Joy won

Inside the victory of hope over fear

Zohran Mamdani’s victory party last night was the closest I’ve felt to unfettered hope for our democracy in a decade.

An establishment candidate backed by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and every billionaire in New York was soundly defeated by a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist who built a movement on affordability.

In the days before the election, the opposition poured tens of millions of wasted dollars into proving that Mamdani is a jihadist who poses an immediate threat to Jewish New Yorkers.

I watched actresses melt down on Instagram, right-wing sycophants recycle the same clips of Mamdani linking police brutality by the NYPD to the training the city’s police force did in fact do with the IDF. (He spoke about it here with Anderson Cooper, if you care to hear him out, which many of you won’t, which is the point.)

I was personally sent the same image of a quote from Mamdani’s father in the ‘80s. The same image of a radical cleric praising his candidacy. The same image saying Islam was incompatible with Democracy.

The campaign against him was targeted, inflammatory, racist, and shockingly effective at activating quite literal Jewish flight or fight.

Because no matter what Mamdani has said about Jewish New Yorkers or combatting antisemitism, which I wrote about in exhaustive detail this week, it will never be enough. Because he is an unapologetically pro-Palestinian Muslim. And for many people, that is all he will ever be.

Fear of antisemitism eclipsed the reality on the ground: This man abhors, like many Jews, what the IDF has done to the people of Gaza. And though antisemites embrace him, he is not an antisemite. Full stop. Here’s another uncomfortable truth for many to accept without falling into a catastrophizing spiral of anxiety, victimhood and fear: Yesterday, more than a million New Yorkers cast their votes for him because of the hope he promises, not the hatred his opponents project on him.

I will never convince the people who cannot see past their own fear, and look directly at the whole candidate himself. I will never reach the people who presume to know more about him based on a few soundbites than the breadth of work he has done, the coalition he has built, and the commitment he has made to the Jewish community.

Because when everything, even the news, feels like a conspiracy or a trick, paranoia has won over reason. To those who choose to remain in their constructed prison of paranoia, I hope you find the keys to unlock it. You are holding them. The key is information.

So let’s move on from that, and into reality. Because the reality of Mamdani’s victory is good.

Outside the Mamdani victory party last night, hundreds of New Yorkers of all ages and races and backgrounds gathered with a shared look of awestruck joy on their faces. This was not an angry mob here to round up the Jews. They were not chanting “Globalize the Intifada.” They were not chanting about Israel at all, as that is not, in fact, what this election was about. This was an election about the quality of life in New York City.

They were chanting “Freeze! The! Rent!”

Freeze the rent.

Freeze the rent.

It was always about money. It was about the money people in this city urgently need, despite what the moneyed few insisted they fear.

Mamdani worked in city government specifically with housing bureaucracy. It is his actual area of interest and expertise and sleeves-rolled-up wonkishness, not, as certain actresses on Instagram would have you believe, inciting jihad. There is a mayor in city hall who will put a cap on rent-stabilized apartments. People who couldn’t afford to stay in this city will be able to stay where they live. This is a promise more powerful than an actress’ Instagram contention that Islam is a religion of hate.

Inside the Paramount theater in Downtown Brooklyn, this collective sense of joy was as overpowering as a (pleasant!) gas leak. Strangers embraced. Conversations were breathless. “I can’t believe it,” an acquaintance said to me, tears in her eyes. “I know,” I said, “It doesn’t feel real.” For too many elections, sexual predators backed by craven special interests have won. Tonight, the historical narrative was rewritten. The shift felt seismic, as if a rule of physics had been bent.

On the ballroom floor, community organizers, civil rights lawyers, volunteers, Democratic strategists, journalists, activists, rabbis, filmmakers, comedians, local business owners, labor organizers, artists, proud mothers, public intellectuals and civil servants all gathered together under the banner of joy. It was the best of New York. It was the New York my great-grandfather, a socialist immigrant labor organizer, could only dream of. There was his great-granddaughter, arm in arm with the Comptroller of his golden medinah, watching an idealistic young man topple a corrupt system that has failed the people of this city. A man who was told by a fascist, racist president that he had no business taking power, and the people of our city made it his business anyway.

I stood in awe of my own joy, as Mamdani took the stage. His speech, which I encourage anyone wary of the mayor he’ll be to read in full, centered on gratitude and commitment. His gratitude for the faith the people had given him, and his commitment to do right by them. He stood at the podium the night he was elected mayor and pledged to combat antisemitism. And he looked into the cameras and said he would not let Islamophobia stop him from serving the people of New York.

He quoted trade unionist Eugene Debs. He quoted Mario Cuomo. He was extremely aware of the loftiness of his promises and the expectations he’d set, and he made it clear he would spend his term doing everything imaginable to achieve those goals. Not for himself, for the people of the city we both love. This was never about him. This was about us. This was, whether you voted for him or not, about you.

As he left the stage, cheers rising out of the concert hall and into the streets, the people around me couldn’t do anything but turn to each other and hug. Joy won.

Early this morning, on a clear blue day, my son and I took the subway to school. Strangers on the otherwise weary and siloed commute smiled at each other with the same look I had seen in the room the night before. Some had kept their “I Voted” stickers from yesterday on their coats, badges of honor, relics from the giant boulder we had all moved together. There we were, a train full of New Yorkers on this new day, all going in the same direction. Together.