Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove struck a nerve on Monday at the American Zionist Movement’s Biennial National Assembly, drawing a line between what he described as communal “orthodoxy” barring public criticism of Israel and the rise of Jewish support for anti-Zionist politicians like New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. 

Cosgrove, who recently made waves by calling on Jewish New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani, told the roughly 300 Zionist leaders in attendance that the democratic socialist politician understood that his anti-Israel stances were more closely aligned with liberal Zionists than the Jewish communal party line. The Conservative rabbi’s remarks drew mixed responses from the crowd, with some standing and clapping, while others walked out.

“You may not like the fact that 30% of New York Jews voted for Mamdani, but you shouldn’t be surprised by it,” said Cosgrove. “For a liberal Zionist disillusioned by the Israeli government, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is a difference of degree, not of kind. He understood the fissures of our community better than we ourselves did, and the question we face now is, what are we going to do about it?”

Cosgrove’s remarks came roughly an hour after a separate, divisive moment during the AZM gathering, in which Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s speech was interrupted by a man demanding that the president pardon Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Another man then stood and unfurled a banner that said “Please, pardon Netanyahu.” 

Following the interruption, the room erupted, with some booing or saying “shame” in Hebrew. After order was restored, Herzog rejected the question. “We made it very clear that we should focus on the challenges of the Zionist movement in America,” he said. 

Moments before Herzog delivered his address, a coalition of 1,400 Israeli expatriates, academics and Jewish leaders organized by anti-judicial overhaul protest movement UnXeptable, delivered a letter to Herzog’s chief of staff, urging Herzog to reject Netanyahu’s request for a pardon. 

“At a time when Israel’s democracy is under intense strain and the eyes of the Jewish people and the world are upon us, a presidential pardon for a sitting Prime Minister, before his trial is complete, would send a devastating message,” the letter, which was later shared publicly by UnXeptable, said. 

In Cosgrove’s speech, he painted a picture of an American Judaism in which questioning Israeli policy has taken on the weight of religious transgression, creating fault lines within the community. “It’s easier to call someone a self-hating Jew than to worry about your own children or grandchildren’s non-observance,” said Cosgrove. “The dividing lines between us no longer fell along the various levels at which we observe Shabbat or our beliefs as to whether the Torah is or isn’t of divine origin… In many respects, engagement with Israel became more than a religion. It became an orthodoxy.”

For young Jews, recent Israeli politics have framed Israel as “a Goliath to the Palestinian David,” Cosgrove said, a perception compounded by rightward movement within the Israeli body politic, the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and religious extremism, he added. 

“I recall the shock and dismay my daughter shared upon returning from her Israel gap year, discovering that her Israeli pre-army mechina peers on whose condition so much of her Jewish identity had been directed, expended zero psychic energy on her well-being and that of Diaspora Jewry. And then we have the nerve to send that kid to a college campus expecting her to defend the policies of a government that does not reflect her values nor recognize her Judaism as Judaism,” said Cosgrove, to both applause and dissatisfied murmurs. 

He continued. “If I do this right, I’ll make everyone angry. I may be constitutionally incapable of walking away from Israel, but others have and will continue to do so.”

Cosgrove concluded by calling for the community to conduct a “self-audit,” on the extremes it enforces in conversation about Israel. “The argument that it’s somehow treasonous to criticize this or that Israeli policy simply doesn’t hold as long as that criticism comes from a place of love, loyalty and investment in the well-being of the State of Israel” he said. “And, the heshbon hanefesh [introspection] goes both ways. It happens on both sides. For such a time as this, when Israel is surrounded by enemies, Jewish critics of Israel need to be judicious in how they voice their dissent. It’s one thing to attend a pro-democracy rally in a sea of Israeli flags that begins and ends with the singing of ‘Hatikvah.’ It’s another thing to stand in an encampment next to someone calling for ‘global Intifada.’”

The mixed response to Cosgrove’s speech was likely tied to the audience’s religious and political heterogeneity — with attendees ranging from representatives of the Haredi Eretz Hakodesh slate to the progressive Hatikvah. 

During an onstage interview with American writer and journalist Abigail Pogrebin, Herzog doubled down on denouncing Mamdani, echoing comments that he made the night before at Yeshiva University’s annual Hanukkah Dinner, in which he said the mayor-elect “makes no effort” to hide disdain for the “Jewish democratic State of Israel.”

Herzog once again expressed his concerns about the incoming mayor, mentioning the incident at Park East Synagogue last month in which protesters chanted “globalize the intifada” and “death to the IDF” outside a Nefesh B’Nefesh event promoting immigration to Israel. 

“I’m extremely disturbed,” Herzog said on Monday at AZM. “The fact is that in the city which comprises the largest Jewish community outside the United States, you have a mayor-elect who shows utter contempt to the nation state of the Jewish people, as well as explaining that the fact that there is an aliyah event in Park East Synagogue is like a violation of international law…The fact is that a mayor-elect, an elected official, you know, speaks in contempt about the whole nation, which is part and parcel of all of us here and the great Zionist movement, worries me a lot.”

Asked later about exit polling, which found that some 33% of Jews voted for Mamdani, Herzog said that he is “not here to judge anybody,” but that he is concerned about the Jewish community facing harassment under the new leadership. 

“I am against [a] judgmental approach from America to Israel, and from Israel to America, I’m just looking at it from a bird’s-eye view, as a leader of the Jewish people, as somebody who really cares for world Jewry and for its well-being, and the fact that every Jew should not be harassed anywhere in the world because of his or her faith… I’m not talking about people who voted or didn’t vote for any candidate,” he said.