Rama Duwaji: Who is the wife of NYC candidate Zohran Mamdani?
Rama Duwaji, a 27-year-old artist and animator, has been thrust into the spotlight as her husband Zohran Mamdani this week became the likely Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City.Mrs Duwaji is a New York-based artist with Syrian roots whose work often explores Middle Eastern themes. Her work has appeared on BBC News, and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice and London's Tate Modern museum."Rama isn't just my wife; she's an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms," Mamdani wrote in a post on 12 May, announcing they had been married three months earlier."Omg she's real," Mrs Duwaji joked in a comment on that post.
Mrs Duwaji was rarely seen during her husband's primary election campaign to lead the most populous US city, leading opponents to claim that the 33-year-old state assemblyman was "hiding" his wife. Her absence was notable, given that US candidates often put their spouses on full display to show off their commitment to family values. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, declared a stunning victory in the Democratic party's primary on Tuesday, defeating his main rival and political veteran Andrew Cuomo who previously served as state governor.
Mamdani addressed the criticism over his wife's absence in his May post, which included a series of photos showing their marriage at the New York City Clerk's office. "If you take a look at Twitter today, or any day for that matter, you know how vicious politics can be," he wrote. "I usually brush it off, whether it's death threats or calls for me to be deported. But it's different when it's about those you love.... You can critique my views, but not my family."After results from the Democratic primary came in earlier this week, she took to her own Instagram page to post black-and-white photos of the couple embracing with the caption "couldn't possibly be prouder".
The couple met on dating app Hinge, "so there is still hope in those dating apps," the candidate said in an interview for The Bulwark last week. "Before their civil ceremony in New York City, Zohran and his wife celebrated their engagement in Dubai last year - where her family lives - with a small, joyful ceremony surrounded by their loved ones," the Mamdani campaign said in a statement.Photos posted by a florist in Dubai showed the Dubai city skyline in the background, as the couple stood on the rooftop where they held a traditional Islamic wedding ceremony known as a nikah. Mrs Duwaji graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University before earning a master's degree in illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York City."Using drawn portraiture and movement, Rama examines the nuances of sisterhood and communal experiences," Mrs Duwaji's professional website reads. Much of her work is in black and white, and depicts scenes from the Arab world. Mrs Duwaji herself was born in Texas and is ethnically Syrian, a campaign spokesman told the New York Times on Wednesday.In 2022, her works appeared in the BBC World Service documentary "Who killed my grandfather" that investigated the assassination of a Yemeni politician in 1974.
Some of her works listed on Instagram criticise "American imperialism," what she called Israeli war crimes and denounce the "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians, mirroring some of her husband's policy positions. Israel emphatically denies accusations of genocide in Gaza, or Jewish people.Her works also show support for Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate that the Trump administration is seeking to deport over claims that his work advocating for Palestinians amounts to "antisemitism" towards Jews. The Brooklyn-based artist spent most of the coronavirus pandemic in Dubai, where her family lives, she said in an April interview with website YUNG.In that interview, she was asked about recent events in the Middle East, the return to the White House of Donald Trump and sharp uptick in immigration raids. "I'm not going to lie, things are dark right now in NYC. I worry for my friends and family, and things feel completely out of my hands," she said."With so many people being pushed out and silenced by fear, all I can do is use my voice to speak out about what's happening in the US and Palestine and Syria as much as I can," she added.
She was also asked about the responsibly that artists have to speak out about global issues. "An artist's duty as far as I'm concerned is to reflect the times," she said, quoting musician Nina Simone."I believe everyone has a responsibility to speak out against injustice, and art has such an ability to spread it," she continued. "I don't think everybody has to make political work, but art is inherently political in how it's made, funded, and shared. Even creating art as a refuge from the horrors we see is political to me. It's a reaction to the world around us."
