DAYS THE BUDGET IS LATE: 48
WOULD HAVE IF HE COULD HAVE: Mayor Zohran Mamdani planned to appear in a video he released over the weekend to commemorate the displacement of Palestinians that occurred in connection with the State of Israel’s creation.
He only opted against being in the video — which drew backlash from local Jewish leaders — because he fell ill, he said this morning at a Bronx press event.
“I was intending to be there as part of it,” Mamdani told reporters. “However, I did fall sick, and we didn’t want to create any kind of complication for her.”
Mamdani was referring to Inea Bushnaq, a woman who lived in the British Mandate for Palestine as a child and was featured in the video released on the mayor’s official social media handles late Friday.
In the 4-minute video, Bushnaq, filmed in her home in New York City, recalls how she was nine when she and her family had to flee their home in East Jerusalem in 1948 during the “Nakba,” an Arabic word that translates into “catastrophe” and denotes the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians upon the establishment of Israel. “The Zionists were coming into Jerusalem,” Bushnaq says in the video.
Local Jewish leaders, including a member of Mamdani’s transition team, were outraged by the video, arguing it provided a one-sided, overly simplified account of the region’s history.
As noted by The Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh, many Jews around the world contend the displacement of Palestinians did not just occur at the hand of Israeli forces. Rather, they point to neighboring Arab states, including Egypt and Syria, which launched military attacks in response to the new Jewish state’s creation in the wake of the Holocaust.
At his press conference today, Mamdani was asked for a response to the criticism that his team’s video excluded critical context.
“I firmly believe that acknowledging any one people’s pain does not preclude you from the acknowledgement of another people’s,” he said. “When it comes to New Yorkers like Inea and so many others, not only has their pain never been acknowledged, but so often we have seen that even their identity is up for debate, and my message to each and every New Yorker is that this is a city for you and that we will continue to be proud of everyone who calls it home.”
His comments come as he’s set to host a reception commemorating Jewish American Heritage Month at Gracie Mansion tonight. The mayor’s release of the Nakba Day video has led some Jewish leaders to boycott the event. They include Mark Treyger, a former City Council member who now leads the Jewish Community Relations Council, and Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the FDNY’s chief chaplain and the executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis.
Assemblymember Sam Berger, a Democrat who represents large Jewish communities in Queens, was still incensed by the video when asked about it this afternoon.
“The mayor has spent his career bending reality with his policies and his budget, so it’s no surprise he’s trying to bend history too,” he said in a statement to Playbook.
The decision by Mamdani to release the video on Nakba Day is part of his longstanding record of aligning himself with Palestinian rights and struggles.
As a candidate last year, Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, faced criticism for refusing to initially denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which many see as a call to violence against Jewish people. As mayor, he has said he’s committed to combating all forms of hate, including antisemitism, while also continuing to accuse Israel of perpetrating a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza as part of the war launched in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack.
Gustavo Gordillo, the co-chair of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, of which Mamdani is a member, celebrated the video, saying it’s consistent with the chapter’s “history of standing up for Palestinian solidarity.”
“Representing the historic struggle of the people of the city is part of the mayor’s job, and I think that’s what he was doing here,” Gordillo said. — Chris Sommerfeldt and Jason Beeferman
FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
BETH DAVIDSON VS. BETH DAVIDSON: Beth Davidson’s congressional campaign has made it crystal clear on her website she absolutely supports establishing term limits — but if you ask her in person you may get an answer that sounds completely different.
Davidson, who’s running in the Democratic primary to unseat Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, says on the “priorities” section of her campaign website that she wants to “enact term limits and stronger ethics rules, to keep career politicians and corrupt insiders in check.”
But at a candidate forum in Ossining earlier this month, when she and her Democratic rivals were asked whether they would “support term limits for U.S. representatives and senators,” Davidson responded, “I actually don’t.”
“Some districts have members that have served them a long time. Some we’re done with after two years. I think it has to be up to the voters,” Davidson explained.
When asked about the discrepancy, Davidson’s campaign said the language on her campaign website is consistent with her support for term limits in the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Beth has clear plans to take on corruption in DC, including enacting term limits for Supreme Court Justices, banning stock trading by Members of Congress, and ending Citizens United to keep special interests and corporations out of our elections,” her campaign manager Ellen McCormick told Playbook.
