A transgender rabbi with alleged ties to Iran campaigns for a New York City mayoral candidate

A group of social justice rabbis, including a transgender rabbi who mingled with Iran’s president and was booted from the Biden White House for hijacking the event to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, headlined an ad urging Jews to come out and vote against Zahran in the final days before the New York City mayoral election.

Rabbi Abe Stein, who is transgender, was one of the four rabbis featured in the Jews for Zahran ad shared on social media by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), which He was accused By the leader of the Anti-Defamation League for being “out of touch with reality.”

Other rabbis who spoke at the announcement included Emily Cohen, Miriam Grossman, and Rachel Goldenberg.

“As Jews, as rabbis, and as New Yorkers, we believe that all people deserve to thrive,” they say in the ad, and Zahran agrees.

New York City rabbi warns that Zahran Mamdani poses a threat to the safety of the Jewish community

Stein co-authored an article in Autostraddle following a 2024 Pride Month event at the White House under former President Joe Biden in which she and another protester, a former White House staffer, described an incident in which she hijacked Jill Biden’s speech to scream about the Gaza ceasefire. The duo were eventually escorted out of the event.

Stein has also been criticized for her association with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian during the United Nations General Assembly in October 2024. Stein reportedly participated in the event, which was broadcast on Iranian state television, along with several Iranian officials, such as Pezeshkian, just days before Tehran fired hundreds of missiles at Israel amid the country’s attack on Gaza.

Other attendees at the event reportedly included members of the ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta, which includes members who oppose the existence of an Israeli state.

representative. Elise Stefanik calls New York mayoral candidate Zahran Mamdani a “jihadist”

Other rabbis in the ad include Mamdani Cohen, whose official biography posted on Manhattan’s West End Jewish website notes that her professional experience “ranges from baking challah with preschoolers to sponsoring teens on road trips to developing curriculum for adult education classes on Judaism and social justice.”

Cohen has similarly written about her social justice efforts online, including during the 2020 George Floyd riots when she recorded how she stood between demonstrators and police during a protest in hopes that the “racism and sexism” of officers would prevent them from pursuing anyone.

Grossman, another left-wing social justice activist, said in his sermons that “Jewish texts and traditions permit and sometimes require abortion” and that “pregnant women are not necessarily all women.” Meanwhile, in a blog post about the Dakota Access Pipeline, Grossman complains that indigenous communities have “suffered (and persisted) under centuries of ‘environmental racism’.”

Queens’ Goldenberg rabbi, the fourth rabbi featured in Mamdani’s ad, can also be found online in videos of her activity in New York City or in her blog posts. In an online op-ed, Grossman discusses how the Jewish community should be more open to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which many pro-Israel critics have accused of being anti-Semitic.

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Goldenberg is the founder of Malchut, which he says aims to build a “progressive Jewish spiritual community” that practices “ecstatic, musical and meditative prayer, mindfulness meditation through a Jewish lens, study of Jewish sources, and social justice work.”