We’re All Mishpachah      

The meeting with Mr. Cuomo is devoid of pomp and circumstance — no opulent offices, grand entrances, or teeming entourages. It’s just a private citizen rendezvous in a midtown Manhattan kosher restaurant near the Garment District.

When I arrive at the Jerusalem Café on West 36th Street, one aide is waiting at the door. There is a confluence of kashrus certificates and Cosa Nostra vibes as I’m escorted past pizzamen hard at work flipping dough, up the stairs, around the corner, to a dimly lit backroom where the Boss sits in a yellow circle of light cast by a single hanging bulb. The aides retreat to the shadows, but when I pull out my recorder and slap it on the table, one approaches and deploys her own recorder.

“For our records as well,” she says.

Perhaps the venue is meant to highlight the Cuomo-Jewish relationship, which the candidate clearly wishes to emphasize.

“Politics, like so many other things in life, is about relationships,” he says, starting his pitch. “My relationship with the Orthodox community goes back to ’82.”

He describes a healthy symbiosis: Back then, Orthodox Jews didn’t just vote, they campaigned hard for both Cuomos, volunteering to staple up posters, hand out literature, and organize events. In exchange, the Cuomo team took care of their needs.

“The Orthodox community, like many other communities, has particular needs and interests,” he continues. “Who understands those needs, who is going to be responsive, and who is competent enough to actually do something about it?”

Cuomo points to his extensive record.

When Kiryas Joel was founded and its school district was launched, Governor Mario Cuomo and Andrew worked to resolve constitutional issues surrounding separation of shul and state. Later, when KJ was experiencing explosive growth, the town wanted to annex adjoining land, but neighboring towns moved to stop it, until Cuomo the younger, by then himself governor, stepped in and vetoed several laws that would have impacted the village.

“I found a way to get it done,” he says.

“State tuition assistance for rabbinical students — the state pays for educating and training a rabbi? How is that constitutional? We made it happen.”

Leading askanim confirmed with Mishpacha that the governor pushed Tuition Assistance Program funding for yeshivos.

He ticks off additional items: “Housing assistance, meeting special needs in education… New York City was very aggressive on the circumcision issue until I intervened and helped settle it.”

He’s referring to a 2012 move by the Bloomberg administration to require parents to sign a consent form before metzitzah b’peh could be performed at a bris. The restriction was enacted after several babies contracted HSV1 herpes virus shortly after their brissin, and NYC Health Department officials blamed it on the milah procedure. Rabbanim, mohalim, and leaders within the Orthodox Jewish community condemned the requirement and urged noncompliance.

Askanim within the community confirm that Governor Cuomo was helpful. He convened a meeting of health department officials and community leaders. Eventually, the case wound up in court, and a compromise was reached in which the health forms were abandoned, and the community agreed that if it could ever be shown that a particular mohel infected a baby with herpes, he would be banned from performing metzitzah b’peh for life.

“Shabbos Goy”                                    

When Cuomo talks about relationships, it’s not just about accomplishments. There’s a cultural overlap between his Italian-American upbringing and the traditional Jewish community, and he likes to play it up.

Growing up in Queens, the Cuomos were sometimes called upon to operate electrical switches for Orthodox Jewish families on Shabbos. Now, Andrew wants to parlay that into doing benevolent deeds for the whole community.

Speaking at an event in Long Island in 2023, he explained that fighting anti-Semitism and advocating for Israel are better done by non-Jews. “This is an extension of the Shabbos goy concept… some things are better done by the Shabbos goy. I will do it… The Shabbos goy can do the work that benefits both.”

He frequently speaks of his kinship with the Jewish community. “You’re all, as they say in Italian, mishpachah,” he once said in a speech.

It’s not all joking. In 2018, he installed a mezuzah at the Executive Mansion in Albany.

