New York’s mayor continues to showcase his command of political symbolism as he prepares to reckon with some difficult real-world choices
Zohran Mamdani finds money under the sofa cushions.(Screengrab from the mayor’s X account)
“He’s here! He’s here!”
At Field 8A in Prospect Park last Friday morning, the row of little boys sitting in front of me waiting for New York’s first Muslim mayor to arrive and pray with them were having a hard time containing their excitement.
It was Eid-al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and Mamdani had already stopped at mosques in Jamaica and East New York. But this was the only public observance on the mayor’s schedule that day, with hundreds of Muslims—along with a few dozen members of the press—streaming into the southwest corner of the park. Security at the event seemed low key: no checkpoints or metal detectors, no bag searches—nothing, in short, to detract from the celebratory mood of the crowd.
When the mayor, who’d been delayed on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, finally did arrive, he was greeted by loud cheers that brought many celebrants to their feet. The display prompted Maruf Maruf, one of the clergymen leading the prayers, to repeat a plea he’d been making for the past half hour.
“Can I ask the brothers standing up in front to please sit down?”
Eventually they did, and, before the mayor joined them in prayer, he hailed “the breadth of Muslim life in this city, the different languages that we speak, the foods that we eat, the customs that we practice.”
“Soon,” Mamdani continued, “we will return to the normal rhythms of our lives. Morning iced coffees, sips long past sunrise, water drunk freely throughout the day, meals eaten on the run, [and] Maghrib prayers offered alone. Often the solidarity and the connection we feel during the month of Ramadan fade as the time passes. And yet what I have seen over the course of this past month across our city has been too powerful and too precious to leave behind.”
It was an idyllic scene, on a gorgeous early-spring morning, and a vivid reminder of just how much any vision of politics which confines itself to economics alone is in danger of missing. Representation matters—that was obvious from the pride on the faces of the Bangladeshi taxi drivers and their families seated around me as they welcomed a nonbeliever into their midst.
Symbolism matters, too. Anyone doubting the mayor’s awareness of that fact should watch the video his office posted on Wednesday illustrating the results of Executive Order 12, issued back in January, requiring each city agency to appoint a “Chief Savings Officer” to look for possible cuts to the city’s overstretched budget. At the time, many scoffed at this attempt to do a local version of DOGE, employing a scalpel rather than a meat axe. And if you look at the numbers on Wednesday’s press release, some of them are very small-ball indeed. The city’s Department of Emergency Management will save $60,000 by insourcing a software maintenance contract, and another $70,000 by moving some programs “to a more cost-effective platform.” The Taxi and Limousine Commission will “cancel its Slack subscription, saving nearly $20,000.” All told, the savings identified so far add up to $1.7 billion—but as Politico’s Chris Sommerfeldt points out, since the preliminary budget already accounted for $1.77 billion of projected savings, none of these measures address the city’s underlying $5.4 billion budget gap.
Indeed, the savings announced this week only amount to about $245 million—with the one really big ticket item being a projected $100 million reduction to come from kicking ineligible dependants off city employees’ health coverage. As for the rest, you might say that in a $120 billion-plus city budget they’re the equivalent of looking for money under the sofa cushions or in the bottom of the drawers. Which is exactly what the mayor’s office video depicts him doing.
The mayor’s preternatural media savvy may not usher in democratic socialism in our time. But it certainly helps him keep his coalition together. And in our current media environment, that is no small achievement.
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To get a better sense of just how deeply the lines running through this city can cut, I spent part of an afternoon this week at the IFC Center watching Scenes from the Divide, director Alison Klayman’s half-hour documentary on the way Jewish New Yorkers of varying political and religious beliefs responded to the Mamdani campaign. Distributed by Jewish Currents, the film definitely has a point of view—and a star in Nicole Krishtul, the 29-year-old Mamdani volunteer first pictured tutoring her fellow canvassers in saying “Зоран не антисемит” (“Zohran is not an antisemite” in Russian).
Though Krishtul, born in the United States and a native New Yorker, is all in for Zohran, her parents, who emigrated from the Soviet Union, are deeply suspicious. But what lifts the film above mere propaganda is the way that, with the possible exception of Elisha Wiesel, who smugly compares “Jews for Zohran” to “turkeys for Christmas,” every single person is shown sympathetically. We see Brad Lander, Zohran’s erstwhile rival—and co-endorser—for the Democratic mayoral nomination (interviewed beside his daughter in their Brooklyn kitchen, Lander jokes about opening a therapy practice for Jewish parents whose children took their talk about social justice seriously and are now opposed to Zionism). And we see Mamdani critic Ramon Maislen, an Israeli-American real estate developer and anti-BDS activist leading a protest outside the Park Slope synagogue that invited Mamdani to speak during the campaign.
For many of those pictured, this is a deeply painful topic. At one point, after a heated argument over the way their family’s experiences during the Holocaust influence their interpretation of events in Gaza and Israel, Nicole’s father, Leon Kirshtul, suggests, almost wistfully, that they return to an earlier line of argument: “Let’s go back to socialism.” It was hard not to agree with him.
Yet as I watched Nicole’s heroic patience in the face of her parents’ fears and her elderly neighbors’ derision, and her joyous celebration on election night, I was reminded again of how much symbolic weight this mayor is carrying on his slender shoulders. That he continues to bear it, and our hopes that he can lead us to a better place, with such persistent good humor is also surely cause for celebration.
D.D. GuttenplanTwitterD.D. Guttenplan is a special correspondent for The Nation and the former host of The Nation Podcast. He served as editor of the magazine from 2019 to 2025 and, prior to that, as an editor at large and London correspondent. His books include American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, The Nation: A Biography, and The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority.