Zohran Mamdani ought to take “immediate and concrete action to protect the city’s Jewish community,” according to an open letter signed by 1,395 Jews in the city, including 76 rabbis and cantors.
The letter calls on the mayor to support protective legislation for Jewish institutions, denounce rhetoric that demonizes Zionists and to “unequivocally condemn, not merely discourage, calls to globalize the intifada.”
“Jewish New Yorkers need something very simple from our mayor: a clear and unequivocal recognition that excluding, stigmatizing or targeting Jews because of a core Jewish value, support for Jewish self-determination in our historic homeland, is discrimination,” the signatories write in the letter, which the Jewish Majority organized and which was published on Thursday.
“Being a Zionist does not mean supporting every policy of the State of Israel or any particular Israeli politician,” the letter adds. “It simply means affirming the right of the Jewish people to national dignity and self-determination, a belief held by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community.”
Jonathan Schulman, executive director of the Jewish Majority, told JNS that “most Jews link the normalization of anti-Zionism to the rise in antisemitism, and the most prominent proponent of that is Mayor Mamdani.”
It is a problem that most of the Jews surrounding Mamdani, either in his administration or as participants in his transition committees, are anti-Zionists or non-Zionists, according to Schulman.
“It’s a real distortion of the majority Jewish opinion,” he told JNS. “The Mamdani administration is lifting up fringe voices as if they’re representative of the community. When he appoints a faith liaison from Jewish Voice for Peace, which works to undermine Israel, it is really tokenism.”
Miriam Grossman, a Reconstructionist rabbi who is a longtime member of the rabbinical council of Jewish Voice for Peace, is City Hall’s faith liaison. Jewish Voice for Peace supports divesting from Israel and trains other faith communities on boycotting the Jewish state.
Mamdani has said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York City, discarded many of his predecessor’s executive orders protecting Jews and Israel shortly after becoming mayor and said, via his spokeswoman, that synagogue hosting pro-Israel events violate international law.
The letter is part of a growing groundswell of public opposition to the mayor that has included demonstrations, like one held Monday evening near Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral home.
Jews represent close to 10% of New York City’s residents, by some counts, and were the targets of nearly 60% of hate crimes in the city in April, according to New York City Police Department data.
The Jewish Majority’s mission is to make sure that mainstream Jewish voices are being accurately represented in media and politics.
Signatories to the open letter include rabbis and cantors of every denominational affiliation who live and work in every part of New York City and in suburbs beyond in the state. The majority of those who signed are laypeople.
Anne Etra, who lives on the Upper East Side and leads a small nonprofit, told JNS of the open letter, which she signed, that “it’s a good start and important to say.”
“New York Jews need to toughen up. Nobody can tell them that they don’t deserve to be safe,” she said. “It’s their city as much as anyone else’s, and the mayor is not a mayor for all citizens.”
Schulman told JNS that his group includes clergy who aren’t constituents of Mamdani’s, because what happens in the five boroughs affects rabbis far beyond the city’s borders.
Rabbis may be based as far as upper Westchester and have congregants who work in New York City, come in to the city to dine or have children attending one of New York City’s colleges or universities. Schulman told JNS that he knows rabbis, who say that their congregants have stopped going out to dinner at kosher and Israeli restaurants in the city, “because they worry that a mob might attack them for eating a there.”
The mayor needs to take note, according to Schulman.
“It is very dangerous how Mamdani is creating this hostile environment for Jews,” he told JNS.
