If you looked at the diversity of New Yorkers present at Zohran Mamdani’s November 4 victory party, Haredi rabbis Moshe Indig and Moshe Hoffman didn’t look too out of place. Having endorsed Mamdani just two days before the election, Indig—a prominent Williamsburg, Brooklyn, askan (activist) from the Satmar Hasidic community’s Ahronite branch—understood that his presence was important for building good relationships with the mayor-elect. In a heated December interview with the popular Orthodox magazine Mishpacha, Indig argued that his endorsement was done with full approval of the current Satmar rebbe, Aaron Teitelbaum. Despite some hedging by other Satmar askans, Indig saw an opportunity to advance the community’s interests. “To be a real and responsible leader, you need to make correct decisions that are in the best interest of the community, even when they are difficult and unpopular,” he explained.
Mamdani’s outreach to Haredi communities ramped up in the weeks before the election. In what started with a viral visit to a Williamsburg sukkah, Mamdani met with numerous Haredi leaders and released an open letter in Yiddish outlining his plans to make housing affordable, provide childcare, and ensure public safety. At least in Williamsburg, some of these overtures worked. On October 31, the two rival Satmar factions officially denounced the “fear and hate campaign” against Mamdani in Jewish institutions as “dangerous and against the Torah way,” despite not officially endorsing any candidate in the race.
Mamdani’s warm reception among the anti-Zionist Satmar leadership—the largest and most powerful Haredi sect—should surprise no one. As Indig explained bluntly when pressed, the Satmar vote “is transactional.” “What do you think politics is?” he asked the interviewer rhetorically. Unlike mainstream Jewish institutions, like the liberal Zionist Jewish Majority, who denounced Mamdani as a threat to Jews, the conservative Satmar leadership didn’t see Mamdani’s pro-Palestine politics as a red line.
“People who are very strongly Zionist, their reaction to Zohran was very emotional from the get-go, ” said Meyer Labin, a Yiddish writer who grew up in Satmar Williamsburg and encouraged Indig to meet with Mamdani after Eric Adams dropped out. “For them it wasn’t like that.” Labin explained that if the leadership had to choose between Israel and protecting the independence of Satmar religious schools, they would choose the latter.
Beyond establishing good relationships, however, the leadership’s overtures made little difference at the ballot box. Despite both Satmar leaderships reportedly being comfortable with a Mamdani victory, the Haredi areas of South Williamsburg voted more than 80 percent for Andrew Cuomo, numbers which matched those in Borough Park, Far Rockaway, and the Chabad areas of Crown Heights. Labin shrugs this off. “At the end of the day, the Haredi popular vote is never going to go for the left,” he said, adding that Indig’s endorsement was more a gesture of good faith.
Mamdani may have received one third of New York’s Jewish vote. But in a city where one third of the Jewish population is Haredi, Orthodox voters are increasingly defining what the “Jewish vote”—and the “conservative vote”—mean. If Mamdani created a left/liberal coalition on Palestine/Israel, Haredi voters lay squarely outside that alliance. In Haredi society, which may soon make up one fifth of the Jewish world, institutions are quickly losing ground to a mirror grassroots politics, a grassroots politics aligned with the anti-liberal right.
Fuelled by a crisis of meaning among the younger generation, the old political strategy championed by Indig—quiet, transactional, and anti/non-Zionist—is losing ground to something brasher and more masculine. In much of the American Jewish community, young people are shunning Israel in droves, but in Williamsburg and Borough Park, Israel is becoming an anchor, a symbol of strength. Here, illiberalism, supremacism, and campaigns of destruction aren’t a source of alarm. They’re becoming a point of pride.
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah in 1946, the rebbe of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty, Joel Teitelbaum, arrived in the United States by boat. Although he was saved due to the Zionist-organized Kasztner transport that reached Switzerland from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Teitelbaum would soon become the most prominent anti-Zionist leader of the post-war period.
Over the next decade, his ultraconservative sectarian ideology drew a massive following, largely among other Holocaust survivors, who found meaning in a traditionally pious lifestyle. America may have been the land of opportunity for some, but Teitelbaum wanted his followers to remain a people apart. He banned his supporters from reading secular newspapers, encouraged them to speak Yiddish, and discouraged engagement in politics. Fearing integration into non-Orthodox society, the Satmar Rebbe distrusted what he saw as “foreign” political ideologies: secularism, nationalism, and especially Zionism.
In his 1961 magnum opus Vayoel Moshe, Teitelbaum argued that Zionism was incompatible with Jewish law and would only hinder the messianic era. “His view was that the Jews’ decision to take it upon themselves to return to the land and build a state before the end-time was a defiant rebellion against that covenantal promise of exile,” says Shaul Magid, who is currently working on a monograph about Teitelbaum (and who is an Arc contributing writer). Central to Teitelbaum’s argument was a commentary on a Talmudic passage stating that Jews are not to establish a Jewish presence in the land of Israel through conquest, not to provoke other nations, and not to delay the coming of the Messiah.
