Melanie Shiraz, who was crowned Miss Israel in 2025, posted video footage on Tuesday of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife in a Brooklyn cafe — alleging Rama Duwaji “refused to engage” during a confrontation about her views on Palestinians.
“So, guess who sat next to me at a cafe in New York?” Shiraz, 27, said in an Instagram video calling out the 28-year-old first lady of New York City. “None other than Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji — the same Rama Duwaji who posted horribly antisemitic, anti-Israel and terror sympathizing things not that long ago and also apologized for it.”
Shiraz said Duwaji, who has expressed “shame” over recently resurfaced social media posts that celebrated Palestinian militants, had been willing to take a photo with her until she learned of her nationality.
“Until I told her that, as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online,” Shiraz said. “But I told her part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which one side is not constantly dehumanized.”
Shiraz wrote in a lengthy caption that Duwaji, a Houston native whose parents were born in Syria, had been “polite” during the brief encounter on Sunday at a coffee shop in Brooklyn.
“But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so,” Shiraz wrote on Tuesday. “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.”
Messages sent to Duwaji and Mamdani’s office were not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.
Duwaji apologized last month for social media posts she reportedly made as a teenager, saying she was “truly sorry” for sharing messages with language “so harmful to others,” although she did not provide additional details. One post insisted Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist,” while another praised Palestinian militant Shadia Abu Ghazaleh — a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
An X profile reportedly belonging to Duwaji has since been deleted. Newsweek was unable to independently verify the account belonged to Duwaji, but The Washington Free Beacon linked the account to Mamdani’s wife through facial recognition technology, according to the outlet.
“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,” Duwaji said last month. “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 Free Beacon report followed earlier criticism of Duwaji’s online activity, including likes on Instagram posts in 2024 that questioned reporting on sexual violence during the October 7 Hamas attack.