Elliot Cosgrove: Clerical Counter-Revolutionary
Ruthless Cosmopolitan
By Ari Paul
Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the Park Avenue Synagogue on Manhattan’s swanky Upper East Side, is calling for a religious rebellion against the incoming New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist and Muslim immigrant born in Uganda.
Cosgrove had already inspired a rabbinical outcry against Mamdani’s popularity before his election. Some rabbis bristled at the idea of electoral politics dividing Jews and the clergy.
As Haaretz recently reported, the rabbi used his Shabbos address to demand his congregation get more politically involved in responding to Mamdani’s election, saying, “It’s time to stop licking our wounds and playing defence and start playing offence.”
According to the Israeli paper, the sermon criticised “the Democratic Socialists of America – the political organization to which Mamdani and other progressives, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, belong – warning that their win in New York City is ‘just the tip of the spear’”.
Cosgrove “called on congregants to donate to New York Solidarity Network, a pro-Israel organization that poured funds into stopping a Mamdani win, raising tens of thousands of dollars for local races to combat candidates critical of Israel”.
Zionist anger at Mamdani has grown after his election ever since pro-Palestine activists staged a protest outside another Upper East Side synagogue, as it had “rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel as well as to settlements in the occupied West Bank”, according to The New York Times.
But the optics of Palestinian flags outside a Jewish place of worship, without the full context, supplied ammo for Mamdani’s critics, making it seem like the protest was against Jews generally, not just the Israeli government.
One could cut Cosgrove some emotional slack in his response to this protest by noting that his synagogue was a victim of vandalism last year, when someone spray-painted the word “Palestine” under the word “Israel” on a sign with a prayer on it.
In Jewish liturgy, the word “Israel” doesn’t mean the same thing as the modern state of Israel, so equating it with the post-1948 nation-state is, at best, ignorant and possibly real Antisemitism.
But Mamdani has shown no such confusion with his politics. Yet Cosgrove’s sermon, coming from such an influential and monied perch in New York society, reverberates the belief that the incoming Muslim mayor is a danger to Jewish New Yorkers because of his stance in favour of Palestinian liberation.
The affair recalls the late Jonathan Sacks, once the United Kingdom’s chief rabbi, and his statements tying former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to Antisemitism.
Sacks went after Corbyn’s statements about Zionists and compared the leftist leader to Enoch Powell, the notoriously xenophobic Tory statesman.
The accusations of Antisemitism against Corbyn were part of his downfall, although his supporters think these charges were blown out of proportion for political reasons.
But the odds are against Cosgrove, who has taken up the mantle of clerical resistance to Mamdani’s platform of free buses, universal child care and rent freezes, all popular ideas in neighbourhoods other than ritzy communities like the Upper East Side, where the centrist candidate, disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, won voting precincts with Saddam Hussein-type percentages.
For one thing, the British Jewish community is tiny compared to New York City’s Jewish population, which varies widely in terms of income, national heritage, and level of religious observance.
Cosgrove can grab headlines. Given his community, he is well-connected in Manhattan society. Still, he has nowhere near the level of authority for the Jewish community that Sacks had over the years in the UK.
As we have noted in this space, Mamdani won with a reported third of the city’s Jewish vote.
Mamdani appointed five rabbis to his transition team, although as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted, none of them are Orthodox (Cosgrove’s congregation is Conservative, a denomination that is notch more observant than Reform but not as stringent as the Orthodox).
It’s clear that the upper-class resentment against Mamdani and his platforms looks unappealing on its own. They’re sore losers, and no one wants to side with the wealthy when it comes to issues of unaffordable rents and essential services for the 99 per cent.
So we need to see Cosgrove’s sermon as a religious cloak over vulgar class politics.
The Cut reported on how a social media group of Upper East Side moms blew up in comments, “looking for property in New Jersey or Florida, predicting that Mamdani’s promise to make buses free will lead criminals to rape and kill innocent passengers, and airing their worries that New York City is on its way to becoming 1930s Germany”.
Cosgrove and those like him have even scored a significant victory: Julie Menin won the race for city council speaker, which acts as a legislative counterweight to the mayor.
Menin is, as Politico described her, a “Jewish resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side who’s married to a real estate developer” and “represents a segment of the Democratic Party that ardently opposed Mamdani’s election”. She is also a former member of the Park Avenue Synagogue.
As Zohran Mamdani’s supporters move forward in trying to implement social democratic reforms to improve life for the non-rich, they should be prepared to take hits like in Cosgrove’s sermons.
While Cosgrove’s attacks are undoubtedly rooted in Zionist anxiety about the turning tide of public opinion about Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, they are also a part of class anxiety as well.
Photograph courtesy of Pamela Drew. Published under a Creative Commons license.