Feb 27, 2026
Since swearing in as Mayor of New York City on Jan 1st, Zohran Mamdani has not wasted any time in declaring Yiddish THE official language of the Jewish people. This announcement, made as predicted while Mamdani AKA DJ Mr. Cardamom was mixing tracks from the “Lider far Palestine” album at a GLYK Kolektiv event, was reported on in the Forverts with great concern.
Although Mamdani got his start as a politician with the campaign to save CYCO, he sought to focus his campaign on the classic Democratic bulke and butter issues of “dire gelt un oyoyoy“ and “daloy politsey” rather than draw attention to his farbrente Yiddishist views, which arguably go beyond those of Bernie “Zeyde“ Sanders. His opponent, Andrew Cuomo, forced attention on this issue however, claiming to speak for the monolingual mainstream and casting suspicion on Mamdani for having applied to the YIVO Summer Program when it was hosted by Columbia University, an institution now associated in New Yorkers’ minds with its suppression of the BDS (Bulgar, Dreydl, Sher) movement. The rival campaigns soon faced off with competing Yiddish campaign literature, with Mamdani promising to have better Yiddish messaging than NYC‘s notorious public health campaign against measles and Cuomo brandishing the slogan “Zohran will be worse than the cholera in Odesa!“
Mamdani is talking about his policies on all the most popular daytime programs
Mamdani crucially appealed to the key demographics of secular Yiddishists and Hasidim. While he has drawn criticism for sidelining Jewish ally Brad Lander (although his proposed campaign slogan “Wherever we live, that is our Lander” suggested that their politics were deeply aligned), Yiddish knowledge and Yiddish yikhes were ultimately crucial litmus tests for members of his transition team.
Time will tell how effective political newcomer Mamdani will be as mayor of New York. His suggestion that snowed-in New Yorkers read the Labzik stories from the New York Public Library (afterall, the animated film is such a hit) has widely been regarded as a sign of his youthful charisma – and caused visits to the NYPL’s Dorot Jewish Division and downloads from the Yiddish Book Center’s Spielberg Archive to soar. Not since the 1908 Czernowitz Conference has there been such heated debate over the language of the Jewish people — we can only hope his term as mayor will result in universal Yiddish pre-k.
