When he sat down for an interview in November with the Chronicle of Increased Training, Mahmood Mamdani provided one parameter: “Let’s not discuss concerning the mayor factor.”
It was simply two days after the Columbia College professor had taken the stage alongside his spouse and daughter-in-law after his son Zohran had been elected mayor of New York Metropolis, profitable greater than 50% of the vote in a three-way race.
Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist with a protracted observe file of pro-Palestinian activism, has stated he counts his father as one in all his political inspirations.
However Mahmood Mamdani most popular to speak about his personal file, as a professor of anthropology and worldwide affairs and a longstanding pro-Palestinian activist who was the primary college member to deal with the Gaza conflict encampment on his campus.
His spouse, filmmaker Mira Nair, and Zohran’s spouse, the artist Rama Duwaji, likewise are revered of their fields and well-known for his or her pro-Palestinian advocacy and adherence to the motion to boycott Israel.
Zohran Mamdani has described the BDS motion as “according to the core of my politics,” and in 2023 launched a invoice whereas serving as an assemblymember that sought to dam nonprofits from funding Israeli settlements within the West Financial institution.
Whereas it’s unclear the extent to which Mamdani will pursue BDS insurance policies throughout his upcoming mayoral time period, his politics and people of his mother and father mirror a shared alignment with pro-Palestinian causes.
“If you’re the child of two mother and father who’re very concerned in social justice, quite a lot of occasions what you keep in mind as a playdate was you being at some rally or some march,” Mamdani recalled in an interview with Metropolis & State in April 2023.
Now, as Zohran assembles his management workforce in preparation for taking the town’s reins on Jan. 1, right here’s what you should learn about his rapid household.
Mahmood Mamdani, viewing Israel by an anti-colonial lens
Columbia College professor Mahmood Mamdani (r) with son Zohran and spouse Mira Nair at a mayoral marketing campaign occasion for Zohran, June 24, 2025, New York, New York. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Photographs)
Lengthy earlier than his son’s mayoral marketing campaign, Mahmood Mamdani, 79, was identified extensively as one of many foremost students on colonialism and postcolonial politics in Africa. Born in India in 1946, Mamdani was raised in Kampala, Uganda at a time when the nation was racially segregated. After receiving his bachelors, masters and doctorate from universities in the USA, Mamdani was expelled from Uganda in 1972 after Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered all Asians to go away the nation.
Since 1999, he has been a professor of presidency at Columbia College, and has printed a number of books and essays on colonialism and political violence together with “Citizen and Topic: Modern Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism” in 1996 and “Good Muslim, Unhealthy Muslim: America, the Chilly Struggle, and the Roots of Terror” in 2004.
As a scholar, Mahmood Mamdani is greatest identified for his evaluation of colonial rule and the way it shapes the identities of each the occupied and occupiers. In his 2020 guide, “Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Everlasting Minorities,” he makes use of case research that embody Nazi Germany, Israelis and Palestinians and post-apartheid South Africa.
Mamdani has spoken straight and repeatedly about how his broader scholarship shapes his considering on Israel and Palestinians. “The difficulty will not be settlers, however settler colonialism,” he wrote in “Neither Settler nor Native.” In 2021, throughout an 11-day outbreak of violence between Hamas and Israel that was sparked by tensions in Jerusalem, Mamdani wrote on X, “Palestinians have a proper to withstand. It is a colonial occupation, not a battle!”
Three days later, as Hamas and Israel exchanged missiles and airstrikes, Mamdani wrote that the battle was not between Israel and Hamas, however somewhat the resurgence of a 3rd intifada.
“The resistance this time started in Jerusalem and unfold to Gaza, now the West Financial institution and Palestinian communities past. This isn’t a battle between Israel and Hamas,” wrote Mamdani in a put up on X. “We’re witnessing one thing way more significant, the beginning of the Third Intifadah in opposition to settler colonialism!”
In 2002, because the second intifada was in full power, Mamdani signed onto a petition calling for Columbia College to divest from firms supplying arms to Israel, saying on the time his help for the petition was to make a “ethical assertion registering concern over the train of energy by Israel.”
Within the Chronicle of Increased Training interview, Mahmood Mamdani spoke about being the primary college member to deal with the pro-Palestinian protesters who arrange an encampment at Columbia in 2024. He stated his discuss targeted on “classes of the divestment motion in South Africa.”