But sometimes, Cuomo’s easy-breezy camaraderie with the community can lead to teasing that doesn’t quite land right. His opponents can point to some off-color comments the former governor has allegedly made, such as a New York Times Magazine article in which he expressed frustration with Succos, supposedly saying, “These people and their […] treehouses.” Cuomo has denied making the comment.

In 2021, he told the US attorney investigating him, Joon Kim, that his inquiry “raises ethical and legal questions” because “your rabbi, Senator Schumer, called for my resignation.” During his 2018 campaign, Cuomo said, “We are not as without rhythm as some of our Jewish brothers and sisters,” comparing Catholic dancing to that of Jews.

How would Cuomo explain these pithies? I didn’t ask him, but the vibe he exudes is that old friends should be able to share some good-natured ribbing without taking offense — just as he is unlikely to be offended by the Mafia imagery I used to describe our rendezvous.

Mea Culpa?                                          

Much as you never get a second chance to make a first impression, your last impression is a lasting impression; for Cuomo, the last impression is not a good one.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the governor was at the peak of his power, liberally wielding his emergency executive powers every day to impose crippling restrictions. He issued injunctions controlling businesses, schools, and religious services. His lockdowns, daily press briefings, and models for managing medical resources drew national attention, and set an example followed by many other states — and countries. The briefings were must-watch, each one announcing new decisions and information that would have drastic effects on people’s lives.

“It was the most frightening thing I ever went through,” Cuomo tells me. “We think that no matter what happens, someone knows [what to do]… nuclear attack, natural disaster, someone knows. But in Covid, no one knew. We had the highest infection rate on the globe, and we had the world’s best health experts sitting around the table — WHO, NIH, CDC, CMS, the whole alphabet soup — and they said, ‘I don’t know.’ And the possibilities they were talking about were cataclysmic… apocalyptic.”

The rules changed as fast as the weather, but for the frum community in New York, one consistent impression remained: They were being publicly vilified, somehow blamed for an international crisis, and targeted for mistreatment. The emotions that reverberated through the community ranged from fury to depression.

“I was never so depressed in my entire life,” one askan remembers. “Thousands of government officials — legislators, state senators, assembly members, state judges, federal judges, prosecutors, you name it… are getting a certain view of us as a community that is reckless and that has no problem being mass spreaders of illness.

“Years after Covid is gone,” he said, “the community will still be suffering from this.”

The Cuomo administration also drew considerable fire for its Covid nursing home policies. Families were denied access to loved ones in nursing homes for what seemed an interminable length of time. The governor also ordered that thousands of recovering Covid patients be transferred to nursing homes, ostensibly to free up beds in hospitals for the sickest Covid patients.

New York’s nursing home population was ravaged by the pandemic, suffering thousands of deaths, and many critics contended that the governor’s policy was to blame. He argued that the disproportionate number of nursing home deaths was due to workers unknowingly carrying the virus who kept reporting for duty. The issue weighed heavily on Cuomo in 2021, and was a large part of his decision to resign. But in the meantime, all investigations against him have been dropped, and it has been ruled “inconclusive” whether they were the cause of the deaths.

The issue still served as a backdrop for the public anger at Cuomo’s later restrictions, particularly the infamous “red zones.” Now, five years later, the tables have turned, and the former governor has come seeking voters. And the voters have questions.

Seeing Red                   

Anger over the red zones still simmers in the community. Almost all frum neighborhoods were the first to be put in red or orange zones, rolled out during the second wave of the pandemic around the Yamim Noraim of 2020. The zones seemed to have been drawn with surgical precision, swerving around neighborhoods with fewer Jews and encompassing those with more.

They had a devastating effect during Tishrei that year.

When I ask, Cuomo claims he had nothing to do with the mapping of the red zones. The rates of spread of the virus were reported by local governments to the state department of health, he says, which compiled the data and plugged it into mapping software. The zones were all automatically generated based on data, with no demographic criteria of any kind input into the system. Cuomo insists he never saw them.

