Last time I wrote, you’d just won the primary. I wasn’t surprised then, and I’m not surprised now that “Mayor” is where we landed. Six months in, and already the most talked-about politician in the country. Credit where it’s due: you’ve kept more campaign promises than any politician in my lifetime. Expanded childcare, the state’s first pied-à-terre tax (overdue doesn’t begin to cover it), a city-run grocery pilot in East Harlem, and a real crackdown on the landlords who’ve been getting away with negligent tactics for profit. You’ve made real change feel possible and efficient. And that Knicks speech, eight minutes that did more for civic morale than most politicians manage in a full term. Authenticity is rare in politics. You’ve got it, and it shows.

You’ve also made “everywhere, all the time” look like an actual governing strategy, which is more than I can say for most of your colleagues on either side of the aisle. Older politicians, take notes.

You already know all this, the polls say so, and apparently so does the president, who by all accounts can be seen smiling next to you these days. I’m writing again because I want to give you something the polling doesn’t capture: what six months of Mayor Mamdani looks like from inside my extended community, the Jewish, and the quietly self-conscious, moderate, self-identifying fiscally conservative class of this city.

I can’t get through a social media scroll or a dinner without your name coming up. This week’s video, doubling down on your wish to arrest Netanyahu and calling on the federal government to finish the job, isn’t helping. Sometimes it’s praise. Sometimes it’s something closer to dread, not about any specific policy, but about what you might represent: the opening act of the thing Jews and conservative voters have spent generations bracing for. Let me try and explain how I now realize how both these groups share a similar anxiety around you that I am now fully starting to grasp.

On the term socialism

I hear “card-carrying communist” more than I’d like, as if given the chance, you’d tear down capitalism and hand us all the same size apartment. I sit with that accusation with a mix of amusement and a nagging discomfort, because I understand exactly where the discomfort comes from: the instinct to always keep a bag half-packed, just in case. That’s not really commentary on your tax policy. That’s inherited Jewish and political vigilance talking.

I don’t think the “reeducation” camps are coming in the slightest. But the anxiety underneath it isn’t irrational, even when it overshoots, on the right, and among plenty of moderates too.

“Socialism” has become the word people reach for whenever a program asks them to subsidize someone they’ve already decided doesn’t deserve it. Paul Krugman made a useful point recently: almost nobody in American politics, including the people who call themselves democratic socialists, is a socialist in any textbook sense. Most are........

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