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."
