Bronx Science Alums: Mamdani, Stokely Carmichael, and Me
Zohran Mamdani, the now well-known New York City Democratic mayoral nominee, graduated in 2010 from the Bronx High School of Science, which is celebrated for its nine graduates Nobel laureates, and the 11 alumni who are recipients of the National Medal of Science or Technology.
Less well-known are that many graduates have been prominent Democrats and those who may be regarded as being beyond extremely left wing.
Physicist Harold Brown ('43) was Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s secretayr of defense (1977-1981). Brown previously served as president of the prestigious California Institute of Technology, and secretary of the Air Force under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Nita Lowey ('55) was a New York congresswoman between 1989 and 2021.
She chaired the powerful U.S. House Appropriations Committee during her last two years.
Two former New York City comptrollers are also Bronx Science graduates: Harrison J. Goldin (’53), (serving between 1974 and 1989), and John Liu ('85), (serving between 2010 and 2013).
But in the 1989 Democratic mayoral primary, won by David Dinkins, Goldin received a miniscule 3% of the vote.
That same year in the Republican mayoral primary, Bronx Science alumnus Ronald Lauder ('61), the businessman, philanthropist, and Jewish leader, was crushed by Rudy Giuliani, 67% to 33%.
The school’s third unsuccessful candidate for Gotham's mayor is Liu, who was a member of the New York City Council between 2002 and 2009, and who in the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary received only 47,000 votes to the winning, extremely left wing, Bill de Blasio’s 282,000.
The 57-year-old Liu, a New York state senator from Queens since 2019, endorsed Mamdani in early June, helping propel the virtually unknown state assemblyman to victory three weeks later.
Other left wing radicals from Bronx Science include Todd Gitlin ('59), president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64, and later a professor at NYU and Columbia University.
Joshua Muravchik ('65), national director of the Young People’s Socialist League between 1967 and 1974, subsequently metamorphosized into a conservative intellectual whose many articles and books include a very timely, updated edition in 2019 of "Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall and Afterlife of Socialism."
Mamdani has been a member of the radical-left Democratic Socialists of America since 2017.
Mamdani is virulently anti-Israel. This writer is a lifelong Zionist who played pro basketball for Beitar Jerusalem in 1972 and has written many articles about the miraculous rebirth and flourishing of the Jewish state.
I am also the rare Bronx Science graduate ('67) who is a conservative writer, a longtime supporter of Republican politicians, and author of dozens of articles since 1986 about my illustrious alma mater.
Another far-left, anti-Israel graduate of Bronx Science was the odious Stokely Carmichael ('60), the advocate for Black Power and Pan Africanism.
Carmichael’s close friend at Bronx Science was Eugene Dennis Jr., whose father Eugene Sr. was general secretary of the American Communist Party between 1945 and 1959.
Carmichael was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) between 1966 and 1967.
Mahmood Mamdani, the Indian-born father of the mayoral nominee, implausibly claimed in a 2013 interview that, as a 17-year-old scholarship student from Uganda at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963 or early 1964, he joined a SNCC Freedom Ride to Montgomery, Alabama, where he "got beaten up, thrown in jail," and was later visited in his dorm by two FBI agents.
Zohran Mamdani claimed on his rejected 2009 admissions application to Columbia, that he was Black or African American.
In 1969, Stokely Carmichael moved to Guinea in West African, and changed his name to Kwame Toure.
Interestingly, Zohran Mamdani’s middle name is Kwame, and he was born in Uganda in 1991, moving with his globe-trotting, radical-left parents to South Africa and then to the Big Apple in 1999.
Until Carmichael’s death in 1998, the rabble-rouser would annually visit many American universities, including one at the University of Maryland in 1986 in which he declared that the "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist."
Abominably, Carmichael is an inductee in Bronx Science’s Hall of Fame.
Zohran Mamdani’s parents are also long-time haters of Israel, as his father, a professor at Columbia for a quarter century, called for in 2015 the "dismantling of the Jewish state."
His mother, Mira Nair, is an Indian-born film director who rejected an invitation in 2013 to the Haifa Film Festival, tendentiously declaring a boycott of Israel until "Apartheid is over."
In conclusion, this writer’s predictions are that Mamdani will be the fourth graduate of Bronx Science who has failed to win the New York City mayorship.
In the June 24 primary, he received a paltry 447,000 votes, or fewer than 10% of the city’s 4,741,000 active registered voters.
However, turnout in the November election will be very robust, and in a two-man race against either Mayor Eric Adams or disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani won’t exceed 40%.
To update and paraphrase a famous quote from William Buckley, the losing candidate on the conservative line in the 1965 New York mayoral race, whose winner was the Republican John Lindsay, who could be described as a limousine liberal. (Lindsay was a Republican up to and until 1971, then jumped to the Democratic Party - after 1971.)
"New Yorkers would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the city’s telephone book than my fellow graduates of the Bronx High School of Science."
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.