Rama Duwaji, the 28-year-old wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, maintained a public Spotify account featuring playlists with anti-Israel songs, including tracks referencing "greedy Jews" and calling for Israel's destruction, until a journalist's inquiry prompted the account to go private, Breitbart News reported, citing an investigation by The Free Press.
The account reportedly contained two playlists titled "Intifada" and "Ana Bakrah Israel." A third playlist, labeled "ACAB", an anti-police acronym, also appeared on the account. The discovery adds fresh trouble to a mayoral household already marked by controversy over Duwaji's public statements and Mamdani's fraying relationship with Jewish constituents.
The sequence of events, as described by Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold in a post on X, is blunt. On a Tuesday, Reingold said she contacted Mamdani's communications team to ask why Duwaji appeared to have a Spotify account with songs "about greedy Jews" and lyrics declaring "Israel gon' die b****." By Wednesday, the account was locked down.
The Free Press reported that the two anti-Israel playlists included tracks with lyrics targeting Jews and celebrating the destruction of Israel. One song on the account, "Rajaoui Filistini," was described as a 2019 track. Another, titled "FREE PALESTINE," was described as a short song that delivers its message in less than three minutes.
A separate playlist, "p2p Palestine 2 Pree, DC protest trip", appeared to have been assembled as a soundtrack for the January 13, 2024, March on Washington for Gaza. That detail suggests the playlists were not relics of a distant past but were curated during an active period of anti-Israel protest activity.
The "ACAB" playlist, meanwhile, sits in a category of its own. The acronym stands for "All Cops Are B*******", a slogan that became a fixture of the 2020 protest movement and remains a flashpoint in debates over policing. For the wife of a sitting mayor who oversees the nation's largest police department, the playlist title is, at minimum, a political headache.
Reingold's account of the timeline is worth examining closely. She posted on X that she reached out to Mamdani's communications team on a Tuesday with a direct question about the Spotify account's content. By Wednesday, the account had been "totally shut down, made private."
"Tuesday: ask Mamdani's comms team, why does Rama Duwaji appear to have a Spotify account with songs about greedy Jews and how 'Israel gon' die b****'? Any comment? Wednesday: the account is totally shut down, made private."
No public response from Mamdani or his team has been reported. The silence, paired with the speed of the account's disappearance, tells its own story. When a reporter asks about something embarrassing and the evidence vanishes within 24 hours, the public is left to draw its own conclusions.
This is not the first time Duwaji's public footprint has drawn scrutiny. She previously faced backlash over social media posts that critics called harmful, and issued a vague apology without specifying what she had actually said.
The Spotify playlists do not exist in a vacuum. They surface at a moment when Mamdani's standing with Jewish New Yorkers is already weak. A recent poll found that fewer than one in three Jewish NYC voters approve of the mayor's performance, a striking figure in a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in the world.
The mayor's broader record has drawn fire from multiple directions. His first months in office produced what critics have described as a string of unmet commitments, from housing vouchers to homeless sweeps.
And the political weakness extends beyond City Hall. A Mamdani-backed candidate and a DSA newcomer both fell flat in a recent NYC Council special election, a sign that the mayor's progressive coalition may not carry the weight he needs it to.
Several basic facts remain unclear. The Free Press investigation does not detail the direct evidence tying the Spotify account to Duwaji beyond what Reingold described. No screenshots or archived playlist URLs have been publicly referenced. And the mayor's office has not, as of the reporting, offered any on-the-record comment.
Those gaps matter. But the account's sudden shift to private, timed precisely to a journalist's inquiry, is itself a data point. Innocent playlists don't get scrubbed overnight.
There is also the question of what Mamdani himself knew. Did the mayor's communications team inform him before locking the account? Did he review the content? Has he addressed the matter privately with Jewish community leaders? None of that has been reported.
Mamdani has hinted at national political ambitions, even while publicly denying interest in a presidential run. If that ambition is real, the content on his wife's Spotify account, and the reflexive decision to hide it rather than explain it, is the kind of liability that doesn't age well under a brighter spotlight.
Elected officials are not responsible for every opinion held by their spouses. That is a fair principle, and it applies here. But Duwaji is not a private citizen in the ordinary sense. She is the first lady of the largest city in America. Her public accounts are, by definition, public.
Playlists titled "Intifada" and "Ana Bakrah Israel", the latter translating roughly to "I Hate Israel", are not ambiguous. They are not the kind of thing that lands on a Spotify profile by accident. Combined with a protest-trip soundtrack and an anti-police playlist, they paint a picture of a household steeped in a particular ideological current, one that a significant share of New Yorkers, and especially Jewish New Yorkers, find deeply offensive.
The mayor's first 100 days have already tested the patience of New Yorkers who expected competence over ideology. This latest revelation tests something else: whether the people running City Hall hold basic respect for a community that has called New York home for generations.
When the music stops and the account goes dark, the silence speaks louder than any playlist ever could.
