Beauty queen says Mamdani’s wife was willing for a photo at a cafe but then refused to engage with her after knowing that she is an Israeli.
Melanie Shiraz, Miss Israel 2025, posted a video of a chance meeting NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife Rama Duwaji at a Brooklyn cafe and alleged that Duwaji refused to engage with her on the issue of Palestine. “So, guess who sat next to me at a cafe in New York?” Shiraz, 27, said in an Instagram video calling out the 28-year-old first lady of New York City. “None other than Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji — the same Rama Duwaji who posted horribly antisemitic, anti-Israel and terror sympathizing things not that long ago and also apologized for it.”Shiraz said Duwaji was willing to pose for a photo with her until she learned of her nationality.“Until I told her that, as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online,” Shiraz said. “But I told her part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which one side is not constantly dehumanized.”“But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so,” Shiraz wrote on Tuesday. “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.”Rama Duwaji came under heat for her social media activities expressing hatred towards Israel, though Mamdani shielded her and said she is a private person who has no former role in the administration.Rama Duwaji did not issue a statement on the claim of the beauty queen. The video too does not show any conversation between them.Duwaji apologized last month for social media posts she reportedly made as a teenager, saying she was “truly sorry” for sharing messages with language “so harmful to others,” — without providing additional details. One post insisted Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist,” while another praised Palestinian militant Shadia Abu Ghazaleh — a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terrorist organization.“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,” Duwaji said last month. “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.”
