The Democrat Socialist poised to become the next boss of America’s largest blue city came out of a Maine college primed to spread his anti-Israeli underpinnings.
That’s the conclusion of a new profile of Bowdoin College grad Zohran Mamdani unveiled Tuesday in The New York Times – on the eve of the New York City mayoral election.
“His studies complemented his commitment to political activism,” the Times says. “At Bowdoin, he formed a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, before the group became a polarizing national force, and unsuccessfully tried to persuade Bowdoin to join an academic boycott of Israel.”
Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Maine’s Ivy League school, bound and determined to spread his anti-Semitic leanings, judging from the Times.
“If anything, his college years seemed to deepen his commitment to his already defined worldview,” the paper reports.
Brian Purnell, one of Mamdani’s professors at Bowdoin College, noted for the Times that Mamdani’s major was Africana studies, a curriculum pursued by few Bowdoin undergrads.
“It’s very rare for someone to come to college and say, ‘I want to major in Africana studies,’” Parnell said.
“Majors like Africana studies, or any of its siblings such as women’s studies, critics charge, promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history,” the Times said. “Some disparagingly call the entire field ‘grievance studies.’”
Mamdani has recalled his Africana studies education fondly. Bowdoin, he has said, is where he first read Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial militant and psychiatrist who wrote about the psychic injuries that racism causes.
As one of only 10 students in his class who graduated with his major, his interests tended toward classes that dealt with history and sociology, his professors recalled.
And he expressed particular interest in slavery in the U.S. and Reconstruction.
The Times account points out how Mamdani wrote columns for the Bowdoin Orient promoting his claims of white supremacy.
“For instance, in one column he implored the Bowdoin community to ‘break the stranglehold of whiteness, wherever it may be,’” the Times said. “And he name-checked well-known scholars, such as Peggy McIntosh, whose writings on power dynamics introduced the concept of ‘white privilege.’”
“I sit in class not knowing whether to correct everyone’s mispronunciation of an Indian woman’s name,” Mamdani wrote in a column. “I usually do, but today I’m tired. I’m tired of being one of a few nonwhite students in a classroom, if not the only one.”
Mamdani told the Orient in a 2019 interview that his studies were “very formative” and informed his thinking about urban problems, in particular “why they exist — and who made them exist,” he said.
He also threw in some advice for student organizers, urging them to follow their passions and “not to feel like any position is too radical,” the Times reported.
Meanwhile, the mayoral race favoring the former Bowdoin grad is tightening a week before the Nov. 4 election.
But Mamdani still leads disgraced former New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo by double digits, according to CBS News.
Cuomo, now running as an independent, having been trounced by Mamdani in the Democrat primary, currently shows a 10-point deficit in the upcoming general election.
Besides being accused by the ex-governor of lacking management experience, Mamdani is also now taking flack from the right of the liberal Cuomo, who resigned as the state’s chief executive four years ago amid a flurry of sexual-harassment allegations he denies.
Just days before the election, a conservative watchdog is accusing Mamdani of accepting illegal foreign donations, according to the Hindustan Times.
The Coolidge Reagan Foundation on Tuesday filed two criminal referrals, one with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and another with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, alleging that Mamdani’s campaign violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Law by taking contributions from foreign nationals, the paper said, quoting Fox News.
Mamdani defended his funding, telling the paper that “31 of the 170 donors have proven their citizenship or legal permanent residence and have been deemed permissible by the Campaign Finance Board, and the remaining 139 have had their donations refunded.”
Federal law strictly prohibits foreign nationals from donating to American political campaigns.
