“I will be the mayor who doesn’t just protect Jewish New Yorkers but also celebrates and cherishes them,” said Mamdani, a New York state assemblyman who identifies as a Socialist, and who has accused Israel of “genocide” and said that he’d have the Jewish state’s premier arrested should he visit the Big Apple.

“You’re the savior of the Jewish people?” countered Cuomo, a Democrat who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani.

“You won’t denounce ‘globalize the intifada,’ which means ‘kill Jews,’” Cuomo told Mamdani. “There’s unprecedented fear in New York.”

The frontrunner said that he has heard from “Jewish New Yorkers about their fears about antisemitism in this city.”

At press time, 915 rabbis and rabbis in training had signed a “rabbinic call,” which names Mamdani and states, in part, that “all Americans who value peace and equality” ought to “participate fully in the democratic process in order to stand up for candidates who reject antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric and who affirm Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”

Asked how he would respond to people protesting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York City streets, Cuomo said that such people have the right to protest, but that “doesn’t justify antisemitic behavior in New York.”

“It doesn’t justify leaders who stoke the flames of hatred against Jewish people, which is what Zohran does,” he said.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee, told Mamdani that his two Jewish sons “have heard statements you made in support of global jihad” and “view you as the arsonist who fanned the flames of antisemitism.”

“They can not suddenly accept the fact that you’re coming in like a firefighter and you’re going to put out these flames,” said Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels.

Mamdani said that he had “never, not once, spoken in support of global jihad.”

“Much of it has to do with the fact that I am the first Muslim candidate to be on the precipice of winning this election,” he said. He told Sliwa that he aims to be “the mayor that will keep your sons safe.”

‘A basic violation’

Cuomo noted that Mamdani was photographed with Rebecca Kadaga, deputy prime minister of Uganda, and asked why the assemblyman didn’t renounce his Ugandan citizenship or call for a boycott movement against the country for “imprisoning people who are gay.”

“Isn’t that a basic violation of human rights?” Cuomo said. “You have no problem with BDS against Israel.”

Mamdani said he would not have been photographed with her if he knew she was the “architect of that legislation.”