2 far-left anti-Israel candidates win NYC congressional primaries in sweep for Mamdani
[IsraelTimes] Claire Valdez and Darializa Chevalier win elections, indicating mayor’s rise in New York City politics was not a one-off; Democratic Socialists set to double representation.
Brad Lander, Jewish Mamdani ally and Israel critic, wins NYC Congressional primary
[IsraelTimes] Leftist ousts incumbent Dan Goldman in election for 10th Congressional District in Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn
NY primary between rabbi, Jewish lawyer serves as referendum on Mamdani and buffer zones
[IsraelTimes] Eli Northrup has suggested that barring protests outside houses of worship is unconstitutional, while Stephanie Ruskay has said doing so is necessary ‘in the world we actually live in’
Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable GOP House member Mike Lawler
[IsraelTimes] Frontrunners in race to represent heavily Jewish swing district in New York include a military veteran and a local lawmaker who has highlighted her Jewish identity.
Israel, AIPAC and Zohran Mamdani take center stage in Tuesday’s NY primaries
[IsraelTimes] From country’s most Jewish congressional district to left-wing challenges against incumbents, contests will test where Democrats stand on Jewish state.
Kennedy scion Schlossberg loses to Lasher in New York City congressional primary
[IsraelTimes] Kennedy family scion and political novice Jack Schlossberg loses to New York state Assembly Member Micah Lasher, in a closely watched and crowded Democratic primary for an open congressional seat in the heart of Manhattan.
Lasher has spent his career in politics, working for officeholders including the man whose seat he hopes to win in November, Democratic longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler.
Flanked by another former boss, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and other politicians in New York City’s Democratic establishment, Lasher says in his victory speech that he aims to “revamp and recharge the Democratic Party in Washington” and to show it has “bold new ideas to improve the lives of struggling Americans and then deliver on them.”
Lasher is well positioned for November’s general election — Democrats make up two-thirds of the district’s registered voters.
Pro-Israel US Congress members Torres and Meng pick up wins in NYC
A couple of seats for the good guys.
[IsraelTimes] The pro-Israel Congress members Ritchie Torres and Grace Meng are declared the winners of their primaries in New York City. Torres, the incumbent in New York’s 15th Congressional District in the Bronx, trounces his leftist opponent, Michael Blake. With 88% of the vote counted, Torres has 72%, compared to Blake’s 22%.Meng, the incumbent in New York’s 6th Congressional District in Queens, leads Chuck Park 57% to 43%, with 84% of votes counted.
Outside New York City, the pro-Israel House representatives George Latimer, in Westchester County, and Tom Suozzi, on Long Island, win their primaries. Latimer won an uncontested vote while Suozzi has 80% with nearly all votes counted.
Some Jewish allies of Mamdani denounce his use of ‘monsters’ to describe AIPAC
The background to the election — not the only issue, but an indication what the estof you have to look forward to:
A loyalty test for a latte[IsraelTimes] A Brooklyn coffee shop's public shaming of a Jewish congressman exposes a society sliding into bigotry – one 'we don't serve your kind' at a time
A Brooklyn coffee shop told a sitting congressman it would have thrown him out. The law has a word for that, and it is not "activism." It is discrimination, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
Last weekend, a Democratic congressman walked into a Williamsburg coffee shop with his seven-year-old daughter, bought a coffee, and left. The barista, by the congressman’s own account, was kind. She let his daughter use the bathroom. He bought a coffee in return for the kindness.
Then the shop posted his photograph to the internet.
Poetica Coffee tagged Representative Dan Goldman directly, published an interior image of him standing at the counter, and announced that his coffee did not "taste like genocide juice." It informed him that "here at Poetica, we don’t serve racists, fascist
...anybody you disagree with, damn them...
s, homophobes, genocide enablers, or anyone in between." It told him that "too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away." It refunded his money, unasked, with the explanation that "we don’t need your money (it’s probably coming from AIPAC anyways)." It closed: "Don’t ever come to Poetica."
Let us be precise about what happened, because precision is the whole point. A business open to the public identified a customer, decided after the fact that he belonged to a forbidden category, voided the transaction he had completed, and posted a standing notice that people like him are not welcome and will be turned away on sight. The shop’s own website promises that "whoever walks through the door is treated with unconditional dignity," that "the door doesn’t close on anyone."
The door closed. It closed on a Jewish public official because the shop treated Israel, AIPAC, and pro-Israel civic participation as proxies for a forbidden identity.
This was not a boycott of a policy. It was the marking of a person, which is what these boycotts are really about to begin with: racism against a people, dressed up as a disagreement with a state.
THE OLDEST TRICK, RUN AGAIN
The defense writes itself, and Poetica’s supporters have already written it: We didn’t refuse him because he’s Jewish. We refused him because he supports genocide. It sounds like a distinction. But it isn’t. It is the oldest trick in the discrimination playbook, and the law stopped falling for it a long time ago.
