26-year-old Morris Katz is gearing up to guide Democratic progressives toward victory in the midterms and beyond.
by Ben Samuels, reposted from Haaretz, November 25, 2025
WASHINGTON – In the weeks since Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in the New York City mayor race, the implications of the 34-year-old’s ascendance to power continues to captivate national attention.
Even Mamdani’s harshest naysayers will acknowledge that his campaign re-wrote the book on how to engage young voters.
Another element gaining global attention is Mamdani’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the scrutiny leveled at his history of pro-Palestinian organizing, as opponents unsuccessfully attempted to turn the mayoral race into a de facto referendum on antisemitism.
No one can tell the story of these two massive pillars of the greater Mamdani story better than Morris Katz, the 26-year-old Democratic strategist and Jewish New York native that played a leading role in crafting a progressive upstart into an international phenomenon.
While Katz has worked on campaigns across the country, the Mamdani campaign undoubtedly carried a personal weight for the Manhattan native. Raised in Tribeca by a publisher and a renowned playwriter and children’s book author, Katz attended the city’s elite Beacon High School before heading upstate to Skidmore College where his political career began in earnest.
Considering his age, Katz has an impressive amount of experience with up-and-coming progressives looking to challenge Democratic Party norms and represent voters who feel alienated from the party’s mainstream.
Mamdani’s election, in his mind, is part of a greater struggle that he hopes will carry over to next year’s midterm elections and the 2028 elections after that. Katz spoke to Haaretz by phone from New York hours before Mamdani traveled to Washington to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump.
What does Zohran Mamdani’s victory tell you about where voters find themselves today – both in terms of how the mayoral race played out, but also on how voters consider the Israel-Palestine issue?
“It shows a marking of both many Jewish New Yorkers rejecting the kind of cynical strategy of [Mamdani opponent Andrew] Cuomo, the weaponization of antisemitism and the Jewish community that he tried to deploy here and was rejected by a lot of Jews of all ages,” he says, “but particularly a younger generation of Jewish New Yorkers. We saw a rejection of a politics of inconsistency and an embrace of politics of consistency.”
This marks a noted shift from elections as recently as last year, where Democratic candidates often espoused progressive policies though maintained a blind spot concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – either due to lack of fluency on foreign policy matters or concerns regarding inevitable political blowback for engaging in a thorny issue.
In a post-Mamdani world, however, this willful ignorance – often derided by left-wing critics as “progressive except Palestine” – may no longer be so tenable.
“There’s this idea that a politics that would sell anyone out is a politics that will eventually sell everyone out,” Katz says. “Even folks who don’t have incredibly strong feelings about what’s happening know when they’re being lied to or know when they’re seeing dishonesty and when they’re seeing bad-faith interpretations of things and are being misled.”
“You cannot tell the general public who have seen what’s happening in Gaza to not believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes, and the politicians who’ve gone down that path jeopardized greatly not only their commitment to humanity, but their credibility with voters,” Katz says.
On the other hand, Katz points to the “absurdity” of Andrew Cuomo volunteering for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense team to combat the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
Mamdani defeated the disgraced former New York governor twice – in the Democratic primary and the general election – despite Cuomo’s explicit strategy of fomenting voter tensions surrounding Israel and antisemitism that only grew more acute toward the end of the campaign.
Katz, who often found himself acting as both a surrogate and a backchannel to New York’s Jewish community amid Mamdani’s ascendancy, credits “an increased fluency and understanding that we can disagree while being agreeable, and that there are going to be New Yorkers who believe certain things about Israel and about foreign policy that don’t align.”
“We were able to kind of bridge this divide,” he says, “with folks interpreting that as though it was not coming from a place of deep commitment to universality and universal humanity and human rights. There was a lot of progress seen through that lens, rather than through the more cynical lens.”
What role has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict played in your political story – both coming of age as a political operator but also over the past two years with the Gaza war?
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“I grew up accepting much of what was said around Israel – over family dinners or over days of Hebrew school. One of the things that makes this issue so interesting or unique is the friction of learning about Israel as a project of liberalism and as a beacon of so many of the things we’re taught from a value standpoint to admire.
“Then as you’re exposed to more and more of the reality and more of the history, understanding the full context of what’s happening and the nature of injustice that’s occurring.
“The reaction that people have to Israel is one of the most inconsistent things in our politics,” Morris Katz tells Haaretz. “For me, at least, it took a long time to reconcile that. So many people you trust on so many issues and have the right positions, then you’ll have a position that’s so incoherent with the other positions.
Growing up, you hear all the time these statements that you don’t think about with a critical eye – the right to self-defense, how difficult the region is. Part of my experience coming into my political identity was asking the real questions.
At whose expense? If we’re saying this is supposed to be representative of our values, are these our values? For me, that’s not the answer.”
“The reaction that people have to Israel is one of the most inconsistent things in our politics. For me, at least, it took a long time to reconcile that. So many people you trust on so many issues and have the right positions, then you’ll have a position that’s so incoherent with the other positions.
