New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a Jewish American Heritage Month reception at Gracie Mansion, which leading Jewish leaders boycotted, that he planned to add $26 million in funding to prevent hate crimes to his proposed budget for the 2027 fiscal year.
Few Jewish government officials or nonprofit leaders attended the reception on Monday, which came on the heels of a video that the mayor posted shortly before Shabbat began marking “Nakba” day, which Palestinians say marks the “catastrophe” of the founding of the modern Israeli state.
JNS was told that there was no room for it to attend to report on the event in person.
The mayor’s annual event is usually full of crowds of elected and organizational representatives shmoozing and networking. This year, every major Jewish organization in the city, from the Anti-Defamation League to the Jewish Community Relations Council-N.Y. to the UJA-Federation of New York, declined to attend the reception, which doubled as a dairy-filled gathering ahead of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.
The mayor, who has said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York City and whose spokeswoman said that synagogues violate international law if they host pro-Israel events, said at the reception that Jews, who comprise about 12% of city residents, are victims of more than 50% of the hate crimes in the Big Apple.
Hate crimes targeting Jews were up 182% in the city in Mamdani’s first month in office. Since then, the New York City Police Department has twice changed the way that it reports hate crimes and has said that such crimes are dropping. The NYPD and the mayor’s office have denied that Mamdani directed the police to change the way it reports such statistics.
Prior to the event, the UJA-Federation of New York said its leaders would not “be attending the Jewish Heritage Month celebration at Gracie Mansion being hosted by a mayor who denies a core pillar of our heritage—the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.”
Among those noshing on blintzes and mini-cheesecakes with the mayor this year were representatives of the anti-Zionist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, as well as the liberal group New York New Jewish Agenda, which says that it supports “a democratic vision of Israel.” Rabbi Moishe Indig, a leader of the Satmar Chassidic community of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, was also among the 150 attendees.
Satmar is anti-Zionist as a matter, it says, of religious principle.
The few Jewish elected officials in attendance were former city comptroller Brad Lander, who is now running for Congress and who features Mamdani in his campaign, and two New York City Council members: Lincoln Restler, who represents downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights, and Harvey Epstein, who represents Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side.
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president emeritus of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, gave the evening’s invocation.
“When the Torah was given at Sinai, the rabbis insist not just the generation of the desert, but every generation across all of time stood at that mountain,” Kula said. “Every age. Every class. Every persuasion. In other words, the tradition insists—even those who would one day deeply disagree with one another, who would one day be almost impossible to reach across the divide to, who would wound each other—all stood together at Sinai.”
“So we are all, even now, standing at Sinai. Together. Receiving the same revelation,” he said at the invocation. “Hearing it differently.”
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council-N.Y., which hosts the Israel parade in Manhattan, in which Mamdani, breaking with decades of mayoral tradition, has said he will not march, did not attend the Gracie Mansion reception. He told the New York Post prior to the event that “it’s a really telling and concerning sign of where things stand in New York City right now.”
Kula told JNS after the reception that he found it to be “filled with hope.”
“One of the striking things was the very different cross-section of Jews who were in the room—liberal-progressive folks rather than mainstream, legacy institutional leadership,” he said.
Kula also told JNS that he found it “ironic, sad and illuminating” that most of New York City’s Jewish leaders boycotted the event. That, he said, “highlights the ongoing collapse of the mainstream, liberal Zionist consensus around which legacy leadership and institutions organized for the past 50 years.”
He closed his invocation with a blessing for the mayor.
“May you be given the continued strength, the emotional depth and the wisdom to hold the complexity of this city, to parse and nuance, with care and precision, the meanings of Zionism, of antisemitism and the inextricable connection of Jewish identity and Palestinian dignity, in ways that open new possibilities of solidarity among all New Yorkers who believe in the infinite value of every human being,” he said.