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The Guardian
35 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘We're seeing the best of LA': as Ice raids haunt the city, Angelenos show up for each other
In the days after ramped-up immigration raids began in Los Angeles, 50-year-old Lorena, who has been running a tamale cart in Koreatown for decades, stayed home. So did her husband, who works as a day laborer. Worried about paying their bills, both of them after a few days went back out to work. 'My son would go around the block and watch out for us,' said Lorena, whom the Guardian is not identifying by her full name for fear of reprisal. He'd text them a warning when he suspected that immigration agents were nearby. Eventually, though, they concluded the effort was not only risky, but futile. There was no business. 'People are scared. They do not go out to buy anything,' she said. Then Lorena was offered a grant by a local advocacy group, KTown For All, which had raised money online from supporters to 'buy out' street vendors at risk of being detained. She and her husband have been able to remain home since, and keep a low profile. She knew the group because they had organized initiatives to support vendors during the height of the coronavirus pandemic – and on occasion she had worked with them to distribute her tamales to unhoused people and others in need. 'That is why I believe that when you give love, you receive love,' she said. 'I want more people to know about [how] this way they can also support more vendors, more sellers. Because there are many, many vendors who are still taking risks because they need to make money.' KTown for All has said publicly that its supporters donated enough money to cover a month's rent and food for at least 42 vendors and their families, and it has shared links to street vendor fundraising efforts in other Pasadena, LA's South Bay and other neighborhoods. The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The LA Street Vendor Solidarity Fund, a similar effort organized by several non-profits, has raised $80,000 so far, with the goal of raising at least $300,000. An estimated 1 million of Los Angeles county's more than 10 million residents are undocumented people, the largest undocumented population of any city in the US. Street vendor buyouts are just one of the ways Angelenos are responding to the Trump administration's raids, which are continuing to spread terror across Los Angeles, with many immigrant families afraid to leave their homes for school or work. 'Community members that have not been traditionally plugged into politics or the current state of affairs are plugging in – they're getting informed,'said Eunisses Hernandez, a 35-year-old city councilmember who represents a quarter-million people in a majority-Latino district in northern Los Angeles. Many Angelenos who did not attend protests against the new Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids are doing other kinds of work, Hernandez said, like providing 'know your rights' information to small businesses about interacting with law enforcement officials, or figuring out how to deliver food to immigrant families too afraid to leave home even to buy groceries. Mutual aid networks created to help people affected by the January's wildfires have been 'reinvigorated' to respond to the Trump administration's raids, Hernandez said. 'In this moment, while we're seeing the worst of our federal administration, we are seeing the best here in the city of Los Angeles,' she said. The pervasive fear of federal raids is reshaping the daily life of the city, leaving streets emptier and quieter. One in five local residents lives with someone undocumented or are undocumented themselves. Half the total population is Latino. 'Our economy is being destroyed, our culture is being destroyed,' said Odilia Yego, the executive director of Cielo, an advocacy group focused on local Indigenous migrant communities. 'The buzzing feeling of being an Angeleno is under attack.' When Yego went out with Cielo workers earlier this month to deliver food to 200 families, she said, the streets were eerily quiet, and restaurants were half-empty, raising concerns about how small businesses already battered by Covid, Hollywood strikes and the wildfires will weather this new crisis. It's not only undocumented residents who fear being snatched up by masked federal agents in raids community members say look and feel like kidnappings, Yego said. 'Even with documents, people are afraid to go out. Even citizens are afraid to go out. People are afraid to encounter an Ice agent regardless of their status, because of the level of violence they have seen on social media or on TV,' she said. Multiple US citizens in the Los Angeles area have reportedly been detained as part of immigration raids this month. As Cielo and similar advocacy groups help frightened immigrant families, other people are stepping up to help them. In early June, one of the city's most popular taquerias and an immigrant-owned coffee shop in West Hollywood held fundraisers for Cielo. 'We own a business, so we can't go protest,' one of the West Hollywood coffee shop's owners said. The Guardian is not identifying the businesses or its owners for fear of reprisal. Helping raise funds for Cielo was 'a way for us to show up to be a voice with our community'. 'In LA, we support each other during times of crisis,' Yego said. 'Someone sent us $100 and said: 'You helped me during the pandemic, and today, I'm able to give back.''
