Letters To The Editor - August 28, 2026

Empty Rhetoric from Mamdani and Hochul

Re: “Former Mamdani Campaigner Retracts Synagogue Attack Claim” (www.JewishPress.com, Aug 19):

No one was surprised by Mamdani’s meaningless response to the latest antisemitic attack. I’m certain that our entire community is surprised by a similar, belated, and equally robotic response by Governor Kathy Hochul. Mamdani’s outrageous behavior has gone on for too long. Just to suggest that he concentrate on city affairs is equally meaningless. After all, the governor has the power to put Mamdani in his place.

Arthur Janus

Via E-mail

New York’s Jews New Year Reckoning

Re: your cover story, “Jews Victims in 64% of U.S. Religious Hate Crimes Last Year” (Aug 21):

Many people know that Jews blow the shofar on the holy days of Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur. Less well-known is the custom of blowing the shofar at the end of the daily morning prayer service for the month preceding the High Holy Days, as a warning that the days of judgment are coming.

These days, New York Jews sense a different kind of warning.

This year, as the High Holidays approach, the Jewish community in New York is thinking about holiday services differently. Every synagogue has a security committee; police presence is a necessity (not because of traffic), and in many synagogues, the process of passing through security at the entrance reminds me of my time working in the White House.

While Jews once felt safe walking the streets of the city – or at least only as threatened as everybody else – now they feel, with good reason, as if they have targets on their backs. Most hate crimes in New York are directed at Jews, even though they’re nowhere near a majority of the population. In July, 70% of hate crimes in the city targeted Jews. Last week, an antisemite disrupted a synagogue service and assaulted a congregant. Last month, a Jew was stabbed leaving prayer services on a fast day.

Under the anticrime policies of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, crime receded, but now discussions with Jewish New Yorkers are about the latest hate crime, or about new communal or personal security measures, or about who is no longer comfortable taking the subway.

The pervasive nature of the threat has Jews continually thinking about it. Before going out to a kosher restaurant, you have to decide: Do you want to become a target just to get a burger or a slice of pizza? When you go to synagogue, can you focus on contemplative prayer knowing that just being there makes you vulnerable? When you visit a Jewish institution, you wonder: Why don’t comparable non-Jewish institutions need the same layers of security?

What’s happening in New York is about more than one mayor running an administration oddly focused on demonizing Israel. The atmosphere is changing the character of what was once America’s most Jewish city and making it simply another place. It feels to many New York Jews as if something is being taken away, an atypical feeling in the American Jewish experience.

In this period before Rosh Hashanah, the daily shofar blasts are supposed to get Jews thinking about what they have done wrong in the past year and how they could be better in the next. This year, that sound is also making them look to the city that has long been the center of American Jewish life and hope against hope that it too can be better in the year ahead.

Brian Goldenfeld

Thousand Oaks, Calif.

I was touched by Michele Anenberg’s steadfast pride in her Jewish identity, yet appalled by the Central Synagogue attack, which is a painful reminder of the antisemitic milieu that continues to saturate our wonderful city under our current mayoral administration, and of the mayor’s incendiary comments. The almost clichéd characterization that the perpetrator has mental issues doesn’t have the credibility it once had, before the unabated hate for the Jewish population sadly pervaded our once friendly culture.

Ron Goldman

Brooklyn, N.Y.