I push back with a quote reported in Mishpacha at the time from Dr. Elizabeth Dufort, the former medical director of the state health department’s office of epidemiology. She testified then that the zones had been sent to the governor’s office for approval, and came back changed, with no explanations. Cuomo denies it, says he does not recognize her name at all.

“I swear by my daughter’s head that the zones were automatically generated,” he asserts gravely.

It will be up to the voter to choose whom to believe, and at least one high-level askan we interviewed expresses doubts. “This was the central issue of the time, and Cuomo has always been a control freak,” he says.

Cuomo is willing to apologize for what he characterizes as a lack of communication. “What I did not do at that time, which in retrospect I should have done, was I should have communicated more directly, because I did have that personal relationship with the community. I should have got on the phone and explained what was going on, because I think some people in the community felt that they were being targeted.”

Community leaders who spoke to Mishpacha in preparation for this interview mentioned a particularly burning memory of exactly one such call; a purported teleconference Cuomo agreed to hold with community leaders on Chol Hamoed Succos that year, billed as an opportunity to discuss Simchas Torah celebrations. But participants were kept on mute throughout the call, and Cuomo answered only two softball questions planted by his staff.

Worse, the governor urged the community to accept a 50% capacity restriction during the holiday — onerous, but perhaps workable. But three hours later, his office dropped a red, orange, and yellow zone map. Almost all Jewish neighborhoods were declared clusters, meaning full closure or limits far more severe than 50%. It was a bombshell that contradicted everything they had heard on the call. Depending on the infection rate, lockdown regulations limited shuls to ten or 25 attendees irrespective of the size of the building; while small businesses considered “essential” by the governor were allowed to function as usual.

“Cuomo played us like a fiddle,” one askan told Mishpacha at the time. “The trust is gone.”

State senator Simcha Felder, state assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein, and New York city council members Chaim Deutsch and Kalman Yeger issued a statement accusing Cuomo of a “duplicitous bait and switch… because of his unilateral and irresponsible acts, our community is rightfully shocked, angered and highly frustrated.”

Today, Cuomo doesn’t recall the incident at all, but explains that the DOH must have not yet run the numbers by the time of the call. During the call, the community was fully within the yellow zone, which allows 50% capacity; but three hours later, the computers mapped the data and the results put everyone in red.

“Why would I ‘play’ anyone?” he asks. “What could I possibly have gained from that?”

Over the Target                   

Adding to the community’s perception of being targeted were Cuomo’s comments during his public briefings, singling out and accusing Orthodox Jews for disobeying his rules and triggering the spread of infection.

“The ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — what’s happening there is the rules were never enforced in these communities,” Cuomo said in an October 2020 briefing.

His slides showed pictures of Orthodox Jews when talking about neighborhoods with high rates of spread — several even featured fake or irrelevant images, such as a funeral from 2006.

An amicus curae brief filed by the Muslim Public Affairs Council in support of Agudath Israel’s lawsuit against the governor a month later highlighted the rhetoric. “Too often, religious minorities have served as scapegoats in times of sickness, war, and fear,” the group wrote in their brief. “Latest in a long and troubling line of such incidents are the statements and policies of Governor Cuomo blaming Orthodox Jewish communities for the spread of COVID-19 and specifically targeting them for closures and restrictions, all despite a dearth of evidence… The Government’s accusatory rhetoric is fanning the flames of an already precarious position for the City’s Orthodox Jews, and this irresponsible behavior can have deadly consequences.”

Here, the mayoral hopeful offers an apology. “I feel very badly that it furthered the stigma associated with the Orthodox community,” he says. “There was no intention of any kind and I didn’t even anticipate… the extent people knew that the red zones were Orthodox, and I didn’t [myself] know what to what extent they were. But I could see that line of thinking and I feel very badly about that.”