Davidson was the only major candidate at the forum who opposed term limits for members of Congress, with her opponents Cait Conley and Effie Phillips-Staley supporting the idea. — Jason Beeferman
From the Capitol
TRAIN DREAMS: Gov. Kathy Hochul this morning visited the state office building in Lower Manhattan where negotiators for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Long Island Railroad and five striking unions are meeting. As of mid-afternoon, no deal to end the LIRR strike had been reached.
In a video posted on social media, the governor said the morning commute had gone “smoother than expected” and that she was fighting to “protect our taxpayers and our commuters from having to pay hundreds of dollars more.”
Outside, picketers — one of them wearing a t-shirt that said “Fuck You, Pay Me” — chanted slogans like, “New York is a union town, Janno Lieber shut it down.” Lieber is the head of the MTA.
Hochul has so far appeared to stake out a more pro-MTA position than Gov. Mario Cuomo did during the last LIRR strike in 1994, which was also a gubernatorial election year. To quickly end the strike, Cuomo — whose son Hochul succeeded as governor — brokered a deal that gave the unions what they wanted.
But Hochul also appears to be keeping her political distance while blaming President Donald Trump for the strike.
In 1994, The New York Times reported that Cuomo was “positively hyperactive in confronting” the strike by cancelling public appearances, including a ticker-tape parade for the New York Rangers who had just won the Stanley Cup. The Times said he’d also “placed round-the-clock telephone calls to the top negotiators, members of Congress, Long Island leaders and the aides he sent to the bargaining table.”
This time around, Hochul has never publicly mentioned the possibility of Congress intervening. Trying to go that route is a nightmare for labor-friendly Democrats: Railroad unions are still bitter about when President Joe Biden got Congress to head off a freight rail strike in 2022. There were crickets from Congress last year when a union of train engineers went on strike and idled New Jersey Transit trains.
Trump said Sunday that until a day after the LIRR strike had begun he’d “never even heard about it.” (The president in September and again in January issued executive orders to create three-member panels to investigate the dispute and issue reports — a standard move in any rail labor dispute.) On Sunday afternoon, federal mediators summoned both sides to negotiations at the MTA headquarters. Those lasted late into the night and resumed this morning.
Hochul’s argument is that the Trump administration last year released the unions from one part of the mediation process early, a maneuver that set up a series of cooling off periods that ended Saturday, when the strike began. The part of the process she’s referring to allows federal officials to indefinitely keep unions in mediation without the ability to strike as long as there’s a reasonable chance of a settlement. Some of those mediations lasted for years.
This time around, all five unions and the MTA participated in mediation sessions between March 2024 and July 2025 before they were released in August. — Ry Rivard
FROM CITY HALL
FOOD DESERT: Mamdani’s plan to open a city-owned grocery store next year in Hunts Point could be a boon for access to healthy food in the bodega-dominated South Bronx, where diabetes and obesity rates far exceed citywide averages.
Hundreds of bodegas are spread throughout four ZIP codes in the South Bronx, accounting for 35 percent of all food establishments in the area, according to a Health Department analysis released last month. While most of the bodegas offered fresh produce, a third of them sold no fresh vegetables besides onions and potatoes — and, overall, healthy meal and snack options were limited, the analysis found.
For every supermarket in the South Bronx, there are four fast food restaurants and six bodegas, the analysis found.
In Hunts Point, the average cost of a standard grocery basket — which includes staples like eggs, deli beef, tomatoes, lettuce, bread, potatoes, milk and bananas — was $39.20 last year, but up to half of those items were generally unavailable, according to the analysis.
“Making sure every New Yorker can buy fresh, affordable groceries in their own neighborhood is a key part of our affordability agenda,” Mamdani said in a statement Monday.
The Economic Development Corp. is preparing a request for proposals for private operators to manage the Hunts Point grocery store and an additional store in East Harlem, which was announced in April and is slated to open by 2029. — Maya Kaufman
IN OTHER NEWS
— FRONT AND CENTER: Puerto Rico has emerged as a key issue in the race to succeed Rep. Nydia Velázquez, as rival progressive camps clash over the district’s political future. (THE CITY)
— PRISON REFORM: Still awaiting appointments from Hochul to reach a quorum, New York’s Committee on Correction is unable to meet or vote, delaying jail reform implementations. (New York Focus)
— LUIGI TAKES A HIT: A Manhattan judge ruled that the gun and notebook seized from Luigi Mangione will be admissible at his upcoming murder trial, while excluding items obtained during an initial warrantless search. (The New York Times)
Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.