On Sunday, more than 50,000 people marched up Fifth Avenue in NYC in the annual Israel Day Parade - the largest celebration of Israel outside of Israel itself. The Governor was there. U.S. Senators and Congressmen were there. Former mayors were there. The sitting Mayor of New York City was not.
The debate that led up to the parade, and what followed, fell into predictable grooves: condemnation from Jewish leaders, defenses from Mamdani’s allies, arguments about Israel, arguments about antisemitism, arguments about campaign promises kept. All of that is warranted. But it misses something more fundamental, something I’ve spent years advocating for as an elected official, and something that goes to the very heart of what it means to hold elected office at the local level.
A mayor is not an advocate. A mayor is not a pundit. A mayor is not a private citizen who gets to decide which of their constituents deserve their physical presence based on their personal politics.
A mayor is the elected public servant of every person in their city.
Through the Combat Antisemitism Movement, I have had the privilege of working with mayors from across the political spectrum – Democrats and Republicans, mayors of small towns and major cities, mayors in the South, the West, the Midwest, and the Northeast. The best ones understand something intuitively that Mamdani seems to have missed: showing up is not an endorsement. Showing up is the job.
When a mayor attends a St. Patrick’s Day Parade, they are not endorsing Irish foreign policy. When a mayor stands at a Diwali celebration, they are not taking a position on Indian domestic affairs. When a mayor marches in a Pride parade, they are not issuing a statement on international politics. They are saying: you are part of this city, and I am your mayor.
For 61 consecutive years, every sitting mayor of New York City attended the Israel Day Parade, not because each one agreed with every policy of every Israeli government during that span, but because they understood that New York’s Jewish community is a community of New Yorkers. The parade is not a foreign policy statement. It is a celebration of identity, of history, of survival, of pride – by Americans, about Americans, in an American city.
Mamdani justified his absence as honoring a campaign pledge. But that framing is itself revealing. He categorized attendance at this parade as a political act requiring political alignment, which means he has decided, whether he intended to or not, that Jewish New Yorkers who feel connected to Israel are a constituency he is comfortable othering. That is not a neutral position. That is a choice.
And it is a choice with consequences beyond the symbolic. When we work with mayors on adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the ones who push back often say the same thing: I don’t want to take sides. What we tell them is that fighting antisemitism is not taking sides – it is doing your job. The Jewish community in your city is your community. Their safety, their dignity, their sense of belonging in the civic life of your city: that is your responsibility. Period.
Mamdani clearly understands this principle in other contexts. He attended the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in March. He has participated in community events celebrating other groups. He did not apply a foreign policy litmus test to those appearances. The selective application of principle is itself the problem.
There is a word for treating one community’s civic celebrations as categorically different from everyone else’s – as the one parade that requires ideological vetting before a mayor can attend. That word is discrimination. And when the community in question is Jewish, and the rationale is rooted in hostility to the Jewish state, it has a more specific name.
Former Mayor Eric Adams marched. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg marched. Governor Hochul marched. Senator Schumer marched. Congressman Lawler marched. They did not do so because they agree with each other on every question of Middle East policy. They did so because they know that leadership requires presence, and presence requires no asterisk.
Mayors are uniquely positioned to model the kind of pluralism that holds cities together. They shake hands, break bread, stand on parade routes in rain and heat. They show their faces. That visibility is not ceremonial. It says: your community is not peripheral. You are not a problem to be managed. You belong here, and I see you.
New York City has more Jewish residents than any city outside Israel. It is a city whose Jewish population is the largest outside of the Jewish state itself. On Sunday, its mayor told that community that his personal political views outrank his obligation to stand with them in their city.
That is not a profile in courage. That is a failure of office.
The marchers on Fifth Avenue didn’t need Mamdani there to have a parade. They had tens of thousands of each other. But they needed him there to have a mayor. And on that count, the city came up short.
Lisa Katz is Chief Government Affairs Officer for the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) and leads CAM’s work with North American mayors. She is a former town supervisor of New Castle, New York.