Hundreds of New Yorkers filled the normally quiet and bucolic Upper East Side street adjacent to Gracie Mansion, the official home of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on Tuesday evening, chanting “Hey, hey, no, no, Mayor Mamdani’s got to go” and “stop Mamdani.”
Lilly Icikson was among the demonstrators—a group of mostly Jews with a few Muslims and Christians—and handed out stickers, which she prints at home and affixes to light poles and other surfaces outside Gracie Mansion and in other neighborhoods daily.
She came to the protest because “anti-Zionism is a sad excuse for Jew-hate,” she told JNS.
“The city has been overrun with people openly calling for ‘intifada,’ which is Jew-hate,” she said. “The city should be safe for everyone.”
The protest was organized by End Jew Hatred, a project of the Lawfare Project, and also involved a coalition of other groups.
In an interview a few hours before the protest began, Brooke Goldstein, founder and executive director of Lawfare Project, told JNS that the goal was to have New York Gov. Kathy Hochul remove the mayor from office, which the governor, a Democrat, has the legal right to do.
That legal right has rarely been exercised. Hochul reportedly considered doing so in February 2025, after then-Mayor Eric Adams had been indicted on federal corruption charges. After requests to U.S. President Donald Trump, those charges were dropped, and the governor didn’t pursue removing him before the end of his term that December.
Shortly after Mamdani began his mayoral term, he struck down many of the executive orders that Adams had issued, including those that aimed to protect Jews and Israelis.
Now, amid a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City, and anti-Israel protesters intimidating and harassing Jews all over the city, Goldstein, a Miami resident, told JNS that the governor should remove the mayor.
“We are demanding the removal of Mamdani for his neglect of duty and his refusal to carry out his legal responsibilities,” Goldstein said. “Jews, Christians, Muslims, people of all faiths are coming together, because they are sick and tired of the extremism that has taken over our streets.”
New Yorkers are also “tired of the Islamists and woke radicals committing assault, his failure to enforce the rule of law and to launch investigations into these so-called protests, which are violent pro-terror mobs,” Goldstein added.
The acoustics at the open-air demonstration made it very difficult for speakers to be heard, except by those at the very front, but that didn’t seem to matter to attendees, many of whom carried signs.
There appeared to be a sense of solidarity and common cause in the crowd, in which several Chabad rabbis milled about and asked men if they had already donned tefillin that day.
Hillary Barr, who owns a real estate company in New York and also promotes investment in Israeli properties, came to Tuesday night’s protest wearing an armful of blue and white whistles and carrying a bag full of small Israeli and American flags. She handed those items out to people at the peaceful demonstration.
“The fact that Zohran Mamdani doesn’t protect the Jewish citizens is criminal,” she told JNS. “He makes his opinion very clear. He doesn’t believe that Israel has a right to exist, and he celebrates the day when he thinks Israel should have been destroyed, which it wasn’t, thank God.”
The mayor has also said that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York, and he released a video for “Nakba” day, the day that some use to mark what they consider the “catastrophe” of the founding of the modern Israeli state.
“I am here as a tax-paying New Yorker to say we will not tolerate that,” Barr told JNS. “Nothing that this TikTok mayor can do is ever going to intimidate the Jews of New York.”
As she handed a whistle to a woman, Barr advised, “When confronted by the ‘free, free Palestine’ morons, blow it in their face and it makes them crazy, because you’re drowning out their ridiculous statements.”
Goldstein of End Jew Hatred plans to continue organizing demonstrations, as she did recently outside the New York Times building.
“This is the beginning of something big,” she told JNS. “This is going to be sustained protest.”
“There’s going to be a huge show of support for saying ‘enough is enough,’” she added. “The public is not behind this man anymore even though he got elected.”
