{"id":489081,"date":"2026-01-03T09:03:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T09:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/489081\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T09:03:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T09:03:15","slug":"how-the-politics-of-mamdanis-parents-both-longtime-bds-supporters-shaped-nycs-new-mayor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/489081\/","title":{"rendered":"How the politics of Mamdani\u2019s parents, both longtime BDS supporters, shaped NYC\u2019s new mayor"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York Jewish News via JTA \u2014 When he sat down for an interview in November with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mahmood Mamdani offered one parameter: \u201cLet\u2019s not talk about the mayor thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was just two days after the Columbia University professor had taken the stage alongside his wife and daughter-in-law after his son Zohran had been elected mayor of New York City, winning more than 50% of the vote in a three-way race.<\/p>\n

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist with a long track record of pro-Palestinian activism, has said he counts his father as one of his political inspirations.<\/p>\n

But Mahmood Mamdani preferred to talk about his own record, as a professor of anthropology and international affairs and a longstanding pro-Palestinian activist who was the first faculty member to address the Gaza war encampment on his campus.<\/p>\n

His wife, filmmaker Mira Nair, and Zohran\u2019s wife, the artist Rama Duwaji, likewise are respected in their fields and well known for their pro-Palestinian advocacy and adherence to the movement to boycott Israel.<\/p>\n

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Zohran Mamdani has described the BDS movement as \u201cconsistent with the core of my politics,\u201d and in 2023 introduced a bill while serving as an assemblymember that sought to block nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tThen-New York State assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, now a NYC mayoral candidate, speaks during a news conference outside the White House to announce a hunger strike to demand that former US president Joe Biden \u2018call for a permanent ceasefire and no military aid to Israel,\u2019 on November 27, 2023. (Tom Williams\/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images via JTA)<\/p>\n

While it is unclear the extent to which Mamdani will pursue BDS policies during his upcoming mayoral term, his politics and those of his parents reflect a shared alignment with pro-Palestinian causes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re the kid of two parents who are very involved in social justice, a lot of times what you remember as a playdate was you being at some rally or some march,\u201d Mamdani recalled in an interview with City & State in April 2023.<\/p>\n

Now, after Zohran took the city\u2019s reins on January 1, here\u2019s what you need to know about his immediate family.<\/p>\n

Mahmood Mamdani, viewing Israel through an anti-colonial lens<\/p>\n

Long before his son\u2019s mayoral campaign, Mahmood Mamdani, 79, was known widely as one of the foremost scholars on colonialism and postcolonial politics in Africa. Born in India in 1946, Mamdani was raised in Kampala, Uganda at a time when the country was racially segregated. After receiving his bachelors, masters and doctorate from universities in the United States, Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972 after Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered all Asians to leave the country.<\/p>\n

Since 1999, he has been a professor of government at Columbia University, and has published several books and essays on colonialism and political violence including \u201cCitizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism\u201d in 1996 and \u201cGood Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror\u201d in 2004.<\/p>\n

As a scholar, Mahmood Mamdani is best known for his analysis of colonial rule and how it shapes the identities of both the occupied and occupiers. In his 2020 book, \u201cNeither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,\u201d he uses case studies that include Nazi Germany, Israelis and Palestinians and post-apartheid South Africa.<\/p>\n

Mamdani has spoken directly and repeatedly about how his broader scholarship shapes his thinking on Israel and Palestinians. \u201cThe issue is not settlers, but settler colonialism,\u201d he wrote in \u201cNeither Settler nor Native.\u201d In 2021, during an 11-day war between Hamas and Israel that was sparked by tensions in Jerusalem, Mamdani wrote on X, \u201cPalestinians have a right to resist. This is a colonial occupation, not a conflict!\u201d<\/p>\n

Three days later, as Hamas and Israel exchanged missiles and airstrikes, Mamdani wrote that the conflict was not between Israel and Hamas, but rather the resurgence of a third intifada.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond. This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas,\u201d wrote Mamdani in a post on X. \u201cWe are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifadah against settler colonialism!\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2002, as the Second Intifada was in full force, Mamdani signed onto a petition calling for Columbia University to divest from companies supplying arms to Israel, saying at the time his support for the petition was to make a \u201cmoral statement registering concern over the exercise of power by Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tPolice and paramedics inspect the scene after a suicide bomber blew himself up on a rush-hour bus near the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo during the Second Intifada, on June 18, 2002. (Flash90\/File)<\/p>\n

