Miss Israel details tense exchange with Zohran Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian wife: ‘She brushed me off’
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY: Melanie Shiraz, who was crowned Miss Israel in 2025, opened up about a tense and unexpected encounter, recounting how a random run-in with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife at a Brooklyn cafe quickly turned uneasy.
The 27-year-old Israeli beauty queen told the California Post that she was in town for an event at the Israeli Consulate when she bumped into Rama Duwaji sitting at a coffee shop in Williamsburg on Sunday, May 3.
She shared a video of the encounter on her Instagram page, saying, "So, guess who sat next to me at a cafe in New York?"
"None other than Zohran Mamdani's wife, Rama Duwaji, the same Rama Duwaji who posted horribly antisemitic, anti-Israel, and sympathizing things not that long ago and also apologized for it,” she continued.
Rama Duwaji refused to engage with Melanie Shiraz
In her video, Shiraz, who studied at UC Berkeley and worked in Silicon Valley’s tech industry before returning to Tel Aviv, maintained that NYC’s first lady had been willing to take a photo with her until she learned of her nationality.
“I told her that, as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online," she said, adding, "But I told her part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which one side is not constantly dehumanized."
"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,” she continued.
Speaking about the incident, Shiraz told the Post that the interaction started off warmly, but Duwaji’s “tone changed,” and she refused to “engage with me” after learning who she was.
“And she politely brushed me off and then refused to engage anymore,” she noted.
Shiraz said she was puzzled that Duwaji chose to publicly respond to past remarks about Israel but did not engage with her directly in person.
Rama Duwaji faces backlash over past posts
Shiraz’s tense encounter with Duwaji came on the heels of backlash against NYC’s first lady over her past controversial social media posts, including one in which she said Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist in the first place.”
She also shared a 2017 Tumblr post featuring Leila Khaled, accompanied by the caption: “If it does good for my cause, I’ll be happy to accept death.”
According to media reports, Duwaji also liked an image that celebrated the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.
She addressed the controversy surrounding her reported liking of the Oct. 7 post and issued an apology last month, saying, “When a tabloid recently published old tweets I wrote as a teenager, I felt a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others; being 15 doesn’t excuse it.”
“I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry,” the apology continued.
