Mamdani’s New York State of Fear

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak. The police were there to protect him. Today every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”

 

These comments, made on Friday by Manhattan Rabbi Yosie Levine, encapsulate the new reality for Jewish New Yorkers: how they are threatened by Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s aggressive anti-Zionism, how they are adapting in their day-to-day lives, and how they are challenging an emerging and daunting status quo.

 

Levine leads The Jewish Center, a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. On Thursday, a man named Raul Morales allegedly went to the synagogue and shouted “justice for Islam” and “Allahu akbar” before stabbing a visibly Jewish worshipper with a screwdriver a few blocks away. He is also accused of stabbing an Asian man a few minutes earlier with the same screwdriver, also while yelling “Allahu akbar.”

 

The attacks took place shortly after Mamdani released a slickly produced video in which he railed against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal and baby killer. The following day, Mamdani exhorted the public to take to the streets to protest Netanyahu’s expected visit to New York City in September. A day later, Morales allegedly grabbed a screwdriver and went looking for his “justice.”

 

Mamdani’s rhetoric about Israel has long been extreme, and its implications for Jews in America have grown more alarming. One of his more infamous statements came in 2023 during a gathering of the Democratic Socialists of America, a far-left organization that was floundering before refocusing its energy on anti-Zionist agitation immediately after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and that would then play a key role in Mamdani’s campaign for mayor.

 

“I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local,” Mamdani said of anti-Israel activism. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

 

The idea that anti-Zionism should be integrated into every political grievance creates a clear domestic enemy: American Jews. Since Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in their homeland, and most Jews (as would be expected) believe this, most Jews are thus portrayed as a threat to the rights and freedoms of the public.

 

In the past, progressive politicians insisted, implausibly, they were only talking about Israelis, not all Jews. Mamdani’s innovation in this regard has been to jettison such gaslighting. In June, at a rally for congressional candidates he endorsed, Mamdani warned darkly of living in a “time of monsters.” Who are they? “These monsters take many forms today,” he said, but then he named only one: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

 

AIPAC may typify the term “the Israel lobby” in many minds, but it is an organization of Americans. Mamdani here is demonizing American Jews who participate in the political process through their constitutionally protected speech. The comments were so over-the-top that even Jewish progressives recoiled from the mayor.

 

“Language that turns AIPAC or Israel into the primary evil influence in American politics can echo antisemitic stereotypes that portray Jews as a sinister force aiming to control the world,” wrote Rabbi Jill Jacobs, the leader of a left-wing social justice organization and a strong critic of AIPAC. The New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal group whose former director had been hired by Mamdani to serve as the city’s antisemitism coordinator, criticized the mayor’s “dehumanizing” language.

 

Mamdani has erased distinctions between Israelis and American Jews. In the process, he is eroding some of the traditional divisions within organized American Jewry. He is not criticizing Israeli government policies; he is flagrantly Jew-baiting, and he is doing so with a passion and an enthusiasm that unsettles even left-of-center Jews who wear their own distaste for Benjamin Netanyahu on their sleeve.

 

At the same time, Mamdani is reshaping New York politics in his image. He backed far-left challenges to Democratic officeholders he deemed insufficiently anti-Zionist. Those candidates, in turn, echoed his rhetoric that casts Jews as scapegoats. For example: Darializa Avila Chevalier, who defeated the Democratic chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with Mamdani’s help, equated gentrification in the United States with Israel’s alleged displacement of Palestinians and blamed Israel for police violence against racial minorities in America.

 

Mamdani collapses all distinctions in other ways, too. In November 2025, the organization Nefesh B’Nefesh, which helps Diaspora Jews who seek to move to Israel but does not broker property itself, held an informational event at a synagogue in New York. Pro-Palestinian protesters mobbed the event and shouted slogans like “globalize the intifada,” an explicit call for violence against Jews anywhere in the world.

 

These protesters consider all of Israel to be “occupied” and “stolen land.” What was shocking was that the then-mayor-elect of New York City legitimized their claims: Mamdani said he opposed blocking access to a house of worship but that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” (Mamdani did not provide any evidence for his accusation against the synagogue.)

 

Once again, it was not Israelis 6,000 miles away but American Jews in New York who were, according to the mayor, violating their own sacred spaces.

 

All of this is unprecedented. But the anti-Netanyahu video, a taxpayer-funded Two Minutes Hate that recycled the classic blood-libel portrayal of Jews as deliberate mass baby killers, further upped the ante. In accusing Netanyahu of ordering an assortment of war crimes out of simple bloodlust, Mamdani was accusing IDF soldiers of carrying out such crimes. And because he categorized every single death in Gaza as the fault of the Israeli killing machine, he implicated anyone who served or serves in the Israeli military as the personification of this evil.

 

He does so knowingly. It hardly needs to be said that neither of the Israeli soldiers arrested and beaten by police in Belgium last summer was Netanyahu. Nor must they be soldiers at all: These days simply speaking Hebrew is enough to put one in danger. Take, for example, the six Israelis attacked by ax-wielding locals in Mongolia two weeks ago, just the latest of a number of such incidents since October 7, 2023. An increasingly common progressive belief is that in a country with military conscription, there are no nonsoldiers among the Israeli public. From there it is a brief hop to believing there are no civilians in Israel.