In the Chronicle of Higher Education interview, Mahmood Mamdani spoke about being the first faculty member to address the pro-Palestinian protesters who set up an encampment at Columbia in 2024. He said his talk focused on \u201clessons of the divestment movement in South Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 2022 Zoom lecture at the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia, Mahmood Mamdani argued that while there was reason to give \u201cfull and enthusiastic support\u201d to the BDS movement, he cautioned against the movement extending its boycotts against the breadth of \u201cIsraeli society and not just to its Zionist sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n

During his lecture, Mamdani also argued that Israel must learn from the dissolution of the South African apartheid, saying that the only way forward in the region was if there was an \u201cepistemic revolution\u201d in Israel where they realized the \u201cflourishing of Jews and Jewish life does not require a Zionist state.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhites did not need to monopolize political power to have a home in South Africa. It is this lesson that needs to be driven home to Israelis, as many as possible, that Jews do not need to have a Jewish state to have a secure home in Israel-Palestine,\u201d said Mamdani. \u201cIndeed, Jews are more secure in New York City than they are in Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked whether he supports a one-state solution, Mamdani recently told The Chronicle, \u201cI\u2019m sympathetic to only one type of one state, a state which is based on rule of law and guarantees equal rights,\u201d a position his son echoed on the campaign trail. \u201cI\u2019m opposed to any kind of discrimination. I\u2019m opposed to any form of apartheid which I understand to be a legally enforced distinction between two groups in society, where one benefits and the other is penalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tMahmood Mamdani gives a Zoom lecture in 2022 at the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the University of Virginia. (Screenshot via JTA)<\/p>\n

In an interview with The Nation in January 2024, Mamdani criticized the public response to the pro-Palestinian protests erupting across the US, saying that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a danger to democracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo conflate the critique of a state with the critique of a people poses a challenge to a democratic culture,\u201d he said. In his recent Chronicle interview, Mamdani pointed favorably to the Jerusalem Declaration definition of antisemitism, signed by over 200 mostly Jewish scholars, which insists that the movement to boycott Israel is not in and of itself antisemitic. The declaration, he said, \u201cmakes a very clear distinction between the State of Israel and the people of Israel,\u201d as opposed to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.<\/p>\n

In a January 2024 letter published in the Columbia Spectator, Mahmood Mamdani criticized the school for dissuading the use of the words \u201cintifada\u201d and \u201cfrom the river to the sea,\u201d arguing that excluding them would \u201crule out any meaningful dialogue on Israel and Palestine on this campus.\u201d (He told the Chronicle that the \u201criver to the seas\u201d concept appears in the Likud party manifesto, which declares that \u201cbetween the [Mediterranean] Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.\u201d He also claimed that he had not actually heard \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d chanted in Columbia\u2019s quad, and had only read about it.)<\/p>\n

Zohran Mamdani similarly downplayed rhetoric that many Israel supporters consider incendiary. In June he declined to condemn the phrase \u201cglobalize the Intifada,\u201d arguing that the phrase symbolized a \u201cdesperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.\u201d (Mamdani later said he would \u201cdiscourage\u201d the use of the phrase, which many supporters of Israel, recalling two violent uprisings of Palestinians in 1987 and 2000 that killed hundreds of Israelis, see as a call to violence.)<\/p>\n

At an appearance on the encampments, Mamdani described charges of antisemitism as \u201cpart of the currency the administration uses to demonize protests like this,\u201d according to the Columbia Spectator.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tPro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrators rally on the Columbia University campus in New York City to mark a year since the Hamas terror group\u2019s onslaught on southern Israel that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza, October 7, 2024 (Alex Kent\/Getty Images\/AFP)<\/p>\n

Critics of the elder Mamdani say he underplays Jewish historical vulnerability and antisemitism, minimizes Palestinian political agency and their internal divisions, and ignores the way Zionism differs from European colonialism. But like his son, he believes even younger Jews are increasingly adopting his critique of Israel and Zionism.<\/p>\n

In a December interview with Peter Beinart for Jewish Currents, a leftist magazine, he said he believed the Jewish diasporic community would play an \u201cimportant role\u201d in discussions over the \u201cPalestinian question\u201d in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cJewish children in New York City have become increasingly skeptical of the direction in which Israel has been moving, and increasingly disillusioned with both the moral and the political efficacy of that route and increasingly open to explore an alternative,\u201d said Mamdani.<\/p>\n

