Susan Abulhawa, an anti-Israel activist who worked on an art project with Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife, posted a screed on social media dismissing the Holocaust and accusing Jews of dominating government and media, and City Hall has said nothing.
Abulhawa took to X on July 31 to attack Jewish Americans who had raised concerns about Mamdani's 18-member judicial screening panel, which contains zero Jewish members. The backlash over that panel had been building for a day when Abulhawa weighed in, not to defend the mayor's appointments on the merits, but to mock the people objecting.
Her post dismissed the murder of six million European Jews as a spent talking point. She accused Jewish Americans of holding outsized power. And she closed with a warning that read, in plain English, like a threat.
The New York Post reported the full text of Abulhawa's July 31 statement on X. She wrote:
"Europe's holocaust has lost its meaning to the point that the whole world is sick of hearing about it. These clowns invoke that genocide with every perceived slight (even as they are committing or supporting a contemporary genocide)."
She did not stop there. Abulhawa went on to claim that Jews hold disproportionate influence across American life:
"There is an extreme overrepresentation of Jews in every branch of government, media, and culture, but we have to listen to more holocaust whining because ONE d*** judicial panel didn't contain enough Jews."
Then came the closing line, the one that moved the post from offensive into something darker:
"Seriously, there's something terribly wrong with them, and if moderate Jews don't effectively reign [sic] in these extremists, it's not going to end well for anyone."
Read those three passages together. The Holocaust is dismissed. Jewish civic participation is recast as sinister overrepresentation. And the whole thing ends with a vague but unmistakable warning about consequences. This is not criticism of Israeli government policy. It is a broadside against Jewish people as a group.
Abulhawa is not a random social media user picking fights. She has a direct professional tie to the Mamdani household. NYC First Lady Rama Duwaji created the lead graphic for an Abulhawa essay titled "A Trail of Soap," published in Slow Factory's Everything Is Political magazine.
X users were quick to flag the connection. One wrote: "Zohran Mamdani's wife did artwork for Susan just a few months ago." Another tagged the mayor's official account directly: "@NYCMayor normal thing for your wife's best friend to say?"
Neither Duwaji nor Mamdani responded to the Post's request for comment. That silence carries its own weight. When someone with a documented working relationship to the first lady of New York City publishes statements mocking Jewish suffering and warning of consequences for Jewish "extremists," the mayor's office owes the public more than a closed door.
Abulhawa's July 31 outburst did not arrive in a vacuum. The Post has previously reported that she celebrated the October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel and has described Jewish people as "vampires," "demons," and "ghouls." Those characterizations, reported in earlier coverage, paint a picture of someone whose hostility toward Jews is not new and not subtle.
Mamdani himself has faced sustained criticism on related fronts. Israeli leaders across the political spectrum condemned him after he called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "war criminal." The chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Museum publicly invited Mamdani to learn "what genocide actually means."
And the judicial screening panel that triggered Abulhawa's rant is itself part of a broader pattern. Mamdani assembled an 18-member body to screen judicial candidates for New York City, and did not include a single Jewish member. In a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in the world, that is not an oversight that explains itself.
The backlash has extended well beyond policy disagreements. Families of 9/11 victims petitioned to bar Mamdani from the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero, a measure of how deeply his conduct has alienated New Yorkers who expect basic civic respect from their mayor.
The question now is simple. Does Mamdani condemn Abulhawa's statements? Does Duwaji disavow a collaborator who mocks the Holocaust and traffics in conspiracy theories about Jewish power?
So far, the answer from both is nothing. No statement. No distance. No comment.
Abulhawa's post is public. The collaboration between her and the first lady is documented. The mayor's own record on Israel-related controversies, from the Netanyahu remarks to the empty arrest threat that drew public ridicule, forms a clear backdrop. Every day City Hall stays quiet, the silence looks less like caution and more like tacit acceptance.
When an activist with ties to your household tells millions of people that the Holocaust has "lost its meaning" and that Jews had better watch themselves, you do not get to hide behind "no comment." You either reject it or you own it.
