NYCPSA leader reflects on the rise of Mamdani
And it could mark the "crumbling" of the NYC public school system as we know it
I am the daughter of a now-retired New York City high school teacher who for decades showed care and dedication to his students and his soccer and wrestling athletes.
He is a lifelong member of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and still trusts them to represent him.
But now he and many current and retired NYC Public School teachers and staff, especially the Jewish ones, are fuming and reeling.
They are feeling the sting, the painful desegregation of any support and acceptance slipping from under their feet by a union and a school system they helped build and strengthen.
Weeks after Zohran Mamdani snatched the Democratic spot in the NYC Mayoral primary, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) of NYC resoundingly endorsed him. We are talking about the city’s second-largest union which boasts 200,000 members who teach 912,000 students, the largest student body in the nation.
Their taxpayer-funded UFT Welfare Fund has a whopping $400 million.
The union includes teachers, administrators, and even some nurses from private hospitals.
The UFT endorsed a man who, as State Senator, would not endorse a bill that denounced the Holocaust.
The UFT endorsed a man who is now the leading face of the Democratic Socialists of America Party, an entity that could not bring themselves to denounce the massacres and mass rapes and kidnapping of Israelis on October 7th, 2023 and could not condemn the murders of two Israeli Embassy workers in May.
The UFT endorsed Mamdani, because, as their statement said, he is the candidate who most aligns with their values.
I interviewed Karen Feldman, co-founder of the New York City Public School Alliance, weeks before the UFT endorsed NYC Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani and just after the Democratic Socialist shattered all norms of history in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Tel Aviv.
Feldman is blunt. She cuts through the academic speak and gets right to the point. Feldman said the NYCPSA and its educational and political factions are urging the nation’s largest public school system and union to get back to basics, common sense, and to stop pitting what long-ago Mayor David Dinkins coined the gorgeous mosaic of diverse New Yorkers against one another, with Jews being the prime target.
Feldman said that the NYCPSA still has a hand, albeit a small one, within the UFT and is still trying to influence from within to support concerned parents, teachers and students to bring their union from slipping into the abyss and come back to the center.
“Our members are politically savvy,” Feldman said. “We are doing our best to educate our constituents as to who are the most pro-Israel and friendly to the Jewish community, because these are going to be the candidates that most align with American values.”
Just what does having American values mean? Feldman said it is a society that can uphold and respect multiple viewpoints with civility.
“It’s about valuing different viewpoints and not shouting them down. It is about balance. It is about coming back to the center instead of the polarization that is pulling us to the right and left extremes.”
It pains me that Feldman left the classroom in November 2024 with a heavy heart after a 25-year of teaching Holocaust education to city middle schoolers on the Upper East Side.
Now a realtor, she shared a chilling anecdote with me on something she overheard on primary day.
She braved the heat that hot Tuesday she walked the Upper East Side on the way to meet a client.
She overheard the conversation of “some Brooklyn-looking hipsters” who seemed to be in their 20s. They were white. They were clad in floral shirts and bucket hats.
As she passed them, she overheard a snippet of their conversation:
“I am getting so sick of seeing all these Zionists all over the place,” one said to another, she said.
You must wonder, if they voted, who they ranked first that day to snatch the Democratic slot in the election, if they voted at all that day.
I’d give you one good guess.
Feldman said that this attitude of despising “Zionists” has been a long time coming. And it began with creeping cultural changes within the ranks of the UFT.
My earliest memories of political awareness occurred at the dinner table while listening to my parents, grandparents, and sometimes aunts and uncles talk about one election or another. Above all, my elders vetted candidates with one question: “Are they good for the Jews?” hereby meaning, what is their stance on Israel.
These were the 1970s and 1980s, when the Jewish vote mattered.
According to Feldman, outside of who sits in the mayor’s and school chancellor’s office, the head of the UFT is the third most powerful elected position in the city. And they are elected by the slates who put them there.
“There was a point where many of us within the UFT began to be very concerned about the growing presence of radical socialists in the union,” Feldman said. “But who we are seeing rising in the ranks cannot even be described as socialists. The leaders of the DSA are Jihadists. (Mamdani’s) not even a socialist. He hides behind the socialist label because it is a term that seems softer. But in reality, he is a radical Islamist.”
Of course, as Feldman and I both know, say this part out loud, and you are deemed a racist.
