NYC Mayor’s Office
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani embodies arrival and recognition for immigrants, even as his politics test the city’s economic and communal fault lines. From fruit vendors to landlords, New Yorkers reflect on their hopes, anxieties, and expectations.
Passing the fading Zohran posters on East Sixth Street, I spot Naz, my street fruit seller from Dhaka, sorting tangerines at his stand on First Avenue. Spread three blocks long behind him is the Mitchell Lama housing complex, with its affordable apartments for middle income renters. “What do you think of our new mayor?” I ask him after Zohran Mamdani was voted in.
He puts down his tangerines as if they might interfere with the scope of his smile. “Young!” he almost shouts. “He is too young. And friendly!”
“What about Zohran’s platform?” Like most of the 34-year-old’s supporters, I too call him Zohran, as if he’s a friend. Or at the very least a neighbor with whom we are on first name terms. A subway rider. One of us. Or at least, not one of them—Democrats shackled to real estate and big pharma donors. For me, there is also a non-political reason: he is the son of film director Mira Nair, whose Salaam Bombay tore from me layers of emotional skin many years ago.
“Zohran’s platform?” he says. “Making New York affordable, of course.” Naz’s major concern is selling fruit, not digesting political platforms. He may be barely aware that Zohran Mamdani is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. But like the more politicized young voters in Brooklyn, he feels that with Mamdani he is finally a stakeholder in New York politics. Its mayor is foreign-born like himself, a South Asian like himself, a Muslim like himself. During State Assemblyman Mamdani’s campaign against Andrew Cuomo, the former New York Democratic governor, our mailboxes were filled with Cuomo’s warnings against his opponent’s extremism. But Cuomo canvassers never showed up. Mamdani’s went door to door, including my door: polite, dogged, factual, sober as Mormons.
Pratik Shah, the Jain who runs East Village Farm, around the corner from me, is more attuned to the complexities of a Mamdani mayoralty. He came over from Mumbai with his family at age twelve. Now in his mid-forties, almost the age I was when I first met him, I find him graying and hard at work, always on the phone, tending to shop business with the intensity of a Wall Street trader. We talk on his day off. He is relaxed, soft-spoken. A different person. “I relate to Mamdani from two different perspectives, as a New Yorker and as a landlord,” he says. “As a New Yorker, I am happy that we have a mayor who is compassionate. His policies emphasize affordability (the word that’s on everyone’s lips), housing that will benefit the ordinary middle class and poor New Yorkers. As a landlord, I worry about what his proposed rent freeze would mean for me. Every year, the cost of fuel, taxes, insurance, all go up. A rent freeze would make it very hard for me to manage. I am also afraid of an anti-landlord atmosphere, where good landlords will be lumped together with bad ones, who deprive tenants of heat in winter and who don’t make repairs.” Beneath Shah’s calm, there is fear. Not for himself, but for Mamdani. “I am afraid of what his being a Muslim could mean,” he adds. “If things get bad, I am afraid of what someone might do.” Shah remains, amidst the bustle of the Lower East Side, a Jain attached to ahimsa, a Jain who remembers what he was first taught: “Be good, do good, have good karma”
I ask Zeshan Hamid, Chairman of New York’s South Asian Chamber of Commerce, what he thinks of Mamdani’s plan to “tax the rich” to fund programs like free child care and rent relief for tenants. “I think it can work,” Hamid says. “If by rich, you are talking about the top one percent of wealthy New Yorkers. They will be able to afford New York even after paying higher taxes. They won’t leave New York. It’s the middle class that’s leaving because they can’t afford to live here. We’ll see if trickle-down economics can work. I think it can.”
“Do you see a lot of resistance to his getting what he wants from the City Council?” I ask.
“Yes, there will be resistance,” Hamid admits. “He won’t get everything he wants. He will win some and lose some. But I think there needs to be change, and there is a good chance he will be able to make some of the changes the city needs.”
On January 1, I arrive at the Brooklyn Bridge subway station for Mamdani’s inauguration. With the police blocking off virtually the entire City Hall area, I join the great trek of celebrators up and down the few open streets in the bitter cold until we reach Zuccotti Park on Liberty Street. (Though it went unmentioned, Zuccotti was where Occupy Wall Street encamped back in September of 2011.) Festive Christmas lights were still wrapped around the slender trees forming a southern border. Taking in the immensity of the crowd, I am struck by its diversity. Many were middle-aged white people wearing their yellow and blue Zohran buttons. One elderly white woman was decked out in a corona with Zohran’s name spread across it. Not far from her stood a group of small, quiet black women from Queens whose accents revealed their Caribbean roots. Several European languages could be heard, and a smattering of South Asian faces could be seen. Mamdani’s legion of young white supporters were everywhere. (According to an AP voter poll, “about three-quarters of New York City voters under 30 cast a ballot for Mamdani.”), including a proud strata wearing their red Democratic Socialists of America baseball caps.