 

The enforcement of this monstrous principle has become ever more carefully planned out. Two weeks ago, Greek anarchists conducted “anti-Zionist patrols” in Thessaloniki, once home to a thriving Jewish community that was almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis. The coordinated attack on Israeli soccer fans in the Netherlands in late 2024 was arranged ahead of time. Just a few days ago, an online crowdsourced attempt to “map” the whereabouts of “Zionists” cropped up in Italy.

 

Like Mamdani, antisemites around the world collapse all distinctions. The massacre of Hanukkah celebrants in Australia; the gunning down, “for Palestine,” of a young engaged couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; the killing of an elderly Jewish man by an anti-Israel protester in California; the murder by fire of a Jewish woman in Boulder, Colorado, by a man who wanted to “kill all Zionist people”; the attempted massacre of young Jewish children at a synagogue in Michigan by a man who posted angry messages about Israel—in all of these cases and more, Israel is just a pretext for joining a global war on Jews.

 

It was ever thus. The term “blood libel” emerged to describe the medieval notion that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in religious rituals. The first such case was that of young William of Norwich, an English boy found dead in the woods in the 12^th century. Simon of Trent was another famous example. Indiscriminate violence against Jews followed the accusations. It works for adults too: The disappearance of an Italian friar in Damascus in 1840 resulted in much indiscriminately spilled Jewish blood.

 

Meanwhile, explaining away antisemitic incitement using excuses like “I’m only accusing one Jew of dishonorable military acts” also has precedent. In the late 19^th century, a false accusation of treason against French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, led to his imprisonment and nationwide attacks on Jews. Even Kristallnacht, the 1938 prelude to the Holocaust, can be put in this category. The pretext for the pogrom was the shooting in Paris of a German diplomat by a Jewish teenager whose family had been expelled from Germany.

 

Mamdani’s lies about Jewish baby killers and the consequences of those calumnies are the rule, not the exception, in Jewish history.

 

What is unusual is the location. America has been a “golden land” for the Jews, and no place has made them more at home than New York City, where nearly a million Jews live. Jews are woven into the fabric of the city’s culture; Gotham’s history cannot accurately be told without them.

 

That story contains plenty of antisemitism, as does the wider story of American history. It has its own blood libels and pogroms, though fewer in number than in most other Diasporic lands. But the Jews have not as yet given up on New York. Will Mamdani change that? Might we reach a tipping point?

 

Since Mamdani took office in January, hate crimes are up—and Jews have been the victims or targets of 55 percent of them. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the state of New York surged after the 2023 Hamas attacks and didn’t drop again until last year. Even with the overall drop, the number of incidents in 2025 was still double the 2022 number, suggesting the new normal is a much higher baseline of antisemitic incidents per year. Last year, the U.S. saw 203 antisemitic assaults; nearly half of them occurred in New York state. And 95 percent of those were in New York City.

 

How willing are Jewish New Yorkers to wait and see which direction the trend goes from here, especially considering the mayor’s encouragement of anti-Zionist street protests?

 

Reporting from the Times of Israel may offer a clue. From Mamdani’s November 2025 mayoral victory to July 2026, the paper found, Nefesh B’Nefesh saw a 31 percent increase in the number of people applying for the organization’s help in moving to Israel. The paper also spoke to Jews who had decided to move to other states but stay in the country.

 

Something is changing. But at the moment, that change most widely takes the form of security adjustments. That usually means hardening targets like Jewish private and religious institutions that would see increased threats. In April, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the state would double the amount of money in the budget for security grants available to nonprofit, community-based organizations.  

 

New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin has so far put forth two bills designed to protect institutions from street mobs. The first required the New York Police Department to create a buffer zone around houses of worship to ensure that protests could take place in the vicinity without endangering worshippers’ access to the building. That bill passed with a veto-proof majority. The second bill, which would have mandated a similar buffer zone around schools, was vetoed by Mamdani for being too broad in scope. Menin is tweaking the bill to address those concerns.

 

The organized Jewish community is also making its voice heard. Levine was far from the only leader to speak up and speak clearly about the danger of Mamdani’s anti-Zionist incitement. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the leader of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, addressed Mamdani in an open letter: “You promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”

 

The ADL, American Jewish Committee, Orthodox Union, UJA-Federation of New York, and Jewish Community Relations Council of New York all harshly criticized Mamdani after his chilling video about Netanyahu. And Jewish elected officials, including Menin and state Assemblywoman Nily Rozic, have pushed back on the mayor.

 

Perhaps, then, what we are seeing is the beginning of an immune response, a kind of natural resistance to the threat Mamdani poses to New York’s equilibrium. Yet even if it is an immune response, its success cannot be taken for granted. New York has never had a mayor so committed to making Jews feel unwelcome. New Yorkers will have to be equally committed to thwarting him.