Mr. Cuomo adds in explanation that his comments were not meant as a judgment of the character or quality of the Orthodox Jewish community, but as a simple, faultless observation of the character of its lifestyle. For most people, he was trying to say, restrictions on gathering are not a big deal, but for the frum community, whose rhythms of life are centered on ceremonies, events, worship and gatherings in significant numbers, it’s a major upheaval. “It wasn’t misbehavior, it wasn’t a lack of cooperation, it was just a feature of the lifestyle.”

It’s All Politics                            

Following the red zone edict closing shuls for Hoshana Rabbah, community leaders weighed their options. They were always hesitant to sue, but it seemed like there was no other option. Still, the governor’s power was such that some organizations feared taking him to court, lest the blowback be even worse.

The Moetzes Gedolei Torah authorized litigation, and Agudath Israel of America filed suit before Yom Tov, hoping to get a temporary restraining order. The TRO was denied, but the case eventually made it to the US Supreme Court.

The fears surrounding a lawsuit were not unfounded. Cuomo leaned hard on the plaintiffs to drop the case, Mishpacha reported at the time. He threatened one wealthy donor linked to Agudah that if the organization didn’t drop the lawsuit, he would personally excoriate Agudah officials at every one of his well-attended press conferences when he announced Covid deaths.

“I will say that because [this official] sued me, X number of people died,” Cuomo reportedly warned.

Agudah stuck it out, and SCOTUS ruled in their favor, five to four. The unsigned majority opinion found that the orders failed to consider religious needs fairly.

“The Governor is remarkably frank about this: In his judgment, laundry and liquor, travel and tools are all ‘essential,’ while traditional religious exercises are not,” the opinion stated. “That is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.”

At the time, Cuomo dismissed the ruling as political. “The Supreme Court ruling on the religious gatherings is more illustrative of the Supreme Court than anything else,” he said. “I think this was really just an opportunity for the Court to express its philosophy and politics.”

Has he changed his mind over the last five years? I read him the quote.

“Look, I think everything is political,” he says, politically. “But I get it, there’s no doubt there was a Constitutional issue between government and religion.”

But he’s quick to observe that the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn was a plaintiff in the case, alongside several shuls. To Cuomo, this indicates that whatever actions he took were not targeting the Orthodox Jews.

“The Catholics also sued me,” he says with a smile. “And I’m Catholic. So I wasn’t targeting anyone.”

The former governor expresses disbelief that this incident overshadows his previous accomplishments. “I fully understand the red zone issue,” he says. “But there’s also 40 years of history, right? We’ve had a productive, close relationship for 40 years, between my father’s administration and my own. How can we ignore that over a few months and one issue?”

The history is not lost on askanim. “He has been very helpful over the years,” one seasoned askan confirms, listing some of the accomplishments the governor mentioned earlier, as well as some he worked on but did not pass, such as an education tax credit. “He tried several times to get that through. But I think what was most important was that there was always an open door, we could always get to him about matters of importance to the community, and he was responsive.”

“Overall, we’ve worked with Governor Cuomo extensively in the past, and have found him to be forthcoming and helpful,” says a prominent community activist, who declined to be quoted on the record.

“What I’m most surprised about is that I never expected this of him,” said assemblyman Simcha Eichenstein at the time.

Asked in October 2020 if Cuomo was anti-Semitic, Rabbi Yeruchim Silber, Agudah’s director of New York governmental affairs, who dealt frequently with the Cuomo administration, said, “I don’t believe he is. It’s just his way of doing things. But some of his actions did raise some eyebrows.”

Seeing as the candidate has acknowledged that communication could be better, will Cuomo commit, if elected, to meet with community leaders a minimum of once in three months?

“Absolutely, 100 percent,” he promises.

Special Community, Special Needs                   

The New York City Department of Education has been fighting to cut special education and related services, which have ballooned to over a billion dollars per year. Currently, the city’s fixed rates for services are about $80 to $90 per hour, far below the market rate. This forces parents to seek redress for higher rates at due-process hearings, involving agencies and lawyers in a convoluted protocol that has gotten out of control.

