The bottle is the kind of object that ends up on a Brooklyn kitchen shelf long after the oil is gone. Dark glass, a hand-drawn label, a price approaching $100. The artwork on at least two such products is credited to Rama Duwaji, the illustrator who is married to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The company behind them, Olive Odyssey, sells itself as a bridge between Palestinian farmers and the world's dinner tables. A report published Wednesday by the Washington Free Beacon describes something else running alongside the tasting notes: a social media feed that mourns a spokesman for a US-designated terrorist group, invokes "from the river to the sea," and speaks of land watered with the blood of martyrs.
According to the report, Duwaji has worked with the brand since at least October 2025, when her husband was the frontrunner for City Hall. Nothing in it suggests she wrote or approved the company's posts. But for a first lady whose past has already become a political problem, the association lands at an awkward moment.
A Brand With a Message
Olive Odyssey was founded by Aya Gazawi Faour, an Israeli citizen who lives in Haifa and describes the city as being in Palestine. The company lists a US address in Casper, Wyoming.
Its politics are not hidden. In July 2024, the company marked the anniversary of the death of Ghassan Kanafani, the novelist who served as spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, calling him "a threat to the settler state." Kanafani was killed in Beirut in 1972, in an operation attributed to the Mossad, weeks after the Lod Airport massacre left 26 people dead. The post, the Free Beacon found, included a PFLP poster of a skull with bodies clenched in its teeth.
Other posts refer to Israel as "the zionist state" and describe the pine trees planted by the Jewish National Fund as soldiers of the occupation. One bottle carries a portrait, drawn by Faour herself, of Khalil Abu Osba, whom the company calls a Palestinian resistance fighter. His granddaughter has written that he shot down a British plane during the Mandate years, was sentenced to death, and escaped from Acre prison.
A Pattern, or a Private Life?
For Duwaji, this is not a first encounter with this kind of scrutiny. In April, she apologized in an interview with the arts site Hyperallergic for posts she made as a teenager, saying she felt shame over her language and that "being 15 doesn't excuse it." Those posts, first surfaced by the Free Beacon, included praise for female Palestinian militants involved in hijackings and bombings.
The apology did not name specific posts and did not address her more recent activity on Israel. That includes liking an Instagram post that appeared to cheer the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. Last week, the Free Beacon reported that she serves as artist in residence at a women's retreat that had also celebrated Kanafani.
Mamdani has described his wife as a private person with no formal role at City Hall. That is a reasonable thing for a husband to say. It is harder to sustain when the private person's commercial work sits beside tributes to the PFLP, and when it is three years to the day since October 7.
The Mayor's Problem
The timing matters. Last week Mamdani unveiled a strategy to combat antisemitism, pledging more than $30 million for prevention efforts. Jewish groups gave it a mixed reception, with several arguing that his own rhetoric on Israel contributes to the problem. Days earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in New York for the UN General Assembly, had accused him of antisemitism.
A mayor asking Jewish New Yorkers to trust his intentions is now fielding questions about an olive oil label. The Free Beacon report did not include a response from Duwaji or City Hall.
After her apology in April, Duwaji said she hoped to let her art speak for itself. The trouble with that hope is that art also speaks through the company it keeps.
Tioday, October 7th, the anniversary of the worst day Jews have experienced since World War 2, Mamdani accused Israel of genocide yet again.