“Growing up, you hear all the time these statements that you don’t think about with a critical eye – the right to self-defense, how difficult the region is. Part of my experience coming into my political identity was asking the real questions. At whose expense? If we’re saying this is supposed to be representative of our values, are these our values? For me, that’s not the answer.”
The AIPAC effect
While asking these questions was clearly a part of his political journey, Katz has a clear and explicit answer about the “main accelerator that radicalized me” – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, more commonly known as AIPAC.
“I started to see what was happening with clear eyes. My eyes were open to the realities of apartheid in Israel,” he says, though AIPAC’s role in American electoral politics truly came to the forefront in 2022 when its then-new United Democracy Project Super PAC intervened in a North Carolina House race against a campaign managed by Katz.
Don Davis defeated the Katz-managed Erica Smith in the state’s 1st congressional district, buoyed by UDP spending $2.1 million in favor of Davis and $335,000 against Smith – which were, at the time, unheard-of numbers for pro-Israel super PACs intervening in House races.
“There simply is not enough in-district money to compete with outside spending of this level, and that’s a troubling reality about the current state of American politics,” Katz said at the time.
Reflecting on the 2022 race, Katz now decries how AIPAC “spent ungodly amounts of money, never mentioning Israel once, because [Smith] had taken some vote nine years prior that they didn’t agree with. It felt so sinister and bad faith.”
“If these people are doing this, then what are they defending? It helped fill out this vision of a structure of conservative billionaires in America spending massive sums of money, undermining American democracy for the sake of protecting an authoritarian in Israel,” he says.
“AIPAC poses the single biggest existential threat to democracy in America out of any group. It is spending hundreds of millions of dollars defending a fascist in Israel and to sustain the power structures that sustain a fascist, while never mentioning the issue and aligning yourself with Donald Trump and going into predominately communities of color with massive disinformation campaigns,” Katz says. “It’s disgusting.”
AIPAC, for its part, frequently highlights its bipartisan efforts and its ties with Republicans and Democrats alike – including a significant portion of the Congressional Black Caucus. For Katz, however, this defense is simply a distraction.
“The support of those things is in reaction to the actions they’re taking that essentially say ‘if you do not [comply with] every one of our demands, we will end your career.’ That is not how democracy is supposed to work,” he says. “No one entity is supposed to have the power to control both political parties through the threat of political repercussion.”
Tattoo trouble
With AIPAC’s increasing alienation of young Jewish voters – both Democrats disillusioned with Israeli actions toward Palestinians and Republicans who believe AIPAC betrays Trump’s America First agenda – it stands to reason that younger voters will gravitate to candidates like Mamdani who steer into the issue rather than tiptoe around it.
One of these candidates already being advised by Katz is Graham Platner, the Maine Democratic oyster farmer-turned-political upstart who captured the imagination of progressives nationwide while explicitly insisting that U.S. taxpayer funds should be spent on local schools and hospitals rather than bombs for Israel to use in Gaza.
Platner further campaigned explicitly against AIPAC, releasing a number of paid advertisements against the pro-Israel organization as representative of the ills of Washington. Last month, Platner confirmed rumors that he previously had gotten a skull-and-bones tattoo on his chest while on vacation with fellow Marines in Croatia. Critics said the tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol, but Platner insisted he did not know about its fascist roots. He has since covered-up the tattoo.
“If we want to move past a time in which the only people who are able to run for office are people who, since they were children, had been planning a run for office or who have closely choreographed every move to position them for a run for statewide office or for a run for president, that’s going to require running real people. And real people who haven’t thought they were going to run for office have lived imperfect lives,” Katz recently told NPR when asked about the scandal.
“If voters feel like it’s disqualifying, it’s up to them. That’s why we have primaries, and that’s why we have elections. But I think an era in which, like, Washington D.C. gets to decide that that’s a liability or that that’s disqualifying is out of touch with the real craving for real human beings who are relatable and authentic, flaws and all.”
Platner’s unique circumstances aside, 2026 may very well mark the first election where many young voters nationwide will head to the polls with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on their minds – inseparable from the more typical cost-of-living and affordability issues informing their choices.
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This is edging towards being proved in Katz’s New York, where at least four Democratic House primaries will clarify whether AIPAC support is disqualifying, as progressives are claiming with increasing furiousness.
“There are a lot of young American Jews who value the lives of Israelis and Palestinians equally, who do not believe that war crimes are ever justified, who do not believe that a defense of Israel is a right to undermine elections or to embrace Islamophobia or to spend years in an aimless war,” Katz tells Haaretz.
“It’s a reflection of the way in which we perceive our Jewish values. Bad faith critics try to interpret this as a betrayal of Jewish values, but a younger generation uses it is a true embrace of Jewish values. I know that’s how I think about it. That’s a really encouraging thing from this election, from just my conversations with friends and siblings – there’s a change, and I think it’s us coming closer to embodying the values we preach.”
Ben Samuels is a reporter with Haaretz
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