“This is part of understanding the community and its needs, which I get with 40 years’ experience,” Cuomo asserts. “There is a need for special education, and yes, it is a higher than some other communities. But if you understand the community, you understand the need is genuine, and the community is a very important part of New York state, so you fund it.”

He gives his word to form a committee to examine the city’s rates for providers within three months of taking office, and to set fair, competitive market rates.

Israel and Anti-Semitism                   

The conversation retreats to safer ground, and I ask the candidate about anti-Semitism in the city.

“That New York City should have the highest incidence of anti-Semitic acts in the United States according to ADL, is shocking and appalling to me,” he says. “It’s almost inconceivable. If you had suggested five years ago that any of these current situations could develop, I would have said that you’re paranoid. It’s New York City!”

He vows to be much more aggressive in enforcing the law, particularly in local universities, respecting the right to protest but punishing those who destroy property or harass another person.

“New York should be the number one place in setting an international model of zero tolerance for anti-Semitism,” he says.

He promises to also organize “Catholics and Blacks and every faith to say ‘we condemn these actions,’ to use it as a moment of solidarity with the Jewish community.”

Throughout his tenure in government, Cuomo has been a strong, unequivocal supporter of Israel, visiting three times even during previous wars with Hamas. In 2016, he issued an executive order combating BDS by disallowing any company that boycotts Israel from doing business with the state, touting the policy as: “If you boycott Israel, New York boycotts you.” Following a violent anti-Semitic attack by a mentally ill person at the home of the Koson Rebbe of Monsey on Chanukah 2019, Cuomo passed the “No Hate in Our State” law, toughening penalties for hate crimes. And he signed $25 million in security funding for Jewish institutions, renewed yearly.

Even from outside government, Cuomo worked to increase Israel’s standing among Democrats, founding an organization called Progressives for Israel in 2023, another known as Never Again, Now! in 2024, as well as writing opinion articles, buying advertising, and publicly speaking out in defense of Israel and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

In contrast, at least two of the other candidates in the primary contest, assemblyman Zohran Mamdani and Comptroller Brad Lander, who is Jewish, are part of a fiercely anti-Israel coalition called the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which supports anti-Israel movements like BDS.

Mamdani —who is running in second place behind Cuomo — accused Israel of genocide just days after October 7, and according to Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, “is undoubtedly the most anti-Israel person in the Assembly.” Lander has regularly called for a ceasefire in Gaza, spoken out against the Israeli “occupation,” and supported Unilever (owner of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream) in its BDS moves.

An Uneasy Electorate               

The former governor has spent the past few weeks meeting extensively with activists and askanim representing all blocs within New York City’s Orthodox Jewish community.

“He met with everybody,” one askan told me. “Agudah, FJCC, Satmar and Satmar, Bobov, Hatzolah… you name it.”

As I met with Cuomo on Wednesday, a Marist poll dropped showing him leading the next candidate in the race, Zohran Mamdani, by more than double percentage points, 37% to 18%. So why the urgency?

New York’s ranked-choice voting system, a candidate must get to 50% of the vote to win. This threshold can be reached by counting voters that ranked him first, but also by counting those who ranked him second or third, after their preferred candidate is eliminated. After all votes are initially counted, the lowest scoring candidate is eliminated, his or her voters are redistributed to their next-ranked choice, and the process repeats. To get there, Cuomo will likely need the Orthodox Jewish voters —who often support candidates as a unified bloc — to rank him first, or perhaps second.

In 2021, Eric Adams defeated Andrew Yang in the eighth round of eliminations by a margin of only 7,000 votes. While it is difficult to calculate the number of Orthodox Jewish registered Democrats in the city, it is certainly many times that margin.

Josh Mehlman, director of the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition (FJCC), the largest Orthodox Jewish voting alliance in New York City, estimates that there are close to 40,000 Orthodox Jewish voters registered in the greater Flatbush area alone, mostly Democrats. The city as whole has about 300,000 Jewish registered Democrats, with some askanim pegging a rough estimate of Orthodox Jewish registered Democrats at about 100,000. While not all vote in primary elections, turnout is usually about 20% to 25%, or approximately 75,000 votes. This is ten times the margin of victory in 2021, and nearly 10% of the total votes cast in 2021.

