Before a 50-year-old Jewish man, who was wearing a kippah, was stabbed with a screwdriver on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, JNS sought comment from New York City rabbis about under which circumstances, if any, Jews would leave the city after Zohran Mamdani, the city mayor, released a video calling the Israeli prime minister a “war criminal,” who ought to be arrested.
Rabbi Scott Bolton of Congregation Or Zarua, a Conservative synagogue on the Upper East Side, told JNS that “we cannot allow them to stir us into new kinds of senses that another great exile is in our sights.”
“There has been nothing like America and the promise of this nation for the Jewish people to have a diaspora center that remains as strong as we’ve ever been, and even stronger after these tides,” he told JNS.
Bolton told JNS of the attack on Thursday that “if this crime is another one committed against identifiable Jews on the streets of New York, this is yet another crime in a long string of attacks that deserve a better response from City Hall.”
The New York City Police Department needs “to be empowered to do their jobs, and prosecutors should not be held back from getting criminals off our streets,” the rabbi told JNS.
“Any serious mayor would be on a public tear about the number of serious felonies in New York City,” he said. “There is not enough public support for the NYPD from City Hall, and there is not enough empowerment of Jessica Tisch,” commissioner of the NYPD, “to get the job done.”
Bolton was one of several rabbis to talk to JNS on Thursday, on the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av, which marks the destruction of the two Jewish Temples in Jerusalem and the subsequent exile of Jews from the city. In a statement about the fast, Mamdani recognized the day without commenting on the Temples or on Israel.
In the past, Mamdani’s spokeswoman has said that synagogues that host pro-Israel events violate international law. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Mamdani admitted in the new video he doesn’t have the authority to arrest, is expected in New York City in September for the United Nations General Assembly.
The mayor’s video is “just hitting the drums again and again and again,” Bolton told JNS. “Our question has to be about staying strong. How do we strengthen each other? How do we strengthen our community?”
“I’m not about sounding alarms about safety,” he said. “I’m about strengthening Jewish resolve and demanding from the authorities the responsibility to all the citizens of New York City.”
Jewish New Yorkers “deserve so much more” than “a youth, who is using his platform on TikTok and now has been elected to spill his Jew-hatred,” the rabbi told JNS.
Bolton accused the mayor of using his office “in an insidious way” to continue “playing on sympathies from especially the younger crowds and antisemites in the wings, who want to use Jew-hatred to create the bogeyman for absolutely failed everything from socialist to, in his case particularly, Islamist—radical Islamist policy.”
“We need to call that out,” he told JNS.
‘Jews have gotten spoiled’
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, senior rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, a Modern Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, told JNS that the Mamdani’s rhetoric, and that of his supporters, is “not unique to New York City.”
“I think it is an enormous mistake to give up on New York City because of Mamdani, just as I think it’s an enormous mistake to give up on America because of the rise in antisemitism,” Steinmetz told JNS.
“The problem is that everything has gone so smoothly the last couple of decades, and American Jews have gotten spoiled,” he said. “Because of that, we have become passive. We need to learn once again how to stand up for ourselves.”
The recent rise in Jew-hatred is not the first in American history, according to Steinmetz, who said the Jewish community should respond by organizing rather than retreating.
“Right now, what we need to do is organize ourselves politically,” he told JNS. “If the Democratic Socialists of America was able to build an electoral machine, so can we. We need to reach out to allies in the non-Jewish community and work together.”
“This is not the time to quit,” he told JNS.
Chaskal Bennet, a political activist and advocate on Jewish communal issues, told JNS that he is keeping an eye on “whether the rhetoric and ideology coming out of City Hall get translated into policy, policing issues or a deterioration of our ability to live and work safely in New York.”
It is “premature and counterproductive” for Jewish leaders to tell people to leave the city, he said. “There’s so much that we’ve built here: extraordinary communities, tremendous investment, shuls, yeshivas, homes, businesses and significant investment in infrastructure.”
“We shouldn’t allow one elected official or one election to chase us away,” he said. “I think we’re stronger than that.”
Rivkie Feiner, a board member of the Jewish Federation and Foundation of Rockland County, New York, also said that Jews must not retreat from the city.
“As a lifelong Jewish New Yorker, and especially as someone visibly Orthodox, I reject the idea that the answer to antisemitism is retreat,” she told JNS. “We will not allow hatred to dictate whether we remain in New York. Our history is defined by resilience, not surrender, and that will not change now.”
When Feiner first saw Mamdani’s video, she thought it might be generated by artificial intelligence, she told JNS.