I talked with Sidha, a young CUNY (City University of New York) student from Bengaluru. Shivering like the rest of us inside his giant overcoat, the anthropology student was quietly impressed by the event he was suffering through. “I think Mamdani has created a different kind of politics,” he says. “He may be a socialist who wants to freeze rents, but he’s been able to do something else: he’s been able to bring people together against hatred, the hatred of immigrants, race hatred. He’s been able to reach people on a human level.”
The crowd was inching closer to Broadway, and the police metal detectors separating us from the main artery, along which we’d shortly be drifting towards City Hall and Mamdani’s outdoor inauguration. I soon lost sight of Sidha, but in the upcoming days I will think about what he said, and what it might mean. Can a charismatic, even humane politician, alter our fragile psyches that breeds communal, racial, and religious hatred? Can one man actually usher in “a different kind of politics?”
The shadow jutting across this light comes from New York’s large Jewish community. In his inaugural speech, there was Mamdani’s warm mention of being the only Muslim kid in the city to eat bagels and lox every Sunday. But the mayor has been a vociferous critic of Israel, not only for its war in Gaza, which many young New York Jews also criticize (and support Mamdani), but for its existence as a Jewish state, whose very definition curtails Arab rights as citizens. Reform rabbi Angela Buchdahl, whose Central Synagogue is noted for feeding the homeless and supporting asylum seek- ers and climate activists, had this to say about Mamda- ni’s reaction to the police crackdown against pro-Palestinian student demonstrators at Columbia University: “His shocking 2023 accusation—‘When the boot of the NYPD (New York Police Department is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces)’—crosses the line clearly into anti-Semitism. Not only demonizing Israelis but echoing the age-old anti-Semitic trope that Jews across the world are the root cause of our problem here.”
One of Mamdani’s first actions as mayor was to rescind former mayor Eric Adams’s Executive Order 52, which broadens the definition of anti-Semitism to include criticisms such as questioning the loyalty of American Jews for supporting Israel, or by holding all Jews responsible for the actions of Israel. An executive order that was criticized even by some liberal Jewish groups for inhibiting freedom of speech, but which carried great symbolic importance for older Jews.
Mamdani’s leadership ability was tested almost immediately. On January 3, U.S. Special Forces attacked Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were taken prisoner and flown to New York, where they were charged with drug trafficking. The mayor’s response was unequivocal: “Unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war.” Addressing reporters, he said, “I called the President directly to register my opposition to this act.” If nothing else, Zohran Mamdani has his mother’s feel for drama. In my 86 years of residency in New York, I, like many others, have come to regard our traditional mayoralty races as bloated theatrical productions, where ambitious politicians and businessmen try to impersonate statesmen. People lose interest after the first five minutes, but in the end many remember to cast ballots in lieu of applause, and in swanky hotels, arms are raised victoriously in the lighted night.
When I first came across the Zohran for New York City campaign posters with his brash young face smiling like a winner, I thought, ‘Is he kidding! Does an obscure Muslim socialist really think he can defeat a well-financed former governor? And what’s with this first name gimmick, as if he’s Fidel? What’s going on?’ I soon became aware of a buzz in the city. New York’s crazy quilt of ethnicity was awakening to Mamdani: Asians in Queens, Haitians in Brooklyn, Latin Americans in the Bronx, and even black voters—originally cool towards him—were beginning to back him. The impossible was beginning to look possible. I looked for reasons. A surrendered old leftist with a soft spot in my heart for immigrants (my mother was born in Poland), I looked for the hope I lost the night Trump was reelected president. I was not alone.
Impressed by the ease, the resounding self- confidence with which Mamdani moved among New Yorkers, I thought of Obama. I remembered that politics, crucially, has always been steered by personality even more than ideology. Maybe what strikes the most receptive chord in me is how unexpected, even surreal, I find all of this. When Mamdani said in his inaugural address, “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist,” I wondered if I was actually in America. I was reminded of being back again in Kolkata during the final days of the Communist Party’s 34-year rule of West Bengal. Emerging from a Hindu temple, I saw trucks filled with Bengali farmers and adorned with the party’s distinctive hammer-and-sickle red flags. It was dislocating. Where was India? Where was its devotion to Shiva, Kali, Microsoft?
India seemed to have disappeared.
Robert Hirschfield, a poet and freelance writer based in New York, has written for Outlook India, Sojourners, The Jerusalem Report, and The Writer, among other publications.