“I think it’s fair to say they took Eric Adams over the top in the last election,” said former councilman David Greenfield. “They can make or break.”

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the New York Jewish bloc vote, led by central gedolim such as the Satmar Rebbe, was mostly Democratic. The Democrats were the ones responsive to the community’s needs, and it responded in turn by electing even such figures as Mayor David Dinkins. Over the past two decades, shifting party politics has brought Jewish values more in line with Republicans, but Jewish advocacy is still centered on Democrats, for the simple reason that in New York, they are overwhelmingly the ones in position to get things done.

“Democrats have an electoral advantage in New York City by very large ratio,” Mehlman says. “We encourage all our members to register as Democrats for the primary elections, to have an important voice.”

According to the NYC Campaign Finance Board, Democrats make up two-thirds of all registered voters in the city.

The election of Mayor Eric Adams was a high point in their hopes for cooperation from City Hall, several askanim told me. With a long track record of close relationships and mutual respect with the Jewish community, said one, “we never had a mayor who has been engaged on the issues, outspoken for Israel, and has staff and leadership working directly with the community as much as Eric Adams.”

But Adams is not on the Democratic primary ballot. Facing his own legal entanglements until a free pass was issued late in the race by the federal Department of Justice, Adams opted to run as an independent instead.

Them Dems                   

I decide to toss the seasoned politician one final curveball, and ask him what has happened to the Democratic Party. Why does it appear that they no longer support Israel? And where does he currently fall on the scale from liberal to moderate?

The question is a trap, because our readers have largely conservative values and would not support a liberal progressive; but anything he says to cast himself as a moderate could be used by his opponents to alienate liberal voters, who are overrepresented in the turnout in primary elections. Extremists are much more likely to show up for low-key elections.

Ever the pro, Cuomo hits my curveball out of the park.

“I was a liberal all my life, a liberal son of a liberal,” he answers. “Now they call me a moderate. I didn’t change. The louder part of the party changed.”

He asserts the majority of the party is where he is — moderate by the current standard. But a new, vocal, far-left minority has taken control of the party through its activism, intimidation of moderates, and turnout in primaries.

In other words, Cuomo reassures our readers that he is a moderate by today’s standards, but testifies to the rest of the party that he is the real liberal; his opponents are simply extreme left.

What vibe do the askanim get now? Unwilling to be quoted by name, many have expressed cautious optimism that the former governor is indeed willing to turn over a new leaf.

“The overall vibe is of a willingness to coordinate, effect change, and provide needed services for the community going forward,” one said. “He is definitely proving to be understanding of our needs and is looking to work with us and do the right thing.”

“I get the sense that from a perspective of policy, our relationship will be good,” said another. “Hopefully, if the community supports him, we will continue to have an open door.”

For askanim, another consideration sharpens the decision: There doesn’t seem to be anyone else to vote for in the primary. Zohran Mamdani is a distant second, and appears to be doing everything in his power to alienate Jewish voters, even recently refusing to sign a resolution denouncing the Holocaust.

So that’s the case. Are voters ready to believe the former governor? Will they trust his reformation? Can they get past the past? These are questions for each to decide.

We conclude the interview, turn off the recorders, and Mr. Cuomo hangs out for a while, just schmoozing, while his aides insist they have to get moving their next appointment.

We’re still in conversation as we go downstairs toward the exit. No one in the restaurant reacts to the former governor passing through. I remain inside and watch them go out into the rain, stop on the street, and confer about their next move. Just three people standing on the sidewalk as the busy city bustles around them.

In a few months, this man standing in the rain may be whisked everywhere with a large entourage, and the city will stop its bustling as he passes.

Are voters willing to make it his city?

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1062)