Of Course This Was Going to Happen in Mamdani's New York

New York City is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, and this year that community is paying a price for who currently sits in Gracie Mansion.

The Wall Street Journal reports that anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city rose 8.5% this year. Officers recorded 205 anti-Jewish hate crimes in the first seven months of 2026, up from 189 during the same stretch of 2025. More than half of all hate crimes in the city targeted Jewish residents this year, even though Jewish New Yorkers make up only about 10% of the population, according to NYPD data.

Overall crime in the city fell, with shootings and murders hitting record lows, aligning with national trends; Jews paid for it anyway.

How does this happen? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Mayor Zohran Mamdani has spent his short time in office trashing Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and let’s stop pretending that this is merely about policy disagreement with the Jewish State. That’s how the left spins it, but Jewish leaders know better. Concerns escalated after Mamdani called for Netanyahu's arrest, and days later, a man stabbed a Jewish man in Manhattan in an attack police classified as a hate crime.

Assemblyman Sam Berger (D-N.Y.), an Orthodox Jew representing Queens, said the mayor built a career on divisive rhetoric aimed at his community and has only leaned into it since taking office. "This is a mayor who has spent his career using divisive rhetoric, particularly aimed at the Jewish community," Berger said. "Something we have seen throughout his mayoralty is that rather than pulling back from his rhetoric, he has leaned in to it."

Mamdani insists he takes the surge seriously. "It will never be tolerated, it will never be accepted, and we know that this is something that we have to fight with every single tool at our disposal," he said Monday, touting increased funding for the city's Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes.

Does anyone actually believe he gives a hoot?

That funding didn't stop a man from allegedly shouting "Allahu akbar" while stabbing a Jewish man and an Asian man on the Upper West Side, and it didn't stop Mamdani from skipping New York City's Israel Day parade, a snub he chalked up to solidarity with Palestinians.

About a week before the stabbing, Mamdani told an interviewer he'd asked his legal team whether he could arrest Netanyahu under an International Criminal Court warrant if the Israeli leader set foot in New York. Legal scholars called the claim nonsense. Mamdani later released a video conceding the limits of his authority while still branding Netanyahu a war criminal and demanding federal action against him. Netanyahu accused Mamdani of "fomenting hate." The video has drawn more than 100 million views on X.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in the country, called the video a "performative fixation." "Mayor Mamdani's apparent obsession with attacking Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu places Jewish New Yorkers further at risk from those who are emboldened by his demonizing rhetoric," Jacobs said in a statement.

Mark Treyger, chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, said the video served no governing purpose beyond racking up online engagement. "No one is asking him to become a Zionist," Treyger said. "We're asking him to be the mayor for all New Yorkers because that is not the feeling that people are experiencing right now."

None of this should surprise anyone who has watched where the Democrat Party has been heading for over a decade. Former President Barack Obama helped mainstream antisemitism in the Democrat Party, and it showed. FBI data showed a sharp rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes from 2015 to 2016, and the Anti-Defamation League documented the same climb beginning that year.

Mamdani is the direct product of that culture.

New Yorkers elected a blatantly antisemitic mayor, and they are getting exactly the city that comes with that choice.

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