The wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is known for her alleged anti-Israeli views, randomly encountered Miss Israel inside a New York City cafe. Rama Duwaji, 28, and beauty queen Melanie Shiraz, 27, had a brief meeting on Sunday in the city that Shiraz described as a short but tense encounter.
In a post to her Instagram page, Shiraz shared a selfie of the two alongside a clip of her speaking, detailing the chance meeting. She said: 'So guess who sat next to me at a cafe in New York, none other than Zohran Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji. The same Rama Duwaji, who posted horribly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and terror sympathizing things not that long ago, and also apologized for it.'
According to Shiraz, Duwaji was initially happy to pose for a selfie, but her demeanor changed when she discovered that Shiraz was Israeli. Shiraz continued: 'Despite the setting being calm, the moment she found out I was Israeli she refused to have a conversation with me.'
A story published by Jewish Insider highlighted Duwaji's social media activity from March of this year. According to the outlet, she liked an image that celebrated the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. The post, made by leftist group The Slow Factory, included images of people after having taken over an IDF vehicle, with 'Free Palestine' scrawled over it. Another image read: 'Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation', followed by the date. The image showed a bulldozer used by the group to break into Israel on that day, which resulted in nearly 1,200 deaths.
When questioned about the posts, Mamdani said: 'My wife is the love of my life, and she is also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall.' Captioning her post, Shiraz added: 'Was I surprised by the outcome? Not particularly. It is easy to apologize without meaningfully changing one’s behavior. It is easy to claim opposition to dehumanization in principle, but far more difficult to embody that in practice. She was polite throughout. But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so.'
She added: 'I approached the interaction with openness to a genuine, respectful conversation. That openness was not reciprocated. And that, perhaps, is the more telling point: how often this disconnect appears, and how normalized it has become.'
Recently, Duwaji apologized for her previous social media posts in an interview with an art news outlet. She said: 'When a tabloid recently published old tweets I wrote as a teenager, I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it. I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry.'
The Daily Mail contacted the mayor's office for comment.
