Just five days before the 87th anniversary of the two‐day pogrom on German and Austrian Jews and Jewish communities, known as Kristallnacht (Nov. 9-10, 1938), an eerily familiar feeling is being felt by the American Jewish consciousness following the disturbing election of Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor-elect of New York City. This sentiment begs the question: What’s going to be with the Jews?
The answer in 1938 was that the very people who had contributed for so many years to the advancement of Europe’s most enlightened society were no longer welcome. Generations of German and Austrian Jews, who once thrived in commerce, academia and public life, and who, for five years ignored the growing sentiment of Main Street and town halls across Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler, suddenly woke that November to the thunderous hammer-blow of national socialism. Jews were finally forced to acknowledge their precarious place in society, and, for most, it was too late to do anything about it.
Now, less than a century later, the verdict is not as clear. One thing remains certain: We are forced to face the same, albeit nuanced form, of hatred. An antisemitic riptide has caught us in the electoral wake. For years in the United States, we have been seeing it resurface as clear as the stereotypical crooked nose on a Der Stürmer caricature, albeit this time thinly veiled behind a rhetoric of “anti-Zionism.”
So when New York City—the self-styled Jewish capital of the Diaspora—elected a Socialist, antisemitic mayor, the question must be asked: What will the Jewish community do now?
I speak from the vantage of someone who was born and raised in New York City. I attended a Jewish day school in New York and graduated from a City University of New York school. I was a proud Jewish New Yorker who wore my yarmulke freely on the streets of Manhattan, marched in the Salute to Israel Day Parade, and attended Jewish heritage days in Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium without fear of attack. But now, that identity is called into question because I no longer feel welcome in the Big Apple.
Thankfully, I made aliyah with my family years ago. Still, many of my family members and friends, and thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of proud Jews, including thousands of Holocaust survivors, remain in the city. My question at this historic crossroad is: Will they receive the wake-up call that our German grandparents got on Nov. 9, 1938, or will the New York Jewish shtetl bury its collective head in the East River and pretend that New York is still their home?
What will Jews in New York talk about in synagogues and at Shabbat tables for the next eight weeks until the Jan. 1 inauguration of mayor-elect Mamdani? Will rabbinical sermons preach aliyah or yeridah, a Hebrew expression meaning “going down,” bound for Florida? Or will they just plead with God to split the waters (this time of the Hudson tidal estuary), so they can cross to its western bank, for relocation to towns like Teaneck or Englewood in New Jersey with large Jewish populations?
Perhaps our fearless leaders will proactively call for aggressive letter-writing campaigns and public rallies aimed at transforming City Hall and Gracie Mansion.
But maybe, just maybe, contemporary American Jewry has taken another lesson from recent history—thinking that everything will be OK and that Jan. 2, 2026, will come and go, and it will be business as usual. One thing’s for certain: This is a moment that demands reflection and action on the part of the Jewish community. Is it too late?
