Mamdani’s college articles show far-left views on Israel and privilege

FIRST ON FOX: College newspaper articles written by New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani shed light on the surging candidate’s early views on a variety of topics, including his promotion of an anti-Israel boycott and concerns about “white privilege,” a Fox News Digital review found.

Mamdani wrote 32 articles for the Bowdoin Orient during his four years studying at Maine’s prestigious Bowdoin College from 2010 to 2014, including an article his senior year promoting an academic boycott of Israel.

“This academic and cultural boycott aims to bring under scrutiny the actions of the Israeli government and to put pressure on Israeli institutions to end the oppressive occupation and racist policies within both Israel and occupied Palestine,” wrote Mamdani, who co-founded his college’s Students for Justice in Palestine organization.

Students for Justice in Palestine has become one of the biggest drivers of anti-Israel protests on college campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, with some going so far as to celebrate the attack. 

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Zohran Mamdani during a campaign event at the NAN House of Justice in the Harlem neighborhood of New York on Saturday, June 28, 2025. (Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Mamdani was taking issue in his article with Bowdoin College’s president, Barry Mills, opposing the boycott. 

“Lastly, Mills regrettably makes no mention of Palestinians or Palestine,” Mamdani wrote. “The call for the boycott comes in response to more than 60 years of Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine. When Mills speaks of the ‘free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and research, and open discourse’ in academia, he does so while privileging partnerships with Israeli institutions over basic freedoms for Palestinians, including the rights to food, water, shelter and education, which many Palestinians are denied under Israeli rule.”

In a 2013 op-ed, Mamdani responded to a White student who took issue with criticism of the school’s editorial page being too White by accusing him of holding “white privilege.”

“White males are privileged in their near-to-exclusive featuring as figures of authority in print, on television and around us in our daily realities,” Mamdani wrote. “We, the consumers of these media, internalize this and so believe in the innate authority of a white male’s argument and the need for its publication. So, white privilege is both a structural and an individual phenomenon, the former propelling the latter. Therefore, even when the individual is silent, the structures continue to exist and frame our society through their existence.”

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Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani takes the stage at his primary election party on Wednesday, June 25, 2025 in New York. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Mamdani said the “pervasive male whiteness” of the school’s opinion pages “builds on the sadly still-present white male monopolization of both discourse and understanding.”

Mamdani explained, “While whiteness is not homogenous, white privilege is. This privilege is clear in not having to face institutional racism in access to housing subsidies, college grants, financial institutions, or civil rights. It allows a white person to universalize his own experiences. It restricts society’s ability to understand its flaws, and projects a false image of meritocracy upon a nation built on institutional racism.”

In another post, titled “Bearded in Cairo,” Mamdani discussed his time studying abroad in Egypt as the Muslim Brotherhood was violently toppling President Morsi’s regime. He explained that before arriving he had grown a beard “mostly as a symbolic middle finger” to the stereotype that “pervades America” that brown individuals with beards are a “terrorist.”

Mamdani discussed privilege again, saying that he had “arrived in a society where privilege was a different color.”

“Gone was the image of the white Christian male that I had grown accustomed to, and in its place was a darker, more familiar picture – ­­­one that, for the first time, I fit: brown skin, black hair, and a Muslim name,” Mamdani wrote. “With the right clothing, some took me for an Egyptian and most thought I was Syrian – either identity allowed me unrestricted access to exploring Cairo.”

In a 2014 article titled “On the 50th anniversary of MLK’s visit to campus, let’s acknowledge what we still need to achieve,” Mamdani lamented that his school, which doubled its diversity student population over the previous 13 years, was still behind where it should be. He wrote that the school had prematurely achieved a “satisfaction with the level of diversity.”

“I have been forced to personally grapple with these inconsistencies during my time here,” Mamdani wrote.

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New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is of Indian descent and was born in Uganda. (Reuters/Bing Guan)

“I sit in class not knowing whether to correct everyone’s mispronunciation of an Indian woman’s name. I usually do, but today I’m tired. I’m tired of being one of a few non-white students in a classroom, if not the only one. I bring up race in discussions only to see the thought flicker in my peers eyes and on their tongues. They sigh without a sound. I’ve brought up race again. I’ve sidetracked the discussion. I’ve chosen to make an issue out of it.”

In the same post, Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Indian parents, outlined his struggles feeling uncomfortable being a non-white student.

“I grow a beard only to be called a terrorist,” Mamdani wrote. “I pronounce the ‘h’ in my name only to hear muffled laughs. Clothing becomes exotic once it clads my body. Cotton shirts are called dashikis and sandals ethnic.”

Mamdani continued, “While I am now comfortable in my own skin, I can remember wishing for whiteness my first year when I thought certain types of girls were impossible to talk to due to my skin being more kiwi than peach. Months later, I remember thinking that attraction might only be possible when a girl had ‘a thing for brown guys.’”

Mamdani explained that he has found “solidarity” with some students on campus but that “still, too few people acknowledge that race is an issue on our campus, or that it has ever been one.”

“But if people say they are color blind, do they even see me?” Mamdani wrote.

Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s campaign for comment.

Zohran Mamdani is challenging incumbent Mayor Adams, who is running as an independent, in November’s mayoral election. (Getty Images)

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Mamdani burst onto the national political scene last month when he won a surprising victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary despite facing criticism for his far-left policies, which included city-run grocery stores, defunding police, safe injection sites and raising the minimum wage to $30.

Mamdani’s victory has sparked a civil war of sorts within the Democratic Party between those pushing to moderate since VP Kamala Harris’s defeat in November and those embracing a progressive shift toward the mold of Rep. Alexandria-Cortez, D-N.Y., who endorsed Mamdani.

Mamdani, thanks to his primary victory, is the clear frontrunner in the general election in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a roughly six-to-one margin.

Fox News Digital’s Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.