Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, liked social media posts celebrating the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers, wounded thousands, and saw 251 civilians and military personnel kidnapped. She also liked a February 2024 Instagram post claiming The New York Times' investigation into sexual violence committed during the attack was "fabricated."
The story, first reported by Jewish Insider, has drawn remarkably little scrutiny from the outlets that typically appoint themselves as democracy's hall monitors. From the time the Jewish Insider report came out on Friday through Monday afternoon, the silence from major newsrooms was deafening.
The socialist mayor did not deny that his wife liked the posts. Instead, he deployed a familiar shield: she's a "private person."
My wife is the love of my life, and she's also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall.
He followed that with a pivot designed to close the conversation:
I, however, was elected to represent all 8.5 million people in the city, and I believe that it's my responsibility, because of that role, to answer any questions about my thoughts and my policies and my decisions.
A City Hall spokesperson added that "Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7 was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally." Clear and consistent, perhaps, in words. His wife's social media activity tells a different story.
According to Fox News, to understand just how selectively the media applies its outrage, consider the case of Corinne Levy Goldman, wife of Rep. Dan Goldman of New York. Goldman's wife liked or reposted social media posts from several right-wing accounts that, according to The New York Times, "some saw as hateful or insensitive toward Palestinians and Black people." That story received wall-to-wall treatment.
Now compare the two situations:
That last phrase belongs to Status, the media newsletter, which described the Jewish Insider report as "something that might have appeared on The Free Press, Bari Weiss' anti-woke and vehemently pro-Israel opinion site." The implication is clear: caring about someone celebrating the slaughter of 1,200 people is a niche editorial concern, a quirk of the pro-Israel right, not a legitimate news story.
Sophie Ellman-Golan, the communications director at Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, went further, reportedly arguing it was unfair to even equate Duwaji's likes with those of Goldman's wife. Think about what that means. Liking posts that celebrate a terrorist attack that included mass murder, sexual violence, and hostage-taking is, in this framework, less newsworthy than liking right-wing posts that "some saw" as insensitive.
The hierarchy of acceptable outrage could not be more transparent.
NBC 4 New York offered its own contribution to the soft-landing effort, noting that the likes occurred "almost a year and a half before she married Mamdani" and that he "did not enter the Democratic primary for mayor until October 2024." The couple wed in early 2025. The framing is obvious: this was before she was a political spouse, so why does it matter?
It matters because the likes didn't celebrate a controversial zoning proposal. They celebrated a massacre. Roughly 35,000 other accounts may have also liked one of those posts, but roughly 35,000 other accounts aren't married to the mayor of New York City.
Ben Rhodes, the Obama staffer turned writer and podcaster, offered perhaps the most revealing reaction. Referencing CBS News' coverage of the story, he posted:
There's a war, high prices, job losses, AI unleashed, and on and on. But Bari Weiss's CBS is on the case of the NY Mayor's wife's likes from years ago. WTF is going on.
This is the playbook distilled to its purest form. When a story embarrasses the right person, it's accountability journalism. When it embarrasses the wrong person, it's a distraction from "real issues." Rhodes doesn't argue the story is false. He argues it shouldn't be covered. There's a difference, and it's not a subtle one.
Some CBS staffers who spoke to Status expressed "growing concern" about Bari Weiss, CBS News' editor-in-chief and an outspoken supporter of Israel, "making editorial decisions." The suggestion is that only someone with a pro-Israel bias would consider this newsworthy. The mayor's wife liked posts celebrating the deadliest attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, and the media's response is to interrogate the motives of the journalists who reported it.
This is how institutional media protects its own. Not by arguing on the merits. By attacking the messenger.
Mamdani's insistence that his wife is a "private person" who held "no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall" is doing an enormous amount of work in this story. It asks the public to treat the mayor's spouse as though she exists in a completely separate civic universe from the man running America's largest city.
No serious person believes that. Political spouses have never been considered fully private figures, and both parties have acknowledged this for decades. The press certainly understood the principle when it covered Corinne Levy Goldman's social media activity. The "private person" shield only activates when the spouse in question holds views the media finds sympathetic, or at least inconvenient to scrutinize.
Duwaji, described as a Houston-born illustrator who identifies as Syrian, liked posts on Instagram that were "supportive of the Palestinian cause immediately after the attacks" and "critical of Israel." Those are The New York Times' own carefully chosen words. The posts she engaged with went beyond criticism of Israeli policy. One of them called the Times' own reporting on sexual violence during the attack "fabricated."
That's not geopolitical commentary. That's atrocity denial.
The deeper issue isn't what Rama Duwaji liked on Instagram. People reveal themselves in unguarded moments, and social media likes are about as unguarded as it gets. The deeper issue is the media apparatus that decided this revelation deserved burial rather than sunlight.
A New York Times spokesperson defended the paper's coverage by saying it reported: "in detail with context and nuance about the social media activity of Ms. Duwaji and its political implications for Mr. Mamdani." Context and nuance, in this case, meant softening a story that would have generated weeks of breathless coverage if the political affiliations were reversed.
Imagine, for a moment, that the wife of a Republican mayor had liked posts celebrating any act of political violence. Imagine she had endorsed a claim that investigative reporting into wartime sexual assault was fabricated. The coverage would not be described as "peculiar" by media newsletters. There would be no chin-stroking about whether the story was really about editorial bias at the outlet that broke it.
There would be front-page investigations. There would be resignation demands. There would be the kind of media feeding frenzy that makes careers.
Instead, New York's socialist mayor gets the gentlest possible landing. His wife celebrated a terrorist attack on social media, and the press corps is busy debating whether anyone should have mentioned it.