In a 2022 Zoom lecture on the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the College of Virginia, Mahmood Mamdani argued that whereas there was purpose to provide “full and enthusiastic help” to the BDS motion, he cautioned in opposition to the motion extending its boycotts in opposition to the breadth of “Israeli society and never simply to its Zionist sectors.”
Mahmood Mamdani provides a Zoom lecture in 2022 on the Carter G. Woodson Institute of the College of Virginia. (Screenshot)
Throughout his lecture, Mamdani additionally argued that Israel should be taught from the dissolution of the South African apartheid, saying that the one approach ahead within the area was if there was an “epistemic revolution” in Israel the place they realized the “flourishing of Jews and Jewish life doesn’t require a Zionist state.”
“Whites didn’t have to monopolize political energy to have a house in South Africa. It’s this lesson that must be pushed house to Israelis, as many as attainable, that Jews don’t have to have a Jewish state to have a safe house in Israel-Palestine,” stated Mamdani. “Certainly, Jews are safer in New York Metropolis than they’re in Israel.”
Requested whether or not he helps a one-state resolution, Mamdani not too long ago informed The Chronicle, “I’m sympathetic to just one kind of 1 state, a state which relies on rule of legislation and ensures equal rights,” a place his son echoed on the marketing campaign path. “I’m against any form of discrimination. I’m against any type of apartheid which I perceive to be a legally enforced distinction between two teams in society, the place one advantages and the opposite is penalized.”
In an interview with The Nation in January 2024, Mamdani criticized the general public response to the pro-Palestinian protests erupting throughout the U.S., saying that conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism was a hazard to democracy.
“To conflate the critique of a state with the critique of a folks poses a problem to a democratic tradition,” he stated. In his current Chronicle interview, Mamdani pointed favorably to the Jerusalem Declaration definition of antisemitism, signed by over 200 largely Jewish students, which insists that the motion to boycott Israel will not be in and of itself antisemitic. The declaration, he stated, “makes a really clear distinction between the State of Israel and the folks of Israel,” versus the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.
In a January 2024 letter printed within the Columbia Spectator, Mahmood Mamdani criticized the college for dissuading using the phrases “intifada” and “from the river to the ocean,” arguing that excluding them would “rule out any significant dialogue on Israel and Palestine on this campus.” (He informed the Chronicle that the “river to the seas” idea seems within the Likud celebration manifesto, which declares that “between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the Jordan [River] there’ll solely be Israeli sovereignty.” He additionally claimed that he had not really heard “from the river to the ocean” chanted in Columbia’s quad, and had solely examine it.)
Zohran Mamdani equally downplayed rhetoric that many Israel supporters contemplate incendiary. In June he declined to sentence the phrase “globalize the Intifada,” arguing that the phrase symbolized a “determined want for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” (Mamdani later stated he would “discourage” using the phrase, which many supporters of Israel, recalling two violent uprisings of Palestinians in 1987 and 2000 that killed tons of of Israelis, see as a name to violence.)
At an look on the encampments, Mamdani described fees of antisemitism as “a part of the foreign money the administration makes use of to demonize protests like this,” in keeping with the Columbia Spectator.
Critics of the elder Mamdani say he underplays Jewish historic vulnerability and antisemitism, minimizes Palestinian political company and their inner divisions, and ignores the best way Zionism differs from European colonialism. However like his son, he believes even youthful Jews are more and more adopting his critique of Israel and Zionism.
In a December interview with Peter Beinart for Jewish Currents, a leftist journal, he stated he believed the Jewish diasporic neighborhood would play an “necessary function” in discussions over the “Palestinian query” sooner or later.
“Jewish kids in New York Metropolis have turn into more and more skeptical of the path during which Israel has been shifting, and more and more disillusioned with each the ethical and the political efficacy of that route and more and more open to discover an alternate,” stated Mamdani.
Mira Nair, a supporter of cultural boycotts
Mira Nair attends 2024 DGA Honors at DGA Theater on October 17, 2024 in New York Metropolis. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Photographs)
Nair is an award-winning Indian-American filmmaker whose debut 1988 movie, “Salaam Bombay!,” earned her an Academy Award nomination for Finest International Language Movie. She additionally directed a number of acclaimed movies together with “Mississippi Masala” in 1991, “Monsoon Marriage ceremony” in 2001 and “The Namesake” in 2006.