Civil rights law does not require a bigot to announce himself with a slur. It has always understood that discrimination hides behind proxies — that "we don’t serve your kind" can be dressed in a hundred euphemisms, and that the euphemism is not a defense but a tell. A landlord who rejects an applicant for his "neighborhood" when the neighborhood is a stand-in for his race has still discriminated. An employer who passes over a candidate for her "accent" when the accent is a stand-in for her national origin has still discriminated. And a coffee shop that refuses a customer for "AIPAC money" — invoking a classic antisemitic libel, the one about Jewish money and hidden Jewish influence — when AIPAC is a stand-in for his Jewishness and his connection to Israel has still discriminated.
"Israel" was the pretext. "AIPAC" was the pretext. "Genocide enabler" was the pretext. But strip the excuses away and what remains is a Jew, refused for being one.
| The New York City Human Rights Law — one of the broadest civil-rights statutes in the nation — makes it unlawful for a place of public accommodation to deny service, "directly or indirectly," because of a person’s actual or perceived creed or national origin. It separately makes it unlawful to publish a notice that a class of customers is unwelcome. |
A LINE OF DOORS, CLOSING
If this were one shop, one barista, one bad day, it would be a small ugliness and not worth a column. It is not one shop. It is a pattern, and the pattern is accelerating.
In Park Slope, the Food Coop voted to boycott Israeli goods — to make its shelves a political checkpoint, to tell its neighbors that some products, and the people associated with them, are unwelcome on the basis of national origin. In Williamsburg, a coffee shop now tells a Jewish congressman he will be turned away at the door. And over all of it hangs the ascent of a mayoralty that has made the loyalty test fashionable.
Consider the calendar. On June 18, at a Brooklyn rally headlined by Bernie Sanders
...The
, Mayor Zohran Mamdani called AIPAC "monsters," accused the organization of moving "millions in dark money" to "turn us against one another," and declared that the only thing AIPAC fears more than democracy is "an end to genocide." Days later, a coffee shop a few subway stops away refused a Jewish congressman and explained that it did not want his money because it was "probably coming from AIPAC anyways." And on June 22 — the very day the coffee-shop story went national — the mayor stood at City Hall and declined to take any of it back.
The coffee shop did not invent that vocabulary. It inherited it. "AIPAC money" as a slur, "dark money" as a dog whistle, Jewish institutions as a hidden hand turning the city against itself — this is not the language of foreign-policy disagreement. It is, as Congressman Josh Gottheimer put it, the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books: swap "AIPAC" for "Jews," and you have it exactly. Even some of the mayor’s own Jewish allies winced at the "dark money" framing and its unmistakable echo of the grand conspiracy libel.
When the most powerful man in the city makes the litmus test respectable, it should surprise no one when others try to enforce it. That is how normalization works. It does not arrive by decree. It arrives one refused latte at a time, each one a little more blatant than the last, each one met with applause instead of consequence, until the thing that was unthinkable on Monday is policy by Friday and a brand identity by Sunday.
We have seen where lines of closing doors lead. We are not there. But we are on the road, and the road runs downhill. A society does not fall off the cliff all at once. It is nudged toward the edge, one "we don’t serve your kind" at a time, by people who are quite sure they are the good guys.
That last part matters. The people closing these doors do not think of themselves as bigots. They think of themselves as anti-racists. They have convinced themselves that this particular discrimination is the righteous kind, the progressive kind, the kind that does not count. It counts. The law does not have a carve-out for discrimination committed by people with good politics, and neither does history. Every closed door in the long catalog of closed doors was, in the mind of the person closing it, justified.
THE LINE, AND WHO DRAWS IT
So this is the line. Not a metaphor, but a legal one.
No New Yorker should have to pass an Israel loyalty test to buy a cup of coffee. A Jew should not have to disavow Israel, AIPAC, Zionism, or his own community to be served at a counter that serves everyone else.
And the principle is only worth anything if it has nothing to do with Israel at all. A coffee shop cannot refuse a Chinese-American customer because it disapproves of Beijing’s conduct in Xinjiang. It cannot refund a Russian émigré’s money because it has decided he answers for the war in Ukraine. It cannot throw out an Æthiopian-American over Tigray, or a Ottoman Turkish-American over the Kurds, or an Indian-American over Kashmir
...a disputed territory lying between India and Pakistain. After partition, the Paks grabbed half of it and call it
Azad (Free) Kashmir. The remainder they refer to as "Indian Occupied Kashmir". They have fought four wars with India over it, the score currently 4-0 in New Delhi's favor. After 72 years of this nonsense, India cut the Gordian knot in 2019, removing the area's special status, breaking off Ladakh as a separate state, and allowing people from other areas to settle (or in the case of the Pandits, to resettle) there....
. In every one of those cases, the shop would be doing exactly what Poetica did — reaching past a person’s politics to punish him for the creed or the country written into his identity — and in every one of those cases, it would be just as illegal. The protection does not belong to Jews. It belongs to everyone, which is precisely why it reaches Jews too. That is what makes it law and not faction.
