In a city where almost half the lawyers are Jewish, Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed zero Jews to a key judicial advisory council. Now he’s pushing government-run grocery stores that promise 30% discounts funded by the public.
Zohran Mamdani is not just another American mayor with big ideas. He’s a radical with a record of singling out Jews and a clear appetite for left-wing social experiments.
In a city where roughly half the lawyers are Jewish, Mamdani just announced an 18-member judicial advisory council without a single Jewish appointee. The odds of that happening by chance are one in 250,000. That isn’t oversight. It’s deliberate exclusion.
Jewish legal organizations, the Queens Brandeis Association, Jewish Lawyers Guild, Brooklyn Brandeis Society, and Bronx County Jewish Bar Association, have united in a joint letter accusing him of orchestrating a purge from an essential civic process. Mamdani claims the panel is “truly reflective of New York City.”
This is part of a pattern. Mamdani has repeatedly denounced Israel and even threatened to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while remaining silent on dictators in China and terror regimes in Iran and Qatar. The focus is always on Israel. That level of fixation rarely exists without deeper antisemitism, and as so often happens, a parallel strain of anti-Americanism.
But even this record pales beside his latest announcement: Soviet-style, government-run grocery stores.
Mamdani promised a network of municipal supermarkets selling food at a supposed 30 percent discount. He held up bananas costing about 20 cents each as proof of the idea. Fresh tropical fruit, picked thousands of kilometres away and sold for 20 cents, is not a miracle of city hall. It is the miracle of global supply chains and free enterprise.
Grocery stores operate on margins of about 2 percent. The only way to deliver a 30 percent discount is with taxpayer subsidies. Consider a $20 steak. How does it become $14? Someone has to absorb the missing $6. That someone is the taxpayer.
Mamdani’s own plan makes this explicit: the city will cover rent and property taxes, fund the build-out, and then provide direct subsidies so food can be sold below cost. There is no free lunch.
New York already has one of the most competitive grocery markets in the world, roughly 1,000 full-size stores and 10,000 bodegas. If 30 percent profits existed, those competitors would already have undercut each other. They haven’t, because the margins aren’t there.
When government abolishes the price signal, other forms of rationing take over: long lines, early-morning rushes, insider access, and black-market reselling. Entrepreneurial New Yorkers will clean out the discounted steaks and resell them. Bodega owners, many of them immigrants, will be forced to compete against stores that don’t pay market rent or cover their own losses, while subsidizing that competition through their taxes.
This has been tried before. Kansas City launched a similar project with the same promises. The result was empty shelves and demands for more funding.
Mamdani has never run a business. Yet he is prepared to spend tens of millions, $70 million in capital costs alone, a figure that will almost certainly rise, on a project whose first store is not scheduled to open until the end of 2029. Three years to open a grocery store.
New Yorkers are about to receive an expensive education in supply and demand, one they will pay for whether they shop at these stores or not.