Mira Nair, a supporter of cultural boycotts<\/p>\n

Nair is an award-winning Indian-American filmmaker whose debut 1988 film, \u201cSalaam Bombay!,\u201d earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. She also directed several acclaimed films including \u201cMississippi Masala\u201d in 1991, \u201cMonsoon Wedding\u201d in 2001 and \u201cThe Namesake\u201d in 2006.<\/p>\n

Born in India, she met Mahmood Mamdani in Uganda in 1989, and they married two years later. Nair was also married to the Jewish photographer Mitch Epstein from 1981 to sometime before 1989; he has declined JTA\u2019s requests for an interview.<\/p>\n

Nair has also been an outspoken critic of Israel and a supporter of petitions backing the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.<\/p>\n

In 2013, Nair declined an invitation to the Haifa International Film Festival. \u201cI will not be going to Israel at this time. I will go to Israel when the walls come down. I will go to Israel when occupation is gone,\u201d she tweeted at the time. In a subsequent post, she added that she stood with the BDS movement.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tMira Nair attends the 45th Annual New York Women In Film And Television Muse Awards at Cipriani 42nd Street, on March 26, 2025, in New York City. (Dia Dipasupil\/Getty Images\/AFP)<\/p>\n

In March of this year, Nair signed onto a petition calling for the Academy Awards to remove Israeli actress Gal Gadot from its ceremony, accusing her of showing \u201csupport for Israel\u2019s military actions against Palestinians,\u201d according to an Instagram post by the group.<\/p>\n

Following the election of her son, Nair has also declined to discuss Mamdani\u2019s attitudes towards Jews and Israel in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I love so much about Zohran is that he embraces the multiplicity of our lives in the most natural way \u2014 this mosaic that is our city but that no one has seen until this young man came along,\u201d Nair told The Hollywood Reporter of her son.<\/p>\n

Rama Duwaji, an artist with a political vision<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s wife, Rama Duwaji, whom he married this year, has also made pro-Palestinian advocacy a focal point of her work in ceramics, animation and illustrations.<\/p>\n

While Duwaji has largely refused interviews with the press and did not appear at campaign events or fundraisers, last month she sat for her first interview post election with The Cut.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeaking out about Palestine, Syria, Sudan \u2014 all these things are really important to me,\u201d Duwaji told The Cut. \u201cI\u2019m always keeping up to date with what\u2019s going on, not just here but elsewhere. It feels fake to talk about anything else when that\u2019s all that\u2019s on my mind, all I want to put down on paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything is political; it\u2019s the thing that I talk about with [Zohran] and my friends, the thing that I\u2019m up to date with every morning, which is probably not great for my mental health. It\u2019s what I talk about when I check on my family back home,\u201d continued Duwaji.<\/p>\n

During the interview Duwaji also discussed the meaning behind part of her election night outfit \u2014- a black top designed by Zeid Hijazi, a London-based Palestinian-Jordanian label.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s nice to have a little bit of analysis on the clothes because, for instance, during the general-election night, it was nice to send a message about Palestinians by wearing a Palestinian designer,\u201d said Duwaji.<\/p>\n

Duwaji, 28, who is ethnically Syrian and grew up in Texas and Dubai, also frequently posts illustrations that advocate for pro-Palestinian causes on her Instagram account. Her art has been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the BBC, and VICE, according to her website.<\/p>\n

In August, she posted an animation of the Palestinian flag along with the words \u201cend the genocide,\u201d and posted another last month depicting the Global Sumud Flotilla.<\/p>\n

In March, she posted an illustration of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, calling for his release after he was detained by the Trump administration amid its campaign to purportedly combat campus antisemitism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an attack on freedom of speech, and sets a scary f\u2014king precedent for anyone who speaks up for what\u2019s right. Resist,\u201d wrote Duwaji.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s his own person\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview with the New York Times in June, Mahmood Mamdani spurned suggestions that his politics had an outsized impact on his son\u2019s political views.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s his own person,\u201d Mamdani said. \u201cNow, of course what we do as his parents is part of the environment in which he grew up, and he couldn\u2019t help but engage with it. That doesn\u2019t mean anything is reflected back on us.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Nair was quick to disagree, telling the Times that her son had \u201cvery much absorbed\u201d his parents\u2019 politics, which largely center on anti-colonialism.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t agree!\u201d Ms. Nair said. \u201cOf course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York Jewish News via JTA \u2014 When he sat down for an interview in November with the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":489082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-489081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115830365044762847","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}