“The fact that it was real was shocking and deeply troubling,” she said.
Still, it would take conditions in New York deteriorating to the point at which “Jews cannot live openly and safely” to convince Feiner that the community should leave.
“My red line is not a single controversial statement,” she told JNS. “It is whether the government fails in its most basic duty—to protect its citizens.”
“We are not there today, thanks to strong leadership in key areas, but that reality cannot be taken for granted,” she said. “New York is home to one of the largest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the world, and we are not going anywhere”
Stabbing ‘changed my thinking’
Duvi Honig, founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber Of Commerce, told JNS that the stabbing on Thursday “changed my thinking.”
“There’s a big difference between not doing enough to stop hate and actually fueling it,” he said. “When a mayor openly supports Hamas, constantly condemns Israel but won’t equally condemn Hamas and antisemitism, it sends the wrong message and gives extremists confidence.”
It gave confidence to many Jewish New Yorkers when Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, stayed on as commissioner of the New York City Police Department under the Mamdani administration, according to Honig.
“If she ever felt she could no longer do her job, because City Hall wasn’t backing her or giving the NYPD what it needs, that would be a huge red flag—not just for the Jewish community but for every New Yorker,” he said.
“New Yorkers want leaders who bring people together, back law enforcement and make it clear that hate and violence have no place here,” he told JNS.
Failing in his leadership
Rabbi David Katz, executive director of the Israel Heritage Foundation, told JNS that he was the “only rabbi” to welcome Mamdani into office on Jan. 1.
“As I said, when a person becomes mayor, he deserves our respect,” Katz said. “I gave him very warm blessings, and I was very respectful. I said that I will respect him, even though I may not align with all his views.”
Even when Mamdani made statements or took actions with which he disagreed, Katz said that he gave the mayor the benefit of the doubt.
“As time went on, he did things that I had questions about, but I was always able to say and to judge him and to tell him, you know what? Maybe he didn’t see this. He didn’t foresee this,’” Katz said. “New York is huge. There are millions and millions of things happening at all times.”
The recent video pushed Katz to finally speak out against the mayor, he said.
“Giving a speech that does not pertain to leadership in New York, that does not pertain to anything that should be in his department, and only went and put up a fire of making people unhappy—that showed that he’s failing in his leadership,” Katz told JNS. “He’s not doing enough for his people.”
A descendant of Holocaust survivors on all four sides of his family, Katz said that he did not want to discuss what developments he would consider a “red line” that would push him to leave New York City.
“We don’t want to think that way. We truly believe Moshiach is coming,” he said, of the Messiah. “We truly believe that every minute he’s going to come, and we’re almost there.”
“I think America is here to stay, and we’ll never come to a point that we will have to leave here,” he told JNS.
Not close to point of leaving
Ezra Friedlander, CEO of an eponymous firm that advises Jewish groups on government and public affairs, told JNS that it would take an event like Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized pogrom also known as the “night of broken glass,” to convince him that Jews need to abandon the Big Apple.
“I do not believe we’re anywhere close to the point where Jews have to leave New York City,” he told JNS. “No, no. I’m not going to say that. Those are very strong words, and the answer is absolutely not.”
Friedlander, who described himself as “an identifiable Chassidic Jew” and “let’s assume, not a card-carrying Zionist in the traditional sense of the word,” said that his concern about Mamdani’s statements about Israel and its prime minister has “nothing to do with Israel.”
He offered a hypothetical scenario, in which he stood on a subway platform beside a secular, former Israeli soldier, while a person enraged by the mayor’s remarks decided to push one of them onto the tracks.
“Who is he going to push off the platform? He’s going to push Ezra Friedlander off the platform,” he told JNS. “Why? Because that’s who he’s identifying with Israel. It’s the Jew.”
Mamdani does not “hate Jews” but “has a beef with the State of Israel,” Friedlander said. “When you’re the mayor of 8 million New Yorkers and 1 million-plus Jews, your words have ramifications beyond your intentions.”
“That’s the danger. That’s the problem I have,” he said. “Because unwillingly, I’m giving him the ‘unwillingly,’ your words will cause antisemitism to the point where Jews could be in danger because of what I just outlined.”
Still, Friedlander cautioned against an alarmist response to Mamdani’s remarks and said that Jewish New Yorkers “have nowhere else to go.”
“The amount of investment in the infrastructure of Jewish life here in New York is in the untold hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars,” he told JNS. “It would require a Kristallnacht to have Jews leave New York City, and thank God we’re nowhere close to that.”
