New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is “more radical than the radical left,” according to one veteran of local and national political campaigns.
“He is in a category all by himself,” the campaigner, who asked to withhold his name, told The Post. “I’ve never seen someone so far to the left. He’s anti Israel, he’s all up in the protests and violence. This is not how a mayoral candidate behaves.”
He may be a dyed-in-the-wool member of the hard-left Democratic Socialists of America — but Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim son of filmmaker Mira Nair, knows how to raise money.
Despite being a virtual unknown until recently, Mamdani, 33, a Democratic Assembly member and New York City mayoral candidate, is second only to the disgraced but still powerful ex-governor Andrew Cuomo in raising campaign contributions for the race.
Mamdani — who was raised in New York and believes in free buses, free childcare, a rent freeze and city-run grocery stores —- raised almost a million dollars over the last two months and has more than 16,000 donors.
More than $500,000 of his cash raised since January is eligible for the city’s eight-to-one matching funds program, the campaign said — meaning Mamdani is set to get $4 million in taxpayer cash next month.
Mamdani’s also eager to make a scene, as he demonstrated last week when he was caught on video trying to get past New York State police troopers while shouting at border czar Tom Homan. Mamdani yelled at the acting ICE director over Trump’s immigration policies and the recent detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and anti-Israel activist.
“How many more New Yorkers will you detain? How many more New Yorkers without charge?” he shouted before being removed by police at the State Capitol. “Do you believe in the First Amendment, Tom Homan?”
The mayoral candidate was arrested at a pro-Palestinian rally outside Sen. Chuck Schumer’s house on Brooklyn’s Prospect Park West in October 2024, a week after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7.
And in 2023, he introduced a bill — titled “Not on Our Dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act” — that would have given the state attorney general power to dissolve groups funding settlements in the West Bank, where some 700,000 Jews reside.
“There is a clear divide between those who embrace socialism and antisemitic, backwards ways of thinking,” another veteran political observer who did not want to be identified told The Post.
“Mamdani is dangerous because he’s someone who seems to be fairly charismatic and effectively engages with people. New Yorkers care about improving legitimate options to improve services and support, true, but anyone who has the backing of the far left and DSA is backwards.”
The Post reached out to Mamdani for comment but received no response.
Mamdani comes by his far-left activist tendencies by birth.
His father, Mahmood, a sometime Columbia professor and the chancellor of Kampala International University in Uganda, has called for the end of the Jewish state.
In a 2014 speech at Columbia, Mahmood claimed: “The Palestinian challenge is to persuade the Jewish population and the world … the longtime security of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine requires the dismantling of the Jewish state … Jews can have a homeland in historic Palestine, but not a state.”
The Indian-born Ugandan first came to the US in the 1963 group of the Kennedy Airlift, a scholarship program that brought hundreds of East Africans to universities in the United States and Canada.
Mamdani’s mother, acclaimed “Monsoon Wedding” filmmaker Mira Nair, was allegedly one of the names on a letter asking the Academy of Motion Pictures to ban Israeli citizen Gal Gadot from presenting at this year’s Oscars.
The virtual open letter, allegedly signed by 21 Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences members and more than 75 other filmmakers, called for the Oscars to “reconsider Gal Gadot’s presence” because the “Wonder Woman” star, who is Israeli, has “openly and repeatedly expressed her support for Israel’s military actions against Palestinians.”
“They spent a few hours trying to get Gal removed from the Oscars,” one Hollywood source previously told Page Six. “It was disgusting.”
The Post reached out to Nair but received no response.
Mamdani’s parents met in 1989 in Kampala, Uganda, when Nair was doing research for her 1991 film “Mississippi Masala,” starring Denzel Washington.
The state assemblyman, per his financial disclosures, owns four acres in Jinja, a city in eastern Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria.
He moved with his family to Cape Town, South Africa, at age 5 and then moved to New York two years later. Mamdani graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and went on to graduate from Bowdoin College in Maine.
Mamdani began organizing campaigns as a student and went on to work on the unsuccessful campaigns of several Democratic candidates, including journalist Ross Barkan’s bid for the state senate in 2017 and Tiffany Caban’s failed effort to win the Queens District Attorney race in 2019.
Using the stage name Mr. Cardamom, Mamdani has also had a side line as a self-described “B-list rapper” and recorded the soundtrack for his mother’s 2016 film “Queen of Katwe.”
He was elected to the State Assembly’s 36th District, which includes Astoria and Long Island City in Queens, in 2021.
That same year, Mamdani held a 15-day hunger strike in support of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance clawing back hundreds of millions of dollars of debt relief for cab drivers who own cab medallions.
In 2023, he participated in a hunger strike calling for a ceasefire to stop Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza after Hamas invaded the Jewish State on Oct. 7.
The DSA announced last October it is endorsing Mamdani. Not only does the group back divestment and sanctions against Israel, it has affirmed Iran’s right to defend itself against Israel.
Other points on the party’s platform include defunding the police, allowing transgender prisoners to be housed in facilities matching their chosen gender identities, and granting unconditional amnesty for all immigrants.
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