The essay was published in an offshoot of Slow Factory, a nonprofit that shared pro-Oct. 7 posts that Rama Duwaji liked
Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City, provided a featured illustration for an essay by an author who called Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack “spectacular,” has frequently decried what she describes as “Jewish supremacist vampires,” and said Jewish Israelis are “rootless soulless ghouls.”
Duwaji, wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D., N.Y.), provided a drawing for “A Trail of Soap,” an essay in the collection Every Moment is a Life compiled by Susan Abulhawa. The essay, published last month in Everything Is Political—an offshoot of self-described “environmental & social justice nonprofit organization” Slow Factory—details a Gazan woman’s attempt to find a bathroom in the territory.
Abulhawa, an author and anti-Israel activist, has a long history of supporting terror and demonizing Jews. Just days after Oct. 7, she wrote an op-ed in Electronic Intifada in which she called the massacres “a spectacular moment that shocked the world” and insinuated that Israel allowed the attack to happen.
“Whether or not Israel indeed knew of the plans in advance, those few freedom fighters inspired not only the whole of Palestine, but the oppressed masses worldwide, to imagine what freedom looks like; what resistance is possible; and what life is attainable,” she wrote.
Abulhawa has spent the years since Oct. 7 offering thinly veiled attacks against Israelis, “Zionists,” and “Jewish supremacists” on social media.
She wrote in one December post on X that Israelis are “rootless, soulless ghouls” and in September called Israel a “cultureless, rootless human aberration in the form of a manufactured ‘nation,'” adding that “we live in the time of jewish supremacist demons.”
Also in September, Abulhawa described a pro-Israel commentator as a “lying Jewish supremacist cockroach” and bemoaned “Dual loyalty zionists.”
Abulhawa described Israelis as “demonic parasite[s]” in a November post in which she said “Israel must be dismantled if humanity is going to have any chance at a moral future” and in another post said “we will have our revenge someday” against the “sons of satan.”
“Jewish supremacists establishing yet more mechanisms and tentacles to control the minds of your children,” she warned in October 2025.
When the Embassy of Israel condemned Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi for declaring “I am against Judaism,” Abulhawa responded that “No one has the right to judge how Palestinians feel or what they say about their colonizers and tormentors.”
“The whole world is Zionist occupied,” she said in February in another post in which she called believers in Jewish self-determination “parasites.”
There have also been posts about “Jewish supremacist vampires,” “Jewish supremacist ghoul[s],” and “rabid demon[s]” in recent months.
“There isn’t enough hate in the world for them,” she said of Israel just last week in a post also thanking anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens.
In other posts, Abulhawa made clear she was not just talking about Israel.
“Wherever they are, they will drag their respective countries into war and financial ruin for their own benefit,” she wrote in January, just a month before the Duwaji collaboration. “They have a singular loyalty to Jewish supremacy. The ADL and various tentacles of Pax Judaica will swallow us all whole.”
A spokeswoman for Mamdani said in a statement provided to the Washington Free Beacon that Duwaji does not have a relationship with Abulhawa.
“As is common for freelance illustrators, the First Lady was commissioned to illustrate an excerpt of Abulhawa’s book by an outside publisher,” the spokeswoman said. “She has never engaged with or met Susan Abulhawa, nor had she seen the tweets in question.”
A representative for Abulhawa did not respond to a request for comment.
The revelation of Duwaji’s illustrations comes after reporting emerged that she liked social media posts celebrating Oct. 7 and calling reports of sexual violence against Israeli civilians a “mass rape hoax.” It also follows Duwaji and Mamdani’s dinner with an anti-Israel radical whose group called for “death to America” and who said “we couldn’t avoid” the Hamas attack.
Slow Factory itself published the celebratory Oct. 7 posts, and Abulhawa defended Duwaji on X during the controversy.
Slow Factory has received mainstream acceptance even as it pushes support for terrorism. The nonprofit partnered with Columbia University on educational programming in the past, the Free Beacon reported, and has worked with companies like Adidas and Gucci.
Abulhawa has similarly found a warm reception within academia. She organizes the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which in 2023 was held at the University of Pennsylvania. That event drew scrutiny for featuring openly anti-Semitic speakers like former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters—who claims Jews manipulate U.S. foreign policy and dressed up as a Nazi during a concert in Germany—and Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired from his job at CNN for advocating Israel’s destruction.
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