For Teitelbaum, the State of Israel was a false messianism. It was no different from that of sixteenth-century mystic Shabatai Zevi, who united the Jewish Mediterranean before converting to Islam; the Judean revolutionary Simon bar Kokhba, who led a failed revolt against the Romans in 132 C.E.; or the biblical golden calf, which the Israelites sinfully worshipped in place of God at Mount Sinai. Teitelbaum forbade his followers in Jerusalem from taking state money and participating in its elections. If any of his followers traveled there, he forbade visiting the Western Wall, so as not to recognize Israel’s sovereignty after 1967. When Teitelbaum himself visited, he paid in U.S. dollars rather than in lira, the Israeli currency of the time.
In Williamsburg and Borough Park, Israel is becoming an anchor; a symbol of strength. Here, illiberalism, supremacism, and campaigns of destruction aren’t a source of alarm. They’re becoming a point of pride.
Although he was among the staunchest of anti-Zionists, Teitelbaum was not an outlier. Before World War II, Hasidic rebbes and roshei yeshiva almost-unanimously opposed the Zionist project; and most European Orthodox leaders held that it was completely illegitimate to join Zionist institutions. In 1900, several prominent rabbis came together to publish Light for the Righteous, a pamphlet that directly attacked Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State. Although attitudes have softened among many Haredim, the Zionist mainstays of other Jewish communities—Israeli flags in synagogues, or the prayer for the State of Israel during services—are still never found in Haredi shuls. But the official non-Zionist stance of Haredi institutions doesn’t always reflect the reality on the ground.
“Growing up, I was outside of Zionism,” explained Frieda Vizel, a tour guide and YouTuber who makes content about the Haredi world. “Israel was a very faraway place. The alte heim—the old homeland of Eastern Europe—was a much closer place in my imagination.”
The current generation of young people, she said, have a different experience. Since the early 2000s, globalization has strengthened the connection between Haredi communities abroad and those in Israel. Ayala Fader, who teaches at Fordham, said that “the internet and its affordances have opened up both transnational kinds of community building” for Haredi communities. Despite leaders’ best efforts to ban the internet in the 2010s, its growing use has exposed many Haredim to Israeli culture and pro-Israel politics, while connecting them to relatives there. The rise of the “kosher travel industry” has meant that American Haredim are increasingly visiting Israel, not only to see their rebbes, but also to attend yeshiva, visit family, and go on vacation. These cultural links have blurred the lines between Haredi identity and Zionism. “You can be anti-Zionist,” Fader said,”but Orthodox Jews go back and forth constantly. There’s a global Orthodoxy.”
As such, the Haredi world is just now discovering “Israelism.” For Jewish liberal communities, support for Israel often fills a void left by secularization in the twentieth century. For Haredim, it provides a sense of cultural identity beyond strict adherence to increasingly obsolete spiritual leaders. In a time of increasing adoption of the internet, upward social mobility, and a perceived rise in global antisemitism, there are few respected leaders giving meaning to changing times. “I think there’s less unquestioning adherence to rabbinic leadership,” Fader said. “I think it started with all those political struggles over succession”—she is referring to the infighting among leaders of various dynasties in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “I think that made them [the rebbes] seem very human.”
The fourth generation of Haredim in America, more online than the last, is less set on piety and keeping quiet. They’re not content with asceticism and being apolitical. They may be speaking Yiddish and dressing like their ancestors, but young people—especially young men—are experimenting with new ideas and trends. In this context, supporting Israel is a form of rebellion against the old orthodoxy; it’s a different way of being Jewish.
“There is a kind of male bravado that I’m seeing that is not what I grew up with,” Vizel recounted. “For us, it was like, ‘Look at how heroically they stole potato peels in the concentration camp to avoid eating non-kosher.’ They were not muscled up and strong, and ‘I’ll punch you back.’” Today, though, many young Haredi men are taking up new activities that were previously unthinkable, like working out, owning guns, and showing off material wealth.
Yaakov Shapiro, a prominent anti-Zionist rabbi, blames fearmongering around “security,” particularly after the Hamas attacks of October 7, for the rise in pro-Israel sentiment in the Haredi world. “The gateway into Zionism is to say: ‘Bottom line is Israel is under attack. We have to stand together against the enemy. Jewish lives are at stake,’” he said. “And if you have these right-wing security-type ideas, then maybe you’ll like Ben-Gvir.”
Labin agreed, adding that the broader campaign to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism has convinced many that the pro-Palestine movement is against all Jews. “It gets very simplistic,” he said. Being visibly Jewish, Haredim are particularly vulnerable to random anti-Jewish attacks; a danger intensified by the public outrage and misdirected fury over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Labin, who is not Zionist, admitted that “everybody in Williamsburg knows now that ‘Free Palestine’ is something you say when you hit a Jew.”
These cultural trends are clearly reflected in the data. A 2024 survey by Nishma Research found that although only 28 percent of Haredim in New York feel “pro-Zionistic,” 83 percent feel connected to Israel. Most interestingly, 68 percent of Haredim felt that Israel was “handling the war well,” compared to just 48 percent of Modern Orthodox respondents. Haredim may not articulate their support through the language of Zionism, but they have grown more connected to Israel in the last two years.
