New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, left, stands with his wife, Rama Duwaji, during his inauguration ceremony on Thursday.Andres Kudacki/The Associated Press
The words were expressed with precision and clarity. The symbolism screamed.
In the first breath of the new year, Zohran Mamdani became New York City’s first Muslim mayor, its youngest leader in more than a century, and a prominent socialist in municipal office much the way Bernie Sanders was as mayor of Burlington, Vt., nearly a half-century ago.
Mr. Sanders, now a senator from Vermont and a two-time candidate for a presidential nomination, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose 2018 election to the House of Representatives was an emblem of the emergence of a new generation of left-oriented political figures, joined fellow democratic socialist Mr. Mamdani in a midday ceremony that marked the ascendancy not only of a new mayor but also of Muslims as a major political force in America’s most populous city.
In a ceremony whose soundtrack included such bows to tradition as New York, New York (Frank Sinatra, Italian-American) and What a Wonderful World (Louis Armstrong, African-American) along with a rendering of America the Beautiful (lyrics written by Katharine Lee Bates, a poet who was the daughter of a Congregational minister), the onetime New York State assemblyman returned to many of the themes - universal child care, affordable housing and groceries, and free public transit - that catapulted him into becoming the 112th mayor of New York.
Zohran Mamdani became mayor of New York City just after midnight Thursday, taking the oath of office at an historic, decommissioned subway station in Manhattan.
The Associated Press
In his first formal remarks, the 34-year-old mayor of a city where “a Muslim kid like me could grow up eating bagels and lox on Sunday” made clear that he was interested in more than mere symbolism.
“I was elected as a democratic socialist,” he said, “and I will govern like a democratic socialist.”
Perhaps the most poignant element of the rise of Mr. Mamdani was the city in which it occurred, itself a vibrant urban festival of clashing metaphors: New York as the great simmering stew of America and the “gorgeous mosaic” that then-mayor David Dinkins (mayor, 1990-1993) celebrated, its streets the seedbed of both stubborn ethnic pride and striving assimilation, its neighbourhoods the launching pads of group after group speaking language after language and adding their traditions, religious rites, fashions, recipes, folkways, anthems, and carnivals and fetes to the daily pageant of the country’s most colourful city.
That note was struck in the invocation by Imam Khalid Latif, who spoke of New York as a place where “strangers can become neighbours” and where the city for centuries has welcomed “those who arrived yesterday.”
In recent years, Muslims have joined the parade of Dutch, Irish, Italians, Jews and Blacks into the power corridors of New York and, in many cases, eventually into national prominence.
Zohran Mamdani begins term as New York’s first Muslim mayor after historic inauguration
Of special poignance was one of the Qurans used in the mayor’s official swearing-in; it once belonged to the Black writer Arturo Schomburg and was lent to the ceremony by the New York Public Library, itself a ladder of social mobility that provided early inspiration to figures such as the Black novelist James Baldwin, whose name was invoked in the ceremony, and the Jewish writer Alfred Kazin, whose title of his 1951 memoir, A Walker in the City, is an apt description of the door-to-door campaign that Mr. Mamdani waged.
He said his government will be “walking a different path,” and it was those he met along the way he saluted.
“If you are a New Yorker, I am your mayor,” he said, acknowledging the opponents who consider him radical and dangerous, and pledging to “protect you, celebrate with you, mourn along with you and never, not for a second, hide from you.”
By taking the oath of office, first at a decommissioned 1904 subway station amid the echoes the stroke of midnight for the new year and later in a chilly City Hall ceremony that had the air of a campaign rally and religious revival, Mr. Mamdani established his presence in the long tradition of immigrants who made New York the forum for their entrance into the American mainstream.
Over the decades, their passage has included accounts by Jacob Riis (Denmark), Saul Bellow (Lachine, Que.), Henry Roth (Austria-Hungary), Isaac Bashevis Singer (Poland), and, more recently, Gary Shteyngart (Soviet Union), Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Dominican Republic), and Padma Lakshmi (India).
Trump gives warm welcome to New York’s mayor-elect Mamdani at White House meeting
Like Barack Hussein Obama, whose middle name was employed by critics to underline his status as an outsider, the mayor’s opponents often refer to him as Zohran Kwame Mamdani. But unlike the first Black president, whom Donald Trump and others argued was a foreigner despite his Hawaii birth certificate, Mr. Mamdani was born in Uganda.
He otherwise is, as George M. Cohan, the Irish-American playwright and composer born at a time of strong anti-Irish sentiment, would call “a real live nephew of his Uncle Sam,” and was educated at Bowdoin College, the tiny Maine institution (enrolment 1,841) that spawned such American figures as a president (Franklin Pierce), a House Speaker (Thomas Brackett Reed), a Senate majority leader (George Mitchell), secretary of defence (Bill Cohen, also a senator), a poet (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), a novelist (Nathaniel Hawthorne), a storied Civil War general (Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain), a businessman (Leon Gorman, president of L.L.Bean), and an Arctic explorer (Robert E. Peary).
Mr. Mamdani now is listed in the “notable alumni” section of the website of the college, chartered in 1794 when so many residents of New York were foreign-born that census takers didn’t bother to establish a separate category for them.
Mr. Mamdani might on the surface be compared to an earlier New Yorker immigrant, Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), born in Lithuania and later editor of The Jewish Daily Forward. “He taught his readers how to adapt to America and embrace its system, its schools and businesses,” Seth Lipsky, author of the 2013 The Rise of Abraham Cahan, said in an interview. “He began a socialist but became much more friendly to mainstream politics.”
A similar political journey might be unlikely for Mr. Mamdani, whose opponents include the Trump administration and supporters of Israel troubled about his pro-Palestine views and avowal to become the first New York City mayor since Israel’s founding in 1948 not to visit Israel.
Indeed, there was no suggestion of moderation at the Thursday ceremony. Mr. Sanders credited the mayor for seeking a “government that works for all, not just the wealthy and the few.” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez spoke of “the barbarism of extreme income inequality.” And Mr. Mamdani, in a clear swipe at Donald Trump, said he would wage war against “agendas of cruelty.”