Born in India, she met Mahmood Mamdani in Uganda in 1989, they usually married two years later. Nair was additionally married to the Jewish photographer Mitch Epstein from 1981 to someday earlier than 1989; he has declined JTA’s requests for an interview.
Nair has additionally been an outspoken critic of Israel and a supporter of petitions backing the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions motion.
In 2013, Nair declined an invite to the Haifa Worldwide Movie Competition. “I can’t be going to Israel presently. I’ll go to Israel when the partitions come down. I’ll go to Israel when occupation is gone,” she tweeted on the time. In a subsequent put up, she added that she stood with the BDS motion.
In March of this 12 months, Nair signed onto a petition calling for the Academy Awards to take away Israeli actress Gal Gadot from its ceremony, accusing her of displaying “help for Israel’s navy actions in opposition to Palestinians,” in keeping with an Instagram put up by the group.
Following the election of her son, Nair has additionally declined to debate Mamdani’s attitudes in direction of Jews and Israel in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“What I like a lot about Zohran is that he embraces the multiplicity of our lives in probably the most pure approach — this mosaic that’s our metropolis however that nobody has seen till this younger man got here alongside,” Nair informed The Hollywood Reporter of her son.
Rama Duwaji, an artist with a political imaginative and prescient
Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and his spouse, Rama Duwaji, vote within the native election at Frank Sinatra Faculty of the Arts Excessive Faculty. (Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket by way of Getty Photographs)
Mamdani’s spouse, Rama Duwaji, whom he married this 12 months, has additionally made pro-Palestinian advocacy a focus of her work in ceramics, animation and illustrations.
Whereas Duwaji has largely refused interviews with the press and didn’t seem at marketing campaign occasions or fundraisers, final month she sat for her first interview put up election with The Lower.
“Talking out about Palestine, Syria, Sudan — all this stuff are actually necessary to me,” Duwaji informed The Lower. “I’m all the time holding updated with what’s occurring, not simply right here however elsewhere. It feels pretend to speak about anything when that’s all that’s on my thoughts, all I need to put down on paper.”
“All the things is political; it’s the factor that I speak about with [Zohran] and my pals, the factor that I’m updated with each morning, which might be not nice for my psychological well being. It’s what I speak about once I test on my household again house,” continued Duwaji.
Through the interview Duwaji additionally mentioned the which means behind a part of her election evening outfit —- a black high designed by Zeid Hijazi, a London-based Palestinian-Jordanian label.
“It’s good to have somewhat bit of research on the garments as a result of, as an example, through the general-election evening, it was good to ship a message about Palestinians by sporting a Palestinian designer,” stated Duwaji.
Duwaji, 28, who’s ethnically Syrian and grew up in Texas and Dubai, additionally continuously posts illustrations that advocate for pro-Palestinian causes on her Instagram account. Her artwork has been featured in The New Yorker, The Washington Publish, the BBC, and VICE, in keeping with her web site.
In August, she posted an animation of the Palestinian flag together with the phrases “finish the genocide,” and posted one other final month depicting the International Sumud Flotilla.
In March, she posted an illustration of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian scholar activist at Columbia College, calling for his launch after he was detained by the Trump administration amid its marketing campaign to purportedly fight campus antisemitism.
“That is an assault on freedom of speech, and units a scary f—king precedent for anybody who speaks up for what’s proper. Resist,” wrote Duwaji.
“He’s his personal individual”
In an interview with the New York Instances in June, Mahmood Mamdani spurned strategies that his politics had an outsized impression on his son’s political beliefs.
“He’s his personal individual,” Mamdani stated. “Now, in fact what we do as his mother and father is a part of the surroundings during which he grew up, and he couldn’t assist however interact with it. That doesn’t imply something is mirrored again on us.”
However Nair was fast to disagree, telling the Instances that her son had “very a lot absorbed” his mother and father’ politics, which largely middle on anti-colonialism.
“I don’t agree!” Ms. Nair stated. “In fact the world we reside in, and what we write and movie and take into consideration, is the world that Zohran has very a lot absorbed.”