These political trends are mirrored in Israel, where Haredi parties have become unconditional allies of the Israeli right since the early 2000s. The writer Ithamar Handelman-Smith, who grew up in the Ger Hasidic sect, explained, “In the past, Haredim who were dealing with the State of Israel did it out of pure interest. You could have a left-wing government, you could have a right wing government. They didn’t care.” In the 2022 election, religious supremacist candidates like Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir made significant inroads in Haredi communities, undermining the patronage politics of the Haredi parties. Although few Haredim serve in the Israeli army, new special units like Hashmonaim are slowly normalizing the practice, mopping up high-profile recruits like the famous Haredi singer Mendel Roth—the son of the anti-Zionist Shomer Emunim rebbe. And opposition to the draft doesn’t translate to dovish politics. A June 2025 poll by Hebrew University found that among Israeli Jewish citizens, Haredim (97 percent) were the most likely to support expelling Gaza’s residents.
In Handelman-Smith’s assessment, Haredi politics in Jerusalem, New York, and the other hubs like Antwerp and London share a common thread: “They relate more easily to anti-democratic ideas and the worldview of ‘us versus them.’” If postwar Haredi leaders distrusted the secular Zionist left, Israel’s turn towards more explicit religious supremacy is likely more relatable.
“The gateway into Zionism is to say: ‘Bottom line is Israel is under attack. We have to stand together against the enemy. Jewish lives are at stake,’” he said. “And if you have these right-wing security-type ideas, then maybe you’ll like Ben-Gvir.”
The glorification of power and security that has taken root in the context of support for Israel finds its American echo in the Haredi world’s devotion to Donald Trump, whose cult of personality within the community is almost messianic. In Labin’s experience, Trump was the first politician Haredim were excited about. His image as a plainspoken New Yorker who worked in real estate made him seem familiar; he also represented an aspirational archetype of masculinity long denied to Haredi men. In the last three U.S. presidential elections, Trump has consistently won over 70 percent of the Haredi vote, with his share of ballots increasing significantly in each election.
Trump also represents the allure of conservative politics more broadly. “There’s a lot of ideological resonances with things like traditional gender roles and public religion and against quote-unquote ‘radical Islam’ and secularism,” Fader said. “Like a kind of culture war.” And Trump’s image as being pro-Israel has left a mark on Haredi politics as well. Shapiro said that “because of Trump, a lot of people have become more Zionist. You have a guy like Trump who’s pro-Israel. And they think that if a non-Jew is pro-Israel, that means he loves Jews.” Some Satmars he knew even “became Zionist because they were so pro-Trump.”
Shapiro has made it his mission to slow the tide of Israelism in his community. A great-nephew of the Satmar Rebbe, Shapiro combines Orthodox and secular anti-Zionist teachings, disseminating them to both audiences. He has written a bestselling book on the topic and has appeared on popular podcasts like The Palestine Pod, TRT World, and The Katie Halper Show; he also gives talks at Haredi yeshivas. In April 2025, Shapiro gave a fiery speech outside of the Israeli consulate in New York, protesting Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit: “Zionism was designed to transform the Jewish people into something similar to those antisemites which the Zionists admired,” he announced to the crowd. In the summer of 2025, Shapiro led the Hareh Betzbah movement, which urged Haredim not to vote in the World Zionist Congress elections. With the support of prominent rabbis, including Aharon Feldman and Dov Landau, the organization released a fifty-two-page pamphlet calling Zionism “the single most successful heretical movement of modern times and perhaps in all of Jewish history (since the Golden Calf).”
Amid the overarching drift towards Pro-Israelism, spawned by the crisis of leadership, Magid sees a different undercurrent developing: a “return to the sources.” His seminar series on Vayoel Moshe, available on Spotify, has gained traction among some young Satmar men in Williamsburg, who are independently having reading groups and seminars on Teitelbaum’s works. “There’s this weird anti-Zionist revival happening, because the present leadership doesn’t really have anything interesting to say,” Magid said.
Despite the tides, it’s important to remember that Haredi institutions haven’t shifted their stances on Zionism. Labin reminded me that this isn’t insignificant. “In the secular world, the institutions lost all of their pull and power with the young people,” but in the Haredi world, they still carry weight. Over the next four years, this might put Mamdani in a prominent position to shift the Overton window: “I think he has an opportunity to prove to the Orthodox community that the far left isn’t the monster they’ve been taught to be scared of,” Labin said.
In New York, Mamdani’s focus on affordability and dignity is slowly shifting the political conversation; his success will hinge on whether material concerns can outweigh identity politics. Mamdani may help secure housing and affordable child care for Haredi communities, and may develop good relationships with community officials. But whether his broad coalition can offer a more compelling alternative to Trump’s ethno-nationalism is the real challenge ahead—not just for Haredim, but for pluralist politics at large.