostly from a single political direction, that's flagged. Where it cuts across the political spectrum, that's flagged too.
A note up front: a fair number of controversies around Mamdani are about whether something he said or stood for is a controversy at all. Reasonable people disagree, often sharply. The job here is to surface the disputes accurately, not to resolve them.
"Globalize the intifada"
The largest sustained controversy of his mayoral run came in a June 2025 podcast interview with The Bulwark, where Mamdani declined to condemn the slogan "globalize the intifada." He framed it as an expression of Palestinian rights and cited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Arabic translation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as historical context for the word "intifada" [1].
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum publicly rebuked him on X, calling the framing offensive to survivors and noting that Jews had been attacked under the slogan since 1987. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt also criticized his response [1, 2].
Mamdani has not used the phrase himself, and by July 2025, he had told a closed-door meeting of about 150 New York business executives that he would discourage its use, a notable rhetorical shift heading into the general election [3, 4].
The progressive response was that the controversy was a manufactured outrage cycle. The Intercept's Yousef Munayyer argued the smears against Mamdani "didn't just fail, they backfired" because voters could identify a bad-faith campaign aimed at a candidate challenging the establishment [5].
Past comments on the NYPD and IDF
A 2023 DSA panel clip in which Mamdani argued that local policing in New York was connected to international military training, culminating in his line about the boot of the NYPD being "laced by the IDF", recirculated heavily during the campaign [6].
Older tweets calling for police defunding and describing law enforcement as "racist and wicked" also resurfaced. He was pressed on those comments after a fatal Midtown Manhattan shooting in mid-2025 in which NYPD officer Didarul Islam was killed [7]. His campaign responded by emphasizing comprehensive public safety reform, including a Department of Community Safety alongside traditional policing, rather than re-litigating the older posts.
Position on Israel
Mamdani has said he believes in Israel's right to exist but has refused to recognize it as a Jewish state, arguing that no state should grant preferential treatment to a single religious group. He supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and has said he would divest the city from Israel if elected [6, 2].
In January 2026, he revoked Adams-era executive orders adopting the IHRA antisemitism definition, which classifies certain forms of criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and prohibits city agencies from boycotting Israel. The UJA Federation of New York and the New York Board of Rabbis issued a joint statement saying the order reversed "significant protections against antisemitism." Israel's Foreign Ministry accused him of fueling antisemitism on social media [8].
Mamdani defended the move by noting that some Jewish organizations had also expressed concern with the IHRA definition's breadth, and that a new mayor has the standard option to either continue, revoke, or amend a predecessor's orders. He kept the city's Office to Combat Antisemitism in place and reorganized its structure [8].
"Communist" framing
President Trump repeatedly called Mamdani a "communist" and a "communist lunatic" during the campaign and threatened to withhold federal funding from New York City if he won. He renewed the threats and the framing after the election [9, 10].
The framing has continued post-election. In an April 2026 episode of his "Club Random" podcast, Bill Maher told guest David Cross that Mamdani was "a straight-up communist", a label Cross pushed back on [11].
Political historians cited by ABC News drew a clear line between democratic socialism and Soviet- or Cuba-style communism. Georgetown's Michael Kazin argued that democratic socialists, unlike communists, accept the legitimacy of being voted out of power [9]. Mamdani has consistently rejected the communist label.
"Salaam" lyrics from 2017
A 2017 song Mamdani released under the name Zohran Kwame, titled "Salaam," praised the Holy Land Five, individuals connected to the Holy Land Foundation who were convicted in 2008 of providing material support to Hamas. The lyrics resurfaced during the campaign and were cited by critics as part of a broader argument that his views on Israel and political violence were more extreme than the campaign's general-election messaging suggested [12].
Appointments under scrutiny
Critics on the right and in some media have pointed to past social-media posts by Mamdani appointees as evidence of a more radical bent than the campaign's framing. The most-cited example involves Cea Weaver, his appointee to lead the revitalized Mayor's Office to Protect Tenants, who had described home ownership in a 2019 X post as "a weapon of white supremacy" [11].
Friction with the DSA left
Not all criticism of Mamdani has come from the right. A Jacobin analysis around the 100-day mark argued that he is operating in inevitable tension with the Democratic Socialists of America, particularly after his decision to endorse Governor Kathy Hochul over a primary challenger from her left [13].
State Senator Jabari Brisport responded to the Hochul endorsement with a statement that, while not naming Mamdani directly, criticized the political class as "by billionaires, for billionaires" and endorsed Hochul's primary opponent, Antonio Delgado [13]. The friction is a useful reminder that Mamdani's coalition is not monolithic, and that some of the sharpest criticism of his choices in office has come from the political tradition that helped elect him.
Islamophobia in the campaign, with Mamdani as the target
Worth flagging in the other direction: Mamdani himself accused independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Vice President JD Vance of engaging in Islamophobic attacks during the general election. Senator Gillibrand was widely criticized, including by The Intercept's Yousef Munayyer, for an early radio appearance in which she accused Mamdani of calling for "global jihad," a claim he never made; she later partially apologized [14, 5].
The campaign, therefore, generated controversies in which Mamdani was both subject and source of criticism, a pattern likely to continue through his term.