Zohran Mamdani showed up at Mandy Patinkin’s Manhattan apartment last week carrying a tray of homemade latkes and a campaign-ready smile.
The three-minute video released Saturday opens with Patinkin pretending to faint—“It’s the mayor! What are you doing here?”—while Kathryn Grody, his wife, ushers Mamdani toward a sizzling skillet and a waiting menorah.
They sing the blessings, spin a dreidel, and toast “more light” for the city, all under warm lamplight and a camera crew that captured every hug.
Within hours the clip was racing across social feeds, praised by some as a sweet gesture of holiday unity and slammed by others as a slick stunt from a politician who has spent years railing against Israeli policy.
Mamdani, who still calls himself anti-Zionist, has never hidden his view that the state of Israel should not exist as a Jewish-only entity, a stance that has put him at odds with many New York Jews.
Yet here he was, head covered, Hebrew prayers on his lips, standing beside a beloved Jewish actor famous for defending both Israeli culture and Palestinian rights, depending on the week.
Supporters said the moment proved you can oppose a government’s policies without hating its people; critics said the staging was too perfect, too obvious, and way too late.
“Some of my best friends are Jews vibes,” one X user wrote, collecting thousands of likes before the menorah candles had even burned down.
Patinkin, for his part, has never met a political fight he wouldn’t join, from singing at Bernie rallies to narrating ads for refugee resettlement, and he told Mamdani on camera, “Your mayoral tenure—or whatever it’s called—has now been blessed.”
The line drew laughs inside the apartment but groans from Jewish groups who still remember Mamdani chanting “From the river to the sea” at a 2021 rally they called genocidal.
The same groups now ask whether a single candle-lighting erases years of rhetoric they say helped fuel a spike in local antisemitic incidents, even as other New Yorkers insist criticizing Israel is not the same as attacking Jews.
The mayor-elect’s office says the visit was personal, not political, planned after Patinkin invited any local leader willing to “share light” during a dark season.
Yet the timing is impossible to ignore: less than two weeks before Mamdani takes office, and days after several major Jewish organizations warned they want a seat at his City Hall table or they will sue to block some of his foreign-policy-themed appointments.
Whether the latke summit becomes a first step toward reconciliation or just another clip to replay at the next protest remains an open question, one that will not be answered until the new mayor turns from lighting candles to balancing budgets, policing subways, and trying to keep the nation’s most diverse city from splitting along the same fault line that followed him home from Patinkin’s kitchen: the thin, bright line between criticizing a state and comforting a people.
