New York’s war on its Jews Mamdani abets the violence

It can happen on any street corner or at any transit stop and increasingly does: a young man with a yarmulke is assaulted for no apparent reason.

Josh (not his real name), a New York public-school teacher, told UnHerd about an assault that happened to him. “I usually hide [the skullcap] under a cap, but my hair was wet,” he said. Thus he was walking down the stairs of a subway stop in Brooklyn, daring to be a visibly practicing Jew, when someone pushed him from behind; the resulting fall left him with a head fracture and gash requiring 18 stitches.

Later, Josh found out that he was hardly alone. Locals said there had been an estimated 30 such attacks in recent weeks. The more recognizable Hasidic Jews, he says, no longer take the subway. “This was one of the guys who keep doing this,” he noted, “but the police now do nothing.” 

Or take the case of 22-year-old Dawood Faisal, who was charged in late July with manslaughter when he allegedly lost control of his car and ran over the Jewish journalist Cara Trager, resulting in her death. Faisal has now also been charged with vandalizing a Jewish-owned bagel shop in Queens. “The fact that this guy did a hate crime … days before means that he could have been apprehended before my mom was killed,” Trager’s daughter told the Forward. 

The deteriorating situation for New York City’s Jews is no accident. It follows years of anti-Semitic agitation on college campuses and even in high schools, and then the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has identified himself, first and foremost, with militant anti-Zionism. By threatening Gotham’s multi-ethnic middle class, and in particular its large Jewish component, this type of violence endangers not just the city’s economy but the very essence of what has made the Big Apple so great for so long.

Assaults at subway stations, particularly in heavily Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, happen regularly. Overall, despite a drop in violent crime and homicides, hate crimes are up almost 10% since Mamdani took office, with the vast majority directed at Jews. 

That all this is happening in New York, the longtime capital of American Jewry, is shocking to a third-generation, Jewish former New Yorker — me. These attacks are directed at almost every aspect of Jewish life. 

Throw feces at a synagogue here, trash a kosher market there, ransack a bagel shop, ban a Jewish lawmaker from a coffee shop, bar Israeli products from the local food co-op, or, worse, perform a stabbing on a city street in broad daylight. You can even turn Columbia from a heavily Jewish school with thousands of Hebraic alumni and donors to the epicenter of anti-Israel activism and an anti-Semitic hotbed. 

This is the new Gotham, very different from the old one. The New York I grew up in was home to some 2 million Jews; today, the number is closer to half that many. And given the rising number of anti-Semitic incidents in the city and the current administration’s lack of concern, it is likely many more will leave.

In his brilliant mayoral campaign, Mamdani won roughly a third of the Jewish vote, although he did poorly among both older people and native New Yorkers — you know, the kind to whom you can’t sell the Brooklyn Bridge. As opposed to the campaign, when he sought, with the help of friendly mainstream media, to tone down his anti-Israel fanaticism, in office Mamdani has been far more explicitly hateful towards Israel, and disdainful of the vast majority of Jews who support it. 

The mayoral hostility comes in many flavors. It includes refusing to restrict demonstrations around temples, refusing to attend the Israel Day parade, bloviating about arresting Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes,” and supporting the candidacy of a Brooklyn democratic district leader who cites such sources as Henry Ford’s The International Jew as a factual guide.

One particular illustration of Mamdani’s disdain for Jews was his appointment of an 18-member judicial advisory commission without a single Jewish member. This is amazing, given that close to half of Gotham’s lawyers are Jews. Judaism is a legalistic religion, whose parsing of the Torah and Talmud has long been excellent training for lawyers and judges.

To be sure, Mamdani is a very effective politician. Already, he has successfully backed three Democratic Socialists of America candidates for Congress and made inroads on the city bureaucracy, turning key segments into jobs programs for his cadres. He has consolidated his power at the expense of the previous, long heavily Jewish, establishment, which stupidly backed Dracula, also known as Andrew Cuomo, as its hope to beat him. 

Now that establishment, Jews and gentiles both, are mostly on the outside looking in, while the mayor hides his hateful politics behind a seemingly permanent benign smile. His election was first and foremost driven by young, college-educated Leftists struggling with mediocre jobs in an impossibly expensive city. In addition to this segment, Mamdani also won the powerful backing of mostly recently arrived Muslims, whose numbers are rapidly equaling those of the Jews.

The surge in hate crimes will likely deepen Jewish hostility to Mamdani, but if there’s any hope for change, it will be resistance to his economic agenda that unsettles his coalition. His assault on small property owners certainly hits many affluent Jews; bashing “greedy Jewish landlords” is a popular meme for Mamdani supporters such as activist Thomas Lopez-Pierre, who compares them to enablers of the Nazis — yes, Jews.

But not all landlords are wealthy, nor are they primarily Jewish. Hasidic and Orthodox communities tend to invest in real estate, but so too do many middle-class New Yorkers. Mamdani’s assault on property owners is also receiving opposition in heavily African-American and Asian areas like Queens. People don’t much appreciate Mamdani’s designated tenant advocate, Cea Weaver, who calls property ownership an instrument of  “white supremacy.”  

This population, whom Marxists might label as “petit bourgeois,” will be increasingly opposed to Mamdani’s socialist economics, unlike the privileged “Lulu Lenins” who are more insulated from it. He is clearly alienating working- and middle-class New Yorkers such as bodega owners, many of whom are minorities, who will soon be competing against city-owned grocery stores. Mamdani’s socialist Mini-Mes will keep shopping at Whole Foods, but for the bodega owners, subsidized city stores will be a matter of business life or death. 

The great irony here is that Mamdani’s South Asian base is also highly entrepreneurial and owns small businesses, including bodegas. Indeed, in capitalistic New York, there should be harmony between Jews and Muslims, both enterprising, family-oriented peoples. American Muslims, notes the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, may not start as anti-American, but their children’s exposure to academic culture produces young, affluent, educated Leftist cosmopolitans like Hasan Piker and of course Mamdani himself.

Ultimately, only when the ethnic areas begin feeling the pain from Mamdani’s policies can the situation change. The city’s future is now a race between how quickly the economics unravel and how rapidly its mayor chases out the Jews and other kulaks. We have seen such things before, during the Michael Curley era in midcentury Boston or Coleman Young’s disastrous turn as mayor in 1970s Detroit. 

Such divisive politics “work” on one level: a city with fewer middle-income people will be a clear field for the political apparatus, the NGO-industrial complex, and the dependent poor. But this is a tragedy: the Big Apple is not Detroit or Boston, but a great world city that has ambition in its DNA. Even the Lulu Lenins may get tired of diminishing opportunity — growth is hardly a prime DSA objective — as well as an infarcted infrastructure, a tent-city crisis, and high property crime. Perhaps a few years off campus will inject the mayor’s base with a dose of reality.

But if the Jewish population and other elements of the middle class leave, it could foreshadow a  future New York reduced to a playground for the rich and their pampered offspring, government workers, and welfare recipients. Stopping hate crimes — not seeming to wink and nod at it — is one way to keep people like our teachers from looking for the exits.

“You feel like no one will protect us,” Josh told me. “Is it getting worse? Are you kidding me? We used to see the police but now the subways are a no man’s land. People are now looking at Long Island, New Jersey — or Texas, Arizona, or Florida. There’s less reason to stay.”

“I don’t want to bring my kids up here,” he added. “It’s very scary.”  

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