The Divisions Mamdani Commands Are About to Be Battle-Tested
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The Mamdani Beat
/ February 12, 2026
The Divisions Mamdani Commands Are About to Be Battle-Tested
The New York mayor draws flack from the Catholic press, holds his own for now with the NYPD, and will have to twist arms in Albany.
D.D. Guttenplan
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Friends for now: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at a January news conference.
(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
According to Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval approached Joseph Stalin with the suggestion that that making life easier for Catholics in the Soviet Union would be a good way of ingratiating himself with the Vatican. “The Pope?” Stalin replied, “How many divisions has he got?”
The quotation came up naturally enough last Friday, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani presided over his administration’s first Interfaith Breakfast. New York Public Library President Anthony Marx, whose building played host to the gathering, concluded his welcoming remarks by referencing the Trump administration’s violent sieges on American cities: “The ICE will melt.”
Mamdani reminded the audience that, for him, interfaith dialogue was more than just a slogan: “I was raised in New York City as a Muslim kid with a Hindu mother. I celebrated Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha with my family, with diyas in Riverside Park for Diwali.” But the murders in Minneapolis were also very much at the front of the mayor’s mind. Shifting from Deuteronomy 10, which commands us to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” to the more apocalyptic language of the Book of Revelation, Mamdani condemned ICE in biblical terms: “They arrive as if atop a pale horse, and they leave a path of wreckage in their wake. People ripped from their cars. Guns drawn against the unarmed. Families torn apart…. If these are not attacks upon the stranger among us, what is?”
The room responded warmly to the mayor’s reaffirmation of New York’s sanctuary city status, but anyone under the impression that Gotham was about to adopt “Kumbaya” as its official anthem need only have consulted that day’s headline on the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights’s website: “Mamdani Stiffs Catholics for Third Time.” Citing the absence of a Catholic priest at the mayor’s inauguration as well as from the breakfast program, the league pronounced the third strike against the Mamdani administraton: the mayor’s failure to attend the installation of Archbishop Ronald Hicks that same day, despite the ceremony’s taking place just “a short walk up Fifth Avenue” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Whatever the other claims …
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The Mamdani Beat
/ February 12, 2026
The Divisions Mamdani Commands Are About to Be Battle-Tested
The New York mayor draws flack from the Catholic press, holds his own for now with the NYPD, and will have to twist arms in Albany.
D.D. Guttenplan
Share
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Friends for now: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at a January news conference.
(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
According to Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval approached Joseph Stalin with the suggestion that that making life easier for Catholics in the Soviet Union would be a good way of ingratiating himself with the Vatican. “The Pope?” Stalin replied, “How many divisions has he got?”
The quotation came up naturally enough last Friday, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani presided over his administration’s first Interfaith Breakfast. New York Public Library President Anthony Marx, whose building played host to the gathering, concluded his welcoming remarks by referencing the Trump administration’s violent sieges on American cities: “The ICE will melt.”
Mamdani reminded the audience that, for him, interfaith dialogue was more than just a slogan: “I was raised in New York City as a Muslim kid with a Hindu mother. I celebrated Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha with my family, with diyas in Riverside Park for Diwali.” But the murders in Minneapolis were also very much at the front of the mayor’s mind. Shifting from Deuteronomy 10, which commands us to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” to the more apocalyptic language of the Book of Revelation, Mamdani condemned ICE in biblical terms: “They arrive as if atop a pale horse, and they leave a path of wreckage in their wake. People ripped from their cars. Guns drawn against the unarmed. Families torn apart…. If these are not attacks upon the stranger among us, what is?”
The room responded warmly to the mayor’s reaffirmation of New York’s sanctuary city status, but anyone under the impression that Gotham was about to adopt “Kumbaya” as its official anthem need only have consulted that day’s headline on the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights’s website: “Mamdani Stiffs Catholics for Third Time.” Citing the absence of a Catholic priest at the mayor’s inauguration as well as from the breakfast program, the league pronounced the third strike against the Mamdani administraton: the mayor’s failure to attend the installation of Archbishop Ronald Hicks that same day, despite the ceremony’s taking place just “a short walk up Fifth Avenue” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Whatever the other claims …
The Divisions Mamdani Commands Are About to Be Battle-Tested
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Current Issue
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The Mamdani Beat
/ February 12, 2026
The Divisions Mamdani Commands Are About to Be Battle-Tested
The New York mayor draws flack from the Catholic press, holds his own for now with the NYPD, and will have to twist arms in Albany.
D.D. Guttenplan
Share
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Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
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Friends for now: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch at a January news conference.
(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
According to Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval approached Joseph Stalin with the suggestion that that making life easier for Catholics in the Soviet Union would be a good way of ingratiating himself with the Vatican. “The Pope?” Stalin replied, “How many divisions has he got?”
The quotation came up naturally enough last Friday, when Mayor Zohran Mamdani presided over his administration’s first Interfaith Breakfast. New York Public Library President Anthony Marx, whose building played host to the gathering, concluded his welcoming remarks by referencing the Trump administration’s violent sieges on American cities: “The ICE will melt.”
Mamdani reminded the audience that, for him, interfaith dialogue was more than just a slogan: “I was raised in New York City as a Muslim kid with a Hindu mother. I celebrated Eid-al-Fitr and Eid-al-Adha with my family, with diyas in Riverside Park for Diwali.” But the murders in Minneapolis were also very much at the front of the mayor’s mind. Shifting from Deuteronomy 10, which commands us to “love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” to the more apocalyptic language of the Book of Revelation, Mamdani condemned ICE in biblical terms: “They arrive as if atop a pale horse, and they leave a path of wreckage in their wake. People ripped from their cars. Guns drawn against the unarmed. Families torn apart…. If these are not attacks upon the stranger among us, what is?”
The room responded warmly to the mayor’s reaffirmation of New York’s sanctuary city status, but anyone under the impression that Gotham was about to adopt “Kumbaya” as its official anthem need only have consulted that day’s headline on the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights’s website: “Mamdani Stiffs Catholics for Third Time.” Citing the absence of a Catholic priest at the mayor’s inauguration as well as from the breakfast program, the league pronounced the third strike against the Mamdani administraton: the mayor’s failure to attend the installation of Archbishop Ronald Hicks that same day, despite the ceremony’s taking place just “a short walk up Fifth Avenue” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Whatever the other claims …
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