This is not about defending one congressman, who can defend himself, or one advocacy group, which needs no defense. It is about whether the privileges of ordinary public life in this city — a coffee, a sandwich, a seat — remain open to Jews on the same terms as everyone else, or whether they are now conditional on a political confession. That question has only one acceptable answer, and the law already gave it.
On behalf of The Lawfare Project, I referred this matter to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, asking it to open an investigation and bring an enforcement action against Poetica Coffee for the discriminatory denial of a public accommodation, the publication of a discriminatory notice, and an unlawful refusal to sell. We have asked the Commission to use the full reach of the law, including its authority to act on its own initiative in the public interest, because this is a public injury and not a private grievance.
The barista was kind to a little girl. The shop that employs her chose to be something else, and chose to put it in writing. The law will now decide which choice the city stands behind.
Draw the line here, now, while there is still a line to draw.
Line drawn: DOJ investigating NYC coffee shop over hostile social post about pro-Israel politician
Angry Coffee Shop Owner Who Smeared Jewish Rep Dan Goldman as a ‘Fascist’ Sipping ‘Genocide Juice’ Is a Graham Platner Donor Cited for ‘Filth and Flies’
[WashingtonFreeBeacon] Israel-hating Uzbek coffee mini-mogul attacked Goldman on social media after the congressman visited the shop with his young daughter
Goldman on Instagram said he had stopped by so his daughter could use the restroom and had purchased a coffee out of politeness.
"I'm sorry to see this post. The barista could not have been nicer to my 7-yr-old daughter and me," Goldman said. "I made sure to buy a coffee in return for her kindness. I hope you at least make sure she gets the tip that she deserved."
The coffee shop is owned by Parviz Mukhamadkulov, an immigrant from Uzbekistan
…legal or illegal? With all the laws he’s broken, is it time for hime to be sent home? who is a donor to far-left Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and who, closer to home, has publicly complained that his Brooklyn neighbors were not tipping enough.
The post instantly made waves on social media, and within hours of it going online, Poetica Coffee had taken down its entire Instagram account.
On its website, Poetica incongruously touts its "radical hospitality" and proudly notes that guests are "sacred" and "the door is open to everyone."
| This is Poetica in all its precious hipster glory: link. |
Mukhamadkulov, despite the deletion of his shop's Instagram account, doubled down in a LinkedIn post, telling one critic, "Pretty simple process if you support genocide we reserve the right not to serve you."
Mukhamadkulov started Poetica in 2020 during the pandemic. And while he has expanded to eight locations since then, he's done so as he's skipped out on paying the Empire State hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax revenue.
As of June 20, 2026, Mukhamadkulov and Poetica Coffee owe the state of New York $397,166.58—mostly in unpaid sales tax—according to the New York Department of Taxation and Finance. All but one of Mukhamadkulov's 16 docketed warrants were incurred in 2025.
In 2023, Poetica and its landlord, Ying Wee Corp, were sued for failing to comply with accessibility requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Poetica failed to appear or answer the lawsuit, and Ying Wee Corp settled for $18,500. A year later, Ying Wee Corp sued Poetica and Mukhamadkulov for unpaid rent and costs associated with the ADA lawsuit, with a judge ultimately ordering the Uzbek to pony up more than $39,000, records show.
In January 2025, as debts began to accumulate, the city still allowed Poetica to install a coffee and food truck inside Brooklyn's Prospect Park.
Poetica's Brooklyn location at 240 Prospect Park West has also been repeatedly dinged by city health inspectors for unsanitary conditions—with a health grade currently "pending."
"Filth flies or food/refuse/sewage associated with (FRSA) flies or other nuisance pests in establishment's food and/or non-food areas. FRSA flies include house flies, blow flies, bottle flies, flesh flies, drain flies, Phorid flies and fruit flies," inspectors noted in an inspection from June 18, 2026.
"Personal cleanliness is inadequate," inspectors added. "Outer garment soiled with possible contaminant. Effective hair restraint not worn where required. Jewelry worn on hands or arms. Fingernail polish worn or fingernails not kept clean and trimmed."
The June inspection was the worst recorded by the city at that location since they first inspected the cafe in August 2023, records show.
On X, Mukhamadkulov identified himself as a proud supporter of Mamdani. And federal election records also show he has also donated to Maine's far-left Democratic Senate candidate, Graham Platner.
Elsewhere on X, Mukhamadkulov has celebrated the deaths of Israeli soldiers and has accused Israel of being behind Sept. 11, calling the country a "nazi nation." He has defended vandalism against Jewish students on college campuses.
"How come when its [sic] Ukraine they are fighting for their land when its [sic] Palestine they are terrorists?" Mukhamadkulov opined on Oct. 7, 2023—the day of Hamas's infamous massacre of more than 1,200 innocent Israelis.
Related:
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Dan Goldman 05/07/2026 DHS Restarts Visa Process for Hospitals' Foreign Doctors
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Dan Goldman 05/28/2026 JONATHAN TURLEY: Rep Goldman is trying to rage bait his way to victory. Can he?
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