In any case, Feldman and others involved in the NYCPSA for months tried to sound the alarm bells about Mamdani, especially to the retiree factions within the union.
According to Feldman, it is these retirees who have been “duped” by their union.
She slammed the leadership of UFT retiree rep head Marianne Pizzitola for supporting some of the union’s hard left slates of the union.
And the standards and endorsements set by the UFT go the way of the nation. It has been that way for nearly a century, in part, she said, because of the involvement of Jewish immigrants who became entrenched in the development of a quality and fair education system to set the path to success for their children as well as for other immigrants.
Still, even before the UFT endorsed Mamdani, Feldman was troubled by the direction the union was headed. There has been a growing number of slates in the UFT that agree with Mamdani’s stance on boycotting Israel, and just as in the Democratic party, there is becoming a drastic shift to the left in the UFT.
Not familiar with the politics of the UFT and its relationship with the Jews, I checked into it and found this information on a blog featured on the Times of Israel:
The six-term president, Michael Mulgrew, who just won his seat again, was contested by Olivia Swisher from the ARISE slate and Amy Arundell from the slate called A Better Contract (ABC).
Arundell, the ABC candidate, had a spat in October 2023 with the UFT’s leader, making a resolution to condemn the October 7th attacks. In a deleted tweet, Arundell declared “Zionists are literally the most evil people to walk this earth.”
Swisher has links to the radical group The People’s Forum. While they claim to represent the downtrodden, the working-class, and marginalized demographic of the city, they hosted Palestinian Land Day in March of 2025. There, they invited participants to “Join us in the streets in New York City to assert the right of every Palestinian to remain and return to Palestine!” with the hashtag #ShutItDownforPalestine.
While Feldman said there has been some relief that, for now, Mulgrew held onto his presidency, the UFT continues a dangerous slide to the hard left.
“The union decides on the direction and timbre of professional development workshops, teaching teachers, and curriculum development,” Feldman said. “More than their antisemitism, we are concerned about their anti-American leanings, because to be antisemitic is symptomatic of the weakening of American values. If people like this take over the UFT leadership, more radical teachers will be hired to infuse their antisemitic, anti-Western, and anti-American leanings into the classroom. What will this mean first for Jewish students and teachers, and then for the system as a whole? It will crumble. This will signal the breakdown of the city’s educational system. I am talking Hitler Youth 2.0 right here in the classrooms of New York City.”
Like I said, Feldman does not mince words. And, after working for 25 years as a Holocaust teacher and historian, her words should have clout.
Finishing up our conversation, I asked Feldman to reflect upon the students she taught in pre-pandemic times: middle schoolers in 2017-2019.
If they were 13 or 14 back in those years, they could very well be the age of those Brooklyn hipsters walking around on primary day being “sick of all these Zionists.”
Feldman said Mamdani gets the mindset of 20-somethings.
They volunteered for him by the thousands and pushed him over the finish line to win the primary.
He understands how they live on social media, so that’s where he met them with his slick campaigns, promising them things like rent freezes, subsidized groceries, and free buses, all the while refusing to call out a slogan that calls for a wave of terror attacks against Jews.
And he also has a deep understanding of how this generation was taught in school, viewing everything through the “oppressed vs. oppressor” filter.
“If the White man was the oppressor, then certainly, they framed Andrew Cuomo (though far from being perfect), as the privileged white capitalist, and Mamdani represents the oppressed, even though he grew up as a privileged millionaire. He never had a hard day or a hungry day in his life. What he is is a future oppressor in disguise. It is an inversion and a manipulation of the younger people’s minds.”
Feldman acknowledges that New York City has become unaffordable for Gen Zers who pay sky-high rents with salaries that are stretched ever thinner.
But turning to socialism is not the answer.
“Of course, (what Mamdani promised) is music to their ears,” Feldman said. “To them, older and more successful New Yorkers have been framed as money-hungry capitalists, and that capitalism is evil. What our young adults are misunderstanding is that the reason why America, by way of New York City, has become the greatest city on earth is because of capitalism and the opportunities it provides. Sure, there are many issues within capitalism that we need to perfect, but the solutions are not going to be found within socialism, because with it comes authoritarianism.
“And that our young voters don’t realize that and would rather embrace socialism is where we have failed as teachers of history.”