Sid Rosenberg does not really do still. New York’s most combative radio host – four hours a day, five days a week on 77 WABC – does confrontation, conviction, and the kind of bluntness that has made him one of the most listened-to voices in the city.
It has also, on occasion, made him one of the most controversial.
“October 7 changed the whole map,” he told The Jerusalem Post. “And after October 7, you follow it up with Mamdani, and there’s a reason why antisemitism is up 182 percent. There’s your answer right there.”
For Rosenberg, 57, who grew up Jewish in New York, the transformation in his home city has been jarring. He recalls little antisemitism from his youth.
“Every once in a while, you read a story about a Jewish kid getting his yarmulke knocked off or getting pushed down in the street,” he said. “But now we get five or six of those a day, every day. It’s terrible.”
That shift, according to Rosenberg, is political. He places the blame squarely on what he describes as Democratic permissiveness in major liberal cities, a culture in which pro-Palestinian protests, conducted under the banner of free speech, have, in his view, crossed into something far more dangerous.
“The fact that they allow these pro-Hamas rallies on the streets of New York as if that’s free speech, when they’re glorifying October 7, it’s pretty pathetic,” he said. “They’ve normalized it and made it okay.”
His critique of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York’s Muslim mayor who was elected in 2025, is relentless and unsparing.
“We’ve got a mayor in the city who is a radical, doesn’t like the Jewish people, doesn’t even try to hide it,” Rosenberg said. He is under no illusions about where that kind of language can lead him. In March, it led him to an uncomfortable place.
Rosenberg sparked a firestorm when he posted on social media, calling Mamdani an “America-hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach running our once beautiful city.”
The backlash was swift and coordinated. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the remarks “dangerous and dehumanizing,” and “a disgusting display of bigotry and Islamophobia.” Within hours, Rosenberg’s feed was flooded with near-identical condemnations from senior officials across the city.
Setting the record straight
Rosenberg apologized the following day and deleted the post. But he is keen to set the record straight on what that apology did and did not mean.
“I was not forced to do anything,” he told the Post. “But by Monday night, my Twitter account was filled with the Attorney General, the Governor, former Mayor de Blasio, Senator Schumer, the Speaker of the City Council – all of them came on my Twitter page with almost identical tweets. It’s almost like City Hall put this together.
“I decided to apologize. But even the day that I apologized, I was very, very rough on Mamdani during that four-hour show. My intense scrutiny of the mayor hasn’t relented even a little. I hate the guy,” he said.
Mandani, for his part, addressed the remarks publicly, saying the language was “painfully familiar” to him as a Muslim New Yorker and connecting it to a broader pattern of dehumanization directed at his community. Rosenberg is unmoved, insisting the episode exposes what he sees as a glaring double standard in American public discourse.
“If you’re Sid Rosenberg, and you’re pro-Israel, and you’re Jewish, and Donald Trump’s one of your friends, then no matter what you say, they’re going to take you to a different level,” he said.
“When they’re talking about the intifada – let’s globalize the intifada – there are no repercussions. Me, if I call somebody an insect, it’s like I just went out and killed a whole bunch of people,” he added.
That friendship with Trump is not mere rhetorical decoration. Rosenberg described a genuine, if sporadic, relationship with the president, and a moment that clearly meant a great deal: being called on stage at the White House Hanukkah celebration this past December.
“He said, I know you fight for Israel, I know you fight for the Jewish people,” Rosenberg recalled. “He called up about three or four people that night. Elizabeth Pipko, some Holocaust survivors, and Mark Levin. And I was one of them.”
“There’s never been a president that comes even close,” Rosenberg said of the incumbent in the White House. “Moving the embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing the Golan Heights, getting all of our hostages out – which was something that nobody thought anybody could do – the Abraham Accords. This guy has done more for Israel in his tenure than probably the last 15 presidents combined.”
On the current confrontation with Iran, however, Rosenberg strikes a more complicated note. He is fully supportive of the military action – “this president showed the courage that many presidents have not” – but candid about the domestic mood.
“About two-thirds of the American people are lost right now,” he said. “They’re like, why am I paying five dollars at the gas tank? Why hasn’t inflation come down? It’s in the president’s best interest to wrap this thing up as soon as possible. We cannot afford to lose the House and the Senate in the midterms.”
Rosenberg is also looking forward to returning to Israel in June, after visiting the country for the first time only after the October 7 attacks.
“The Israeli people are the most resilient people that God has ever created,” he told the Post. “And I would say to the Israelis: don’t lose faith. The PR war, you’re losing it, and badly. All you hear about are the college campuses that are hating Jews. But I really believe the overwhelming majority of Americans love the Jewish people, love Israel, and know what’s right compared to what’s wrong.”
“Right now, with Trump in America and Bibi in Israel, it’s not going to get any better than that ever,” he stated. “That is the best one-two punch, I believe, not just in my lifetime, but maybe in the history of both countries.”
Sid Rosenberg will appear at The Jerusalem Post’s Annual Conference in New York on June 1.