New York —

As a Jew and a New Yorker, Norman Needleman said he finds the city’s mayoral election “painful.”

Waiting in line Friday to vote on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the 77-year-old Needleman thought Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, would be good for the city’s social needs. But his positions on Israel were just too much for Needleman to accept.

“If I try and bend that far, I’ll break,” he said, quoting the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”

His comments reflect what has been a fraught debate, among Jews in New York and elsewhere, ahead of the city’s mayoral election Tuesday. Jewish voters have long reliably supported Democrats, and Mamdani won the Democratic primary, but concerns about rising antisemitism and Mamdani’s sharp criticisms of Israel have opened up a generational split and raised deeper questions what it means to be an American Jew in 2025.

This election has shown clearly that “Jews and Jewish voters are not a monolith,” said Phylisa Wisdom, the director of the New York Jewish Agenda, an advocacy group promoting liberal Jewish New Yorkers.

“Folks have been really trying to reckon with how much does it matter that they have a mayor that has their same feelings about Israel,” she said. “There are some who feel like it’s not the most important thing to me when I’m voting for mayor, how they feel about Israel, and there are some who t