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Zohran Mamdani has unleashed a political earthquake
The surprise electoral success of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York, the most prominent city on earth, is a political earthquake. The breadth and scope of his performance were predicted by no polls, no prognosticators, none of the wise men. The ramifications of this upset will be felt for years, across the US and the developed world. In the end, it wasn't even close. Mamdani's widespread appeal represents the total collapse of a Democratic party establishment that had weathered Donald Trump's first term with rhetorical resistance, and fumbled the beginning of the second with triangulating appeasement. This year, the favorability of the Democratic party has collapsed to record lows, not because of the popularity of the Trump administration or the Republican party, but because of its unpopularity with its own voters. Chuck Schumer caving to the president on an unpopular and devastating Republican spending bill was the last straw for many. The Democratic party and the resistance to Trump had been severed for the first time. There's anger across the country with its leadership, Democratic and Republican, in cities, suburbs and rural areas. According to Americans, things are not going well. Prices are up, wages are down and instability is at an all-time high. Nowhere is this more true than in our biggest city, New York, where the moderate Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, made a quid pro quo deal to keep himself out of prison on corruption charges in exchange for enforcing Trump's policies in a city where Trump had minimal political support. Enter Mamdani. Many major cities in the US, in recent years, had a two-party system, not between Democrats and Republicans, but between centrist Democrats and their progressive flank. The US, like all polities, has many organized political groupings, but due to byzantine electoral laws, only two official ones exist - the state-administered ballot lines. Nowhere is this more true than in New York, the crown jewel of the electoral socialist left in the United States for more than a century. Mamdani is the progeny of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the US's largest socialist organization in a century. He is among the many young people inspired by Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. The staying power of that campaign has asserted itself over the years. Most of the talented organizers and thinkers whom it shaped were in college or their early 20s. They were never going to stop being socialists. They just needed seasoning. Mamdani got involved in the DSA as a young man and honed his skills leading campaigns in the nearly all-volunteer organization. He has spent most of his adult life as a DSA organizer. After the New York City DSA had built sufficient infrastructure and he had learned the necessary skills, he was able to win election to the state assembly in 2020. But to Mamdani, democratic socialism isn't an identity or a set of principles. It is being part of and accountable to a democratic organization, the sort of working-class civil society that has atrophied in this country, but at one time built the backbone of the welfare state across western society and lent the muscle to the New Deal. Mamdani and the DSA cannot be separated. It's a different, and for many Americans new, but a deeply old way of thinking about politics. Political organizations represent different classes, which are necessarily in conflict. To win for your class, you must be a representative of working-class democracy. Mamdani was built by the DSA and the young leftwing milieu that emerged after the Sanders campaign. They cannot be separated. Not his charisma or campaign style. He is a product of the movement. His victory and its comprehensive level are shocking to nearly all. How did he do it? Combining new and old tactics. Mamdani had perhaps the most innovative social media campaign in American political history. Not jumping on tired memes, but showcasing his authenticity. He also borrowed old tactics. Mamdani harnessed the sort of retail diaspora politics that have always won in the world's most diverse city. He campaigned in dozens of languages, met leaders from ethnic groups from around the world and sold his vision in the style of Fiorello LaGuardia. This way, he was able to harness both the insurgent left, often caricatured as downwardly mobile, overly educated and overwhelmingly white, and the worldwide working-class diaspora that shapes the neighborhoods of New York. As he climbed the polls through steady mass organization, almost linearly, he began to face ever-increasing, and horrifying, attacks from capital and the powers that be, to the tune of a record $25m in outside spending. The one they homed in on was one that had been proven to take down leftwing leaders across the world, such as Jeremy Corbyn: antisemitism. All social justice-minded people are horrified by antisemitism, an ancient hatred. It's an accusation that would make anyone on the left, anyone of conscience, take notice. For this reason, used in a spurious way, it was an insidious attack that could break the left. However, in this election, the baseless smear backfired. There are several reasons for this. The first is overuse. It's quite blatant to continually accuse obviously deeply compassionate and humanistic people of an evil hatred without evidence. No one believes friendly and understanding social democrats in a secular urban milieu are pogromists or jihadists (despite nasty Islamophobic baiting about Mamdani's background), for obvious reasons. The second is the actual circumstances. Most accusations of antisemitism on the left have little or nothing to do with actual overt discrimination or hatred; they are almost entirely based on opinion of the state of Israel. As Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians and long-term eliminationist and revanchist ambitions, and ties itself closer to the far right in the US, Democratic voters in the US have made the rapid and historic transition to sympathizing with Palestinians over Israel by a nearly 3-1 margin. Even last year, this issue and money could win Democratic primaries. No longer. Lastly, Mamdani is in many ways a continuation of the Jewish left tradition in the United States. New York has long been the home of the most powerful electoral socialist left in the United States. The base for the Socialist party of America (SPA) or the American Labor party, many-time electoral winners, was the Jewish community. Jews in New York voted in the hundreds of thousands for socialists for decades. These are the same policies of so-called 'sewer socialism' (in which socialists ran cities