The woman living in Gracie Mansion has a music problem — and it goes far beyond bad taste.
Rama Duwaji, the 28-year-old wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, built Spotify playlists stocked with songs carrying explicit, profanity-laced anti-Israel messages, the Free Press revealed Wednesday.
One of those playlists carried a title so brazen it stopped readers cold: “hungry but sexy for palestine.”
Sitting inside that playlist was a track called “Ana Bakrah Israel” — four words that leave nothing to interpretation. Translated from Arabic, the title means “I hate Israel.”
A separate playlist, labeled “p2P Palestine 2 Pree-DC protest trip,” appeared to have been assembled specifically for the March on Washington for Gaza, an event that drew crowds to the nation’s capital on January 13, 2024.
That playlist featured a song titled “FREE PALESTINE,” which contains the repeated lyric “F–k Israel, Israel a bitch,” alongside additional inflammatory language targeting the Jewish state, according to the Free Press.
A third playlist on the account bore the label “ACAB” — shorthand for “All Cops Are Bastards” — and was active during the summer of 2020, when cities across the country erupted in protests following the murder of George Floyd.
City Hall said nothing. The mayor’s office declined to offer any comment on the newly surfaced material.
What the administration did do, however, was act fast. Within a short window after the Free Press reached out to City Hall for a response, the Spotify account vanished behind a privacy wall, cutting off public access to its contents entirely.
The playlists represent just the latest chapter in a widening pattern of online activity that has drawn sustained attention since Mamdani took the oath of office at the start of 2026.
Duwaji had previously been found to have liked Instagram posts that expressed celebratory sentiments in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel. She also engaged with a post that dismissed the sexual violence carried out by Hamas against Israeli hostages and victims as a “mass hoax.”
The scrutiny extends further back. In 2015, Duwaji publicly posted that Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist in the first place,” referring to the city’s population as “occupiers.” Two years before that, as a teenager, she used a racial slur in another post.
Facing mounting public pressure, Duwaji issued an apology in April acknowledging the “hurt” her past social media posts had caused. She stopped short of specifically addressing her anti-Israel content or expressing direct regret over it.
Throughout the controversy, Mayor Mamdani has positioned himself as his wife’s most vocal defender. He has argued that Duwaji is a private citizen who holds no official title and should not be subjected to public scrutiny over her personal online history.
Mamdani himself has a documented record of opposition to Israel. At a 2023 Democratic Socialists of America convention, he declared that “the struggle for Palestinian liberation was at the core of my politics and continues to be.”
Duwaji, a professional artist of Syrian descent born in Texas, relocated to New York City in 2021. She met Mamdani through a dating app, and the two married in a civil ceremony at City Hall in February 2025, followed by a ceremony in Mamdani’s birth country of Uganda that July.
She assumed the role of New York City’s first lady when Mamdani was inaugurated in January 2026.
In March, the Free Press first drew widespread public attention to her social media history, reporting she had engaged with upward of 70 Instagram posts promoting extreme anti-Israel positions.
Separately, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism moved to formally recommend that Duwaji be barred from entering the country based on her documented social media record.
