Thousands of Jewish NYers have joined a WhatsApp group to counter Zohran Mamdani …

Like so many other New Yorkers, Samantha Epstein-Rubenstein was distressed when Zohran Mamdani won the city’s Democratic mayoral primary last month. As a lifelong supporter of Israel, she knows she doesn’t want to vote for Mamdani in November — but she’s also not sure who to support instead. So Epstein-Rubenstein turned to WhatsApp, where she activated a dormant group she initiated two years ago to educate voters and marshal support for her local City Council candidate, Julie Menin. Ahead of the June primary elections, she and another Upper East Side Jewish local urged the roughly 250 members of the group to invite every Jew across the five boroughs who was eligible to vote they knew to join, with the goal of building some kind of unified strategy to keep Mamdani out of office. By election day, Epstein-Rubenstein and her partner, a businessman who declined to be interviewed, had attracted 700 people to the group, called Jews of NYC – Get Out the Vote. The roster included neighbors, synagogue friends and parents of Jewish day school students — all recruited very deliberately. After Mamdani’s surprise primary win, the group snowballed in size, soon reaching WhatsApp’s maximum of 1,024 members. A second
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