Just thinking about his Jewish friends. Photo : AP

In his push to paint himself as a progressive since Cynthia Nixon announced her primary bid, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been employing a strange form of identity politics. Last month, Cuomo called himself “undocumented” (he isn’t) and stated that he was “raised by poor immigrants from South Jamaica” (he wasn’t).




This week, Cuomo announced that he was planning a trip to Israel. In doing so, Cuomo, who is Catholic, decided to claim that “New York and Israel are political bodies that share the same DNA” (debatable) and that as a New Yorker, “the Jewish people and the culture are embedded in me” (also debatable). He then pointed out that his “best friends are Jewish” and “two of my brothers-in-law are Jewish.”


Again, Andrew Cuomo is not Jewish.

This isn’t the first weird Jewish-related comment Cuomo has made recently. It’s not even the first time Cuomo has tried to claim that he is specifically Jewish at heart. After Donald Trump first tried to enact his Muslim travel ban last January, Cuomo said that, “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am Black. I am gay. I am disabled. I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices. Because as a New Yorker we are one community.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Cuomo will be stopping this stuff any time soon.