‘No NY without Jewish community,’ Cuomo says

Hours after Rich Azzopardi, spokesman for former Andrew Cuomo’s independent mayoral campaign, touted a new poll showing a “dramatic 10-point swing since late August” and a “dead heat” between his boss and frontrunner and Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, Cuomo downplayed the importance of polling in remarks at Congregation Ohab Zedek on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“You have to be in a place where you make a decision that you believe is the right decision, and you stand with your principles regardless of the political consequences and regardless of the noise of the moment,” he said. “Public opinion can sway from day to day. The emotion can sway from day to day. A real leader knows principles and sticks to their principles.”

Addressing event moderator Elisha Wiesel, son of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, Cuomo said he learned that lesson about principles from his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo. “I’m sure you carry the same lesson,” he said.

“I was thinking when preparing for tonight, what would our fathers think that we have to be here tonight, in this moment?” Cuomo told Wiesel, citing rising Jew-hatred. “This moment that they spent their entire lives working to make sure never happened again.”

Wiesel also quoted Cuomo’s father, and said that the latter’s remark about the Holocaust — that “armies of people” aided “barbarians” by opting not to oppose them and refusing to notice, care or speak up — could also apply to Oct. 7 and its aftermath.

Andrew Cuomo has made rising Jew-hatred a central point of his criticism of Mamdani, who has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” and has said that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested, should the premier come to New York.

Rabbi Allen Schwartz, spiritual leader of the synagogue, told attendees that “it is simply unconscionable that the city with the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel could contemplate having as its leader someone who cannot walk away from ‘globalizing the intifada.’”

Cuomo said that it’s a “frightening moment” in New York City.

“It is a moment where the question will be asked for years to come, ‘Where were you and what did you do in that moment?’” he said.

“The Jewish community is New York,” Cuomo said. “There is no New York without the Jewish community.”

The former governor noted that the first Jews came to New York in 1630, “while my people were still making wine in the old country — 200 years prior to the major European immigration to the city.”

Those responsible for Jew-hatred in the city include “a group of young people, who have no sense of history, who have watched what has happened in the Middle East, in Gaza, and have no context for it,” he said.

“I’m sorry that we have to feel fear in our own home city. I’m sorry that we have to feel isolated in our own city, [that] we feel abandoned in our own city,” Cuomo said. “Where were the people standing up for the Jewish community? Where was the outrage?”

Cuomo noted that Wiesel’s father often referred to the danger of indifference.

When asked how his campaign is welcoming Republicans, Cuomo said he has a “history of working on both sides of the aisle.” As the New York governor for 11 years, he worked with a Republican state Senate to pass each bill, he said.

“Bridging that political divide I’ve done before, but this transcends everything, because this is Democratic Republican political moderation versus socialism plus antisemitism,” he said of Mamdani.

“That’s what he is selling. He is a socialist — Democratic Socialists of America, DSA — whole charter. This is a very organized, well-funded organization, the Democratic Socialists,” Cuomo said. “This isn’t a bunch of 20-year olds on a Friday night. This is a movement that has been growing for years and years and getting more and more sophisticated and better funded.”

Cuomo said it’s unfortunate that Curtis Sliwa was declining to drop out, “I believe, for his own public relations and his own personal agenda.”

“He is not a viable candidate to win,” Cuomo said of Sliwa. “He knows that, but he is a viable candidate to make Mamdani a winner.”

Dr. Joseph Bistricer, an optometrist in New York, told JNS that he attended to hear Cuomo speak because he is worried.

“My big concern and big worry is that someone like Mamdani may become mayor of this great city. It’s strange,” he said. “Very upsetting for the city, and especially for Jews. He’s a jihadist in a suit, and I’m very worried, and hopeful and pray that this doesn’t happen.”

“He’ll be bad for Jews and terrible for the city,” he said, of Mamdani.

Cuomo also told attendees that New York City isn’t creating enough jobs and that businesses are leaving the city. “We have to start attracting rather than losing businesses,” he said.

Speaking about illegal immigration, he gave a rare nod to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Cuomo noted that as head of the National Governors Association, he told the White House that Abbott is “a Republican, but he has a point.”

“It happens once in a while,” he said.