like Milwaukee and boasted of excellent sewer systems), the same parties (DSA being the direct inheritor of the SPA), the same tradition and even the same neighborhoods as a century ago. The foundation of the American left. An unbroken line. Mamdani is the inheritor of the tradition of Baruch Vladeck, and of the socialists and trade unions that built New York. Even the membership of DSA and the staff of his campaign reflect this. So, how did Mamdani win support? He brought back class as the defining issue of politics. Class as a political divide has declined across the industrialized world for decades, beginning in the US. While Sanders reinjected a class message and a degree of class polarization back within the Democratic coalition, there were still shortcomings. Bernie did worse among Black voters across class. And Bernie and other democratic socialists relied heavily on the good graces of socially progressive upper-middle-class professionals, rendering socialists subordinate to or in coalition with their interests and organizations. After nearly a decade of work by the left, this class polarization seemed uncrackable. Until now. Mamdani underachieved compared with prior leftwing candidates in professional progressive areas like the Upper West Side. But he smashed through the racial barrier that had divided the working class. Few expected this before the votes rolled in. His base would be downwardly mobile white professionals, of course. But his clear message and innovative campaign brought back real class politics, of the kind that seemed a myth in the contemporary age. According to the New York Times, Mamdani did better with voters of color than with white voters. While he shed reliably progressive votes among the Times-reading, machine-hating liberals of Manhattan, he won them back many times over among working-class people of color who had never taken a second look at leftist candidates before. In this, he reversed nearly 30 years of anti-materialist political science theories. This may seem like something confined to New York City, a progressive bastion in a deep blue state. But it points a path forward for the left and for advocates of social justice and liberatory politics. Donald Trump's most shocking and profound gains in 2024 came among young voters, particularly men, Latino voters, Asian voters and urban voters in general. These are the exact demographics that came out in droves for Mamdani. The left has long shirked its responsibility to fight the far right, leaving it to the center as if the political spectrum were a rigorously enforced line rather than a fluid concept. But the center failed. And they sacrificed these demographics to Trump because these masses were fed up with the status quo. The center could never win them back. But the radical left actually could, through a targeted, economic, anti-establishment message. Mamdani's campaign did it, and brought people back from the far right on a massive scale, more than any anti-Trump rally could. In this way, campaigns like Mamdani's are actively practicing anti-fascism in a real way, by winning the targets of the right back to the left. The left needs to study this shocking election and take thorough notes. The first is that Mamdani was a product of real, organic, working-class organization in the DSA. The kind that has been dying out in this country for half a century and is disregarded by most. This lack of organization is the defining feature of our political time. The only way to the future is more people in the DSA, more people in unions, more people in civic organizations and the rebuilding of working-class community. Our institutions are hollow, but Mamdani and his 50,000 youthful volunteers are proof that they can be rebuilt, and that people yearn to do so. In 2017, a DSA organizer and philosopher named Michael Kinnucan said: 'US civic culture is so hollowed out at the grassroots level that in any city in the US if your organization can get 40 to 50 committed people in a room occasionally you're probably operating one of the five or six most potentially powerful grassroots organizations in your city.' This idea was foundational to DSA, especially in New York City, and shaped Mamdani. For many, it seemed a fantasy. Five hundred thousand votes later, across nearly every language and nationality in the world, it's a warning. To defeat the right, the left must learn from Mamdani and the DSA and rebuild mass working-class organization. Sure, charisma helps, but at its core, this win was an eight-year project that must be replicated everywhere if we are to defeat fascism and stop the worst horrors of the climate crisis. Mamdani is an Obama-level political talent, but most of all he is a call to return to real working-class organization. This is something the hollow entities of the Democratic or Republican parties could never defeat, and something they learned on Tuesday night. Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Cobra Kai actor denies sexually harassing woman on set amid ongoing shock biting scandal
Cobra Kai actor Martin Kove last year faced a sexually harassment probe from Sony for his conduct on his set of The Karate Kid adaptation after a female extra said he made her uncomfortable with his behavior. 'It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now,' the Brooklyn, New York City-born actor, 78, told Deadline on Thursday of the sexually harassment complaints made against him more than a year ago. Sources told the outlet that the extra complained Kove had been 'leering' and 'verbally overt' toward a female extra on the Atlanta set of the adapted film franchise. The woman subsequently complained to producers he was making her feel uncomfortable, and Sony launched a probe into the incident. Reports of the Sony investigation into the actor come after Kove admittedly bit costar Alicia Hannah-Kim at a fan event earlier this month in Puyallup, Washington, claiming he was immersed in their respective roles on the series. Daily Mail has reached out to Kove's reps for further details on the incident. Kove - who portrayed the role of villainous karate instructor John Kreese in the first three Karate Kid film in the 1980s - told the outlet that he didn't do anything wrong. Kove, who has reprised his role of Kreese on 57 episodes of Cobra Kai since 2018, said that he was honest when questioned about his behavior by Sony officials looking into the 2024 claim. 'If there was something to confess, I would be the first to say it,' Kove said. 'Sony did ask me about the alleged incident, and I was completely transparent.' The veteran actor, who has been active in Tinseltown for more that five decades, said the timing of the news going public was suspect. 'This is so bizarre,' he said, 'as it was in April of last year.'
