Moral Deodorant in the Glow of the Menorah

Peloni: There is a particular foulness about Patinkin having chosen to voice his support for Mamdani, a modern day promoter of the Jew Hatred,  during the very celebration which marked the defeat of those who sought the annihilation of our ancestors during the age of the Maccabees.

How Mandy Patinkin helped whitewash Zohran Mamdani’s Anti Jewish Ideology with a Hanukkah cameo

Michel Benchimol

Mandy Patinkin at the premiere of Life Itself, 2018 Toronto Film Festival. Photo by GabboT – Life Itself 05, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikipedia [Cropped]

Mandy Patinkin’s Hanukkah Cameo For Zohran Mamdani Is A Moral Collapse

Mandy Patinkin has spent a lifetime as one of the most visible Jewish figures in American culture, trading on stories of Holocaust trauma, Jewish conscience, and the moral obligations that come with them.

That is precisely why his beaming Hanukkah appearance with New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is not a harmless gesture, but a staggering betrayal: a celebrated Jew lending his name, face, and ritual to launder a politician and a family whose ideological project is fundamentally anti-Jewish.

A Family Ideology: Dismantle Jewish Nationhood

Zohran Mamdani did not simply “go too far” in criticizing Israeli policy. He comes out of a home in which hostility to Zionism and Jewish peoplehood is not an excess but a core principle.
His mother is filmmaker Mira Nair; his father is Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, a theorist who has spent decades recasting Zionism as a colonial crime and “resistance” to Israel—including its most brutal forms—as something to be sympathetically understood.

Mahmood’s writing on terrorism does not treat suicide bombings of buses and cafés as sheer barbarism. Instead, he argues that suicide bombing must be seen as “a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,” and that the suicide bomber should be regarded “first and foremost as a category of soldier.” When so many of those bombs have targeted Jews, that move is not neutral scholarship; it is an intellectual laundering of Jew-killing, stripping it of its moral horror and reframing it as a rational tactic against “the Zionist order.”

In essays and public appearances, Mahmood consistently casts Israel as a “settler-colonial” project and calls for Jews to be “persuaded” to abandon Zionism and accept a new, non-Jewish political arrangement—an explicit program to dismantle Jewish sovereignty in the name of justice.
He serves on the advisory council of a Gaza “tribunal” tied to Hamas-aligned narratives that accuse Israel of “genocide,” “ethno-supremacism,” and “apartheid” and seek to legitimize campaigns like BDS that criminalize the Jewish state itself, not merely its policies.
The ideological through-line is simple: Jewish nationhood is illegitimate; Jewish self-defense is suspect; violence against Jews for being Zionists must be understood, not stigmatized.
“Like Father, Like Son”: Zohran’s Record

Jewish commentators describe Zohran as “like father, like son” because he has translated this worldview into street politics and public office.
As a student, he helped found a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter that practiced “non?normalization,” refusing to engage with people who accept a Jewish right to self?determination—turning ordinary Zionist Jews into pariahs.
As a politician, he has embraced BDS and refused to affirm that Israel should exist as a Jewish state at all, presenting Zionism as a colonial crime to be reversed, not a legitimate expression of Jewish peoplehood.
He has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza and described the New York State Assembly as a “bastion of Zionist thought,” converting mainstream Jewish attachment to Israel into something inherently shameful and immoral.
On the second anniversary of the October 7 massacre, his public statement was condemned by Israel’s Foreign Ministry for echoing Hamas talking points and amplifying what it called a “fake genocide campaign,” accusing him of normalizing antisemitism and standing with Jews “only when they are dead.”
When asked whether the chant “globalize the intifada” made him uncomfortable, Zohran declined to condemn it, even as Jewish organizations and rival Democrats insisted the slogan glorifies violent uprisings that have murdered Jews and is “undeniably antisemitic.”
As mayor?elect, faced with a protest outside Park East Synagogue where demonstrators shouted anti?Israel and intifada?linked slogans while Jews prayed inside, he issued a brief, equivocal statement that gently “discouraged” some language but also scolded the synagogue—splitting the difference between Jews under threat and those shouting threats at their door.
This is a consistent pattern: when living Jews are targeted in the name of his cause, his first instinct is to blur lines, not draw them.
An Inner Circle Soaked in Jew-Hatred

The people Zohran elevates around him confirm that this is not about one man’s careless words; it is an ecosystem. One early appointee, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned after old social-media posts surfaced calling people “money hungry Jews,” sneering at “rich Jewish peeps,” and joking about a “Jew train”—openly antisemitic language that no careful leader would ever allow anywhere near public service.

