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Libby Lenkinski was walking toward Union Square in New York City last week on the evening of Oct. 7, when she first encountered a sea of Palestinian flags. Lenkinski is an Israeli American who has spent more than two decades working against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and helping lead organizations that pushed for democracy and equality there. She also lost friends in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

She had come that night to read a eulogy for an Israeli killed in Gaza at a vigil that would also remember Palestinians killed, an event organized by Israelis for Peace, a group of left-wing Israeli expatriates. She wasn’t expecting to find herself on the opposite side of a barricade from people she had spent much of her adult life marching alongside.

“I couldn’t quite hear what was happening. I couldn’t quite decipher what I was seeing. I was like, is this part of it or is this something else?” she recalled. Then she noticed someone wearing what appeared to be a Hamas headband. When Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared at the vigil, the protesters began to shout at him:

“Zohran, you can’t hide, you support genocide.”

“Traitor, traitor, come on out, you sold all your people out.”

“Mamdani, what do you say? How many kids did you kill today?”

What exactly was this about? For Lenkinski, the disruption was painful on several levels. “What happened that night at the vigil was brutal,” she said. “It was megaphones from before we started until after we left. You couldn’t get through a single testimony—including from families in Gaza—without being disrupted by these chants.”

When video of the incident began to spread, it was also confounding far beyond New York. Conservatives reacted with glee; many liberals scratched their heads. Had the left flank already turned on Mamdani, not even a year in?

It’s clear that the majority of the New York City voters who brought Mamdani into office have not, in fact, turned on him. In a Suffolk University poll in September, some 56 percent of voters said he was doing an “excellent” or “good” job, and another 17 percent rated him “fair.” More than 6 in 10 voters said he was performing better than they expected. But those numbers may not reflect some discontent in the left-most movement where the future mayor earned the early enthusiasm that helped vault him into office.

It wasn’t just one rally, either. There had been rumblings of frustration in criminal justice circles over policing, for which Mamdani has largely retained the status quo in New York. After........

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