Mamdani quoted Eugene Debs in his victory speech — there’s a long Jewish history there

Guno צְבִי · Nov 9, 2025

The Forward’s early decades were devoted to socialism, and specifically support for Debs

“The sun may have set over our city this evening,” Zohran Mamdani said from a stage at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater late Tuesday night. “But as Eugene Debs once said, ‘I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”

This was the first sentence of the new mayor-elect’s victory speech, which gave pride of place to a candidate who ran for president — and lost five times — between 1900 and 1920 under the banner of the Socialist Party of America. And each one of those times, the Forverts backed him.

Debs was core to the early history of this paper, which was a staunchly socialist rag with strong union ties; Debs helped to found the American Railway Union and was a major socialist leader, elevating the ideology’s profile, for a time, to the relative mainstream in the U.S. Founding editor Ab Cahan, himself an avowed socialist, used the Forverts to elevate the leftist ideology among American Jews, urging readers to vote the socialist line every single time Debs ran. The now-defunct Yiddish radio station run by the Forverts, WEVD, took its call letters from the candidate’s name.