A member of his inaugural committee, Alvaro López, publicly praised activists tearing down posters of Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas, writing of them, “All I see are heroes”—a chilling celebration of efforts to erase Jewish victims from public view.
Jewish watchdogs describe his committee as a “rogue gallery” of figures and groups that relentlessly demonize Israel and minimize or excuse anti-Jewish terror. The Anti-Defamation League has created a dedicated “Mamdani Monitor,” with its national director calling him a “clear and present danger” to the Jewish community and warning that hisrhetoric and alliances are actively feeding antisemitism.
In other words, this is not a “progressive with sharp views on Israel.” It is a politician formed in, and now leading, a milieu that denies the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood, rationalizes or downplays violence against Jews, and surrounds itself with people who casually spit out antisemitic slurs and cheer the erasure of Jewish suffering.
Patinkin’s Hanukkah Cameo: From Moral Voice To Fig Leaf

It is into this context that Mandy Patinkin stepped, smiling, at a Hanukkah menorah beside Zohran Mamdani. Jewish and Israeli outlets have already described that video as “political deodorant,” designed to cover the stench of his record with the warm light of candles and the comforting presence of a beloved Jewish actor.
The imagery is the point: if Mandy Patinkin, who has built a public identity around Jewish moral seriousness, can bless this man on a Jewish holiday, how dangerous can he really be?
Patinkin allowed his Jewishness—his name, his past, the roles in which he has invoked Jewish suffering—to be weaponized against fellow Jews.
That appearance sends a clear message to Jews who have been warning about the Mamdani project: your fear and your experience matter less than my willingness to provide him with a soft-focus moment of absolution.
In effect, his cameo tells the world: “Relax, he’s with us; he lights our candles.”

For many, the parallel to earlier eras is inescapable. In Europe, there were Jews who lent their prestige to regimes or movements that targeted their own people, insisting that collaboration, visibility, or proximity would tame hatred rather than enable it. History has not judged those choices as nuance; it has judged them as moral collapse. To see a prominent modern Jew help “normalize” a leader whose ideological lineage includes the intellectual sanitizing of suicide bombers and the political delegitimization of Jewish self-defense feels, to many, like a softer, media-savvy echo of that same dynamic.
From Disappointment To Offense

As an ex-fan, the reaction to Patinkin’s choice is raw. The man who once embodied conscience and complexity now appears as just another celebrity willing to front for whoever offers him a flattering role in their story.
The gap between the moral weight of the characters he has played and the lightness of his actual judgment here is jarring.
But as a Jew, the reaction moves beyond disappointment into offense. In an era when young Jewish men and women have died confronting Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups animated by the same hatred of Zionism that shapes the Mamdani milieu, Patinkin chose to stand not with the dead and endangered, but with the ideological heirs of those who seek to destroy the Jewish state.
When one considers the soldiers, festival-goers, synagogue worshippers, and ordinary civilians murdered or maimed in attacks justified by precisely the narratives that Mahmood and Zohran help circulate, the sight of Patinkin smiling at a menorah beside Zohran is wrenching.
The hard questions follow naturally. Does he feel any shame when he thinks of the young Jews who have given their lives fighting organizations that share the same ideological DNA as the man he now blesses in public? Is this simple blindness—a failure to look beyond the script he was handed—or is it willful, a choice not to know because knowing would demand refusal?
If he has seen the alarms from Israel’s government, from the ADL, from Jewish journalists and rabbis, and proceeded anyway, what conclusion is left except that Jewish lives and the terror attacks on them do not weigh heavily enough against the allure of participating in this performance?
Mandy Patinkin was not tricked into lighting Hanukkah candles with Zohran Mamdani. He was invited to help launder a fundamentally anti-Jewish project in the warm glow of Jewish ritual. And he said yes.