The allegedly anti-Israeli wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani happened to run across Miss Israel at a cafe.
Beauty queen Melanie Shiraz, 27, and Rama Duwaji, 28, had a brief but tense encounter in the city on Sunday, according to Shiraz.
Shiraz posted a selfie of the two and a video of herself speaking about their fortuitous encounter on her Instagram site.
“So guess who sat next to me at a cafe in New York?” she asked, referring to Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani. “The same Rama Duwaji, who posted horribly anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and terror sympathising things not that long ago, and also apologised for it.”
Shiraz claims that Duwaji was delighted to take a selfie with her before acting differently after learning that she was Israeli.
“Despite the calm setting, she refused to have a conversation with me the moment she found out I was Israeli,” Shiraz went on.
In March of this year, a piece about Duwaji’s posts and activities on the platform appeared in the Jewish Insider.
On Sunday, Rama Duwaji, 28, and beauty queen Melanie Shiraz, 27, briefly interacted in the city.
Shiraz claims that Duwaji was delighted to take a selfie with her before acting differently after learning that she was Israeli.
The outlet claims that she loved a picture that commemorated Hamas’ October 2023 attack on Israel.
The Slow Factory, a socialist organization, posted pictures of groups of people with the words “Free Palestine” scribbled over an IDF car after they had taken control of it.
“Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation” and the date appeared in another image.
The picture depicted a bulldozer that the group used to enter Israel on the day that about 1,200 people perished.
Mamdani responded, “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,” when asked about the posts.
Shiraz wrote, “Was I surprised by the outcome?” as a caption for her photo. Not especially. It is simple to apologise without actually altering one’s behaviour.
She was courteous the entire time. “It is easy to claim opposition to dehumanisation in principle, but it is far more difficult to embody that in practice.” However, the change in attitude was noticeable, and the unwillingness to participate was even more so.
On election day in November of last year, Duwaji and Mamdani were spotted here in the city.
Shiraz claims that Duwaji was delighted to take a selfie with her before acting differently after learning that she was Israeli.
“I approached the interaction with openness to a genuine, respectful conversation,” she continued. That transparency was not returned. “And that, perhaps, is the more telling point: how frequently this disconnect appears and how normalised it has become.”
In a recent interview with an art news outlet, Duwaji expressed regret for her earlier social media posts.
“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,” she said. “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 mayor’s office was approached by The Daily Mail for comment.
