‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel’s Jewish’: who’s behind the Knicks chant uniting New York?
“A viral chant celebrating the New York Knicks’ success in the NBA finals has become an unofficial anthem for the city. The chant, originating from a TikTok video by Knicks fan Ahnaf Hossain, highlights the city’s diversity and unity. While the video’s marketing by Kalshi has been acknowledged, its success is attributed to its catchy, positive message and its connection to hip-hop culture.
The New York Knicks are 3-1 up in the NBA finals, one game away from winning the championship for the first time since the 1970s. The mood in New York is electric, the city is strewn with blue and orange, crowds roar outside Madison Square Garden, and – at least last week – a viral chant has become a new unofficial New York City anthem:
My mayor Muslim
My bagel’s Jewish
My Christian Dior
Knicks in four
After the team’s loss on Sunday, the last line is no longer viable – no team can now win the series in four games – but the chant has taken on a life of its own thanks to MD Ahnaf Hossain, a 23-year-old Knicks fan who shouted the bars in a Kalshi-branded TikTok video after a Knicks win last week. The New York Times called the lines “pure New York City poetry”, but the viral clip has spread far beyond the city limits, with 7.4m views on TikTok and the words appearing on T-shirts and hats.
Last night Hossain was again filmed on the streets of New York with an updated version, which reflected the reality of the series and one Knicks fan celebrating in the Vatican:
My mayor still Muslim
My bagel’s still Jewish
The pope’s on our side
Knicks in five
What is it about these lyrics that has propelled their rise? There’s Kalshi’s marketing power, of course – the video appeared on a channel where a Kalshi-branded robot interviews fans, trying to copy the viral formula of the more organic New York man-on-the-street channel Sidetalk.
There’s the positivity of the lines amid so much toxicity on social media. And there’s the easy sense of unity in a world that direly needs it, especially after a mayoral contest in which Zohran Mamdani’s opponents attempted to pit religious identities against each other. “I grew up with Jews, Muslims, Haitians, Pakistanis, Bengalis,” Hossain told the Washington Post. “I just had to bring everyone together.”
The lyrics also build on hip-hop tradition, says AD Carson, a rapper and associate professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia. “Hip-hop is ultimately as mimetic as any popular cultural product can be.”
The first line is reminiscent of the Young Jeezy song My President, released in 2008 amid the rise of Barack Obama, which features the line “My president is Black, my Lambo’s blue”; the next year, after Obama’s inauguration, a Jay-Z remix of the song featured similar lyrics: “My president is Black, my Maybach too.”
The Dior line, as Hossain has acknowledged, references the rapper Pop Smoke’s hit Dior. (Both Pop Smoke, who died in 2020, and Jay-Z are New Yorkers.) And the final line – a prediction of victory for a favored team in a set number of games – is also a familiar trope. “What the four lines are borrowing from – it’s a pretty rich, pretty fertile cultural text,” Carson says. What feels like an “offhand viral video moment” reveals “the capacity of rap – even a cappella rap lyrics – to hold information”.
The lines also appear to have a direct predecessor: commentators have pointed out that tweets from May and early June use virtually the same language. Hossain told the Post he hadn’t seen the tweets. But how much would it matter if he had? “It’s hard to ever have a conversation like this about culture without discussing the politics of intellectual property,” Carson says. “I absolutely believe this is related to mimetic culture, which is to say he may not have seen the tweets and still could be influenced by them in the same way that ‘My mayor is Muslim’ seems to reference My President.”
But that’s not the only source of controversy over the video. Others have pointed out that it is essentially an ad for Kalshi. The prediction market company is the source of the original clip, which was reposted by an X account with a bio that promotes the site. Kalshi later posted a follow-up interview with Hossain, who said he was drawn to the “iconic green mic”. Kalshi gifted him an actual Dior scarf, during the second interview.
Kalshi has since acknowledged “smart marketing” was behind the video, but remained vague about exactly how the clip was set up, telling Front Office Sports “it was also organic … we didn’t go find him and say, ‘Hey, come talk into this mic.’ He found us and then we connected to make the second video.”
Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, says marketing is part of the clip’s success, but it doesn’t explain all of it. He sees three ingredients at work: first, it’s all about New York, which remains the country’s biggest media market, second “it fits a moment, it’s funny, it’s engaging, it’s short and simple”. And finally, there’s the marketing behind the scenes, typically “some hidden engagement machine in which both the algorithms and some coordinated behavior” – related accounts that may be paid for highlighting and reposting a clip – serve to boost it. Of course, this doesn’t always succeed, which speaks to the potency of the chant. “They probably tried to do this kind of thing dozens of times, and it’s rare for it to go viral,” Hancock says.
Hossain himself seems to be taking his newfound celebrity in his stride – he’s mostly focused on the games and the impact they’re having on New York. He told the New York Times on Monday: “I think the sportsmanship is bringing a type of love we haven’t seen in the city for a long, long time.”
