New York has crossed a line. Hope for the best – but prepare for the worst.
That’s the responsible strategy now that Zohran Mamdani – a 34-year-old socialist firebrand who is openly hostile to the Jewish State and to the movement that supports it – has been elected mayor of the city that is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel.
A Uganda-born dual citizen, who became an American citizen only seven years ago, Mamdani is a New York State Assemblyman and a former student activist – for “Palestine” – who, starting January 1, despite having no experience in managing a business, meeting a payroll, or running a public entity of any kind, will oversee the nation’s largest municipal workforce with the authority to appoint commissioners and direct city agencies.
He is an unabashed anti-capitalist who will be the chief executive of the city that is the center of the nation’s financial industry – and for generations has symbolized Jewish success and civic influence.
He is also an anti–law-and-order demagogue – with a social media history that includes cheering the “defund the police” movement and denouncing the NYPD as “racist” and “wicked” – who is now poised to preside over the nation’s largest municipal police force, a sprawling, highly professional organization of more than 33,000 uniformed officers and nearly 18,000 civilian employees charged with protecting over eight million residents across five boroughs.
In short, insanity reigns – and there is no reason for optimism.
Mamdani’s hostility to Israel and Zionism can’t be overstated. He isn’t merely a “vociferous critic of Israel,” as the authors of an article in the November 6 edition of The New York Times put it two days after his stunning political achievement (“As Mamdani Surges Ahead, Schumer Risks Finding Himself Left Behind”). The incoming mayor is a proud member of an organization called Democratic Socialists of America. Once a small, reform minded group of intellectuals, writers and Civil Rights activists that was both staunchly pro-Israel and anti-Communist, the DSA is now a far-left revolutionary party growing in size and influence. It aims to replace capitalism with socialist economic structures, brands Israel an illegitimate “apartheid state,” and threatens to expel members who deviate from the anti-Zionist party line.
Mamdani has nothing to fear on that score since his commitment to the anti-Zionist cause is beyond reproach. He clearly believes that regardless of its borders, Israel has no right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people and should therefore be replaced by a Palestinian state consisting of all the land “from the river to the sea” – in accord with the genocidal war cry of pro-Hamas mobs from London to Los Angeles, Melbourne to Manhattan. Hence, his longtime support for the BDS movement that works to delegitimize, isolate, and eliminate Israel.
Hence, too, Mamdani’s outrageous, oft-repeated vow to arrest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity should he ever set foot in New York City in order for the democratically elected leader of America’s strategic ally in the Middle East to be extradited to the Netherlands for a show trial at the International Criminal (Kangaroo) Court that neither the United States nor Israel recognizes as legitimate – an obscene ordeal certain to be followed by a sentence of life imprisonment.
Don’t overreact, the appeasers, cowards and quislings counsel. They claim, slyly, that there’s no cause for Jews to be alarmed because Mamdani isn’t antisemitic, only anti-Zionist, like anti-Zionist charedim, say, or the “progressive” Jews who have rallied, incredibly, around the Palestinian flag.
Baloney! It’s at best delusional and at worst suicidal to believe Mamdani doesn’t pose a serious threat to the roughly 960,000 Jews that comprise around 11% of New York City’s total population – and to all New Yorkers who reject the hateful ideology of the neo-Marxist movement that he both dutifully represents and enthusiastically champions.
On some level, of course, downplaying the Mamdani menace is understandable. It’s human nature to believe things can’t or won’t get worse – that common sense will prevail, that extremists will moderate once they are in power.
And many New Yorkers will no doubt cling to that same belief now, convincing themselves that Mamdani will govern differently than his record suggests.
Unfortunately, waiting for moderation in moments like this invites catastrophe.
So does underestimating an adversary. Those who dismiss Mamdani by saying he “lacks the power” to do this or that aren’t paying attention. He’s a revolutionary, not a reformer – and he didn’t come this far to fail according to his – and the DSA’s – definition of success.
Take his promise to make bus rides free – a measure all but guaranteed to make city buses magnets for the homeless and drug addicted. Nothing stops the mayor from ordering the police not to arrest or ticket anyone who refuses to pay the fare. That’s one way revolutions advance – through willful testing of limits by those in charge.
Simply stated, the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York’s 111th mayor marks a terrible turning point – the start of an economic and social decline for New York like the downward spirals that destroyed Detroit and other American cities. His policies are likely to bankrupt Gotham and strip away its institutional backbone.
For Jews, the danger is sharper still: the end of New York as a place where they can expect to prosper and live securely.
And Mamdani’s victory isn’t just a local story. It’s a dramatic development with global implications.
For the first time, an avowed anti-Zionist – a smash-the-system radical who rejects the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination in their ancestral homeland – has conquered City Hall. As a result, America’s largest and most important city can be expected to become the global epicenter of anti-Israel agitation and propaganda.
Violence-prone, pro-Palestinian groups are certain to feel emboldened. Antisemitic threats – and attacks – are likely to spread, regardless of Mamdani’s promises to protect the Jewish community from the rampaging mobs that turned the campus of Columbia University and other iconic New York sites into riot-torn battlegrounds during Israel’s defensive war in Gaza against Hamas.
Not for nothing, did the terrorist-affiliated Telegram channel react to Mamdani’s win by praising him as “a supporter of Hamas and a hater of Israel.”
It’s no accident that an Iranian lawmaker hailed Mamdani’s victory as “a sign of the strength of the slogan ‘Death to Israel.’”
While Mamdani is in power, representatives of Iran and other implacable enemies of America and Israel at UN Headquarters – a cesspool of support for terrorism and antisemitism stuck in Manhattan’s heart – will make every effort possible to exploit their diplomatic immunity and proximity to City Hall through boundary-pushing, possibly illegal meetings and conferences and heaven knows what else.
More immediately, inside city government, ideological appointments and purges are likely. Mamdani has pledged to dismantle the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group – the unit that deals with violent demonstrations and terrorist threats – and to shut down intelligence programs that track radical Islamist and far-left networks. These moves are nothing less than a gift to terrorists, rioters, and radical agitators.
His election-night victory speech left no doubt about the direction he intends to take. Gone was the smiling mask of moderation he wore so effectively through the campaign. He discarded it to reveal the scowl and rhetoric of a man who believes he has won a mandate for radical change.
It was also the rhetoric of an agitator schooled in intersectional ideology and postcolonial propaganda and discourse.
In fact, a visitor from another planet tuning into the celebration would assume Mamdani and his followers had just overthrown a postcolonial, predominantly Muslim country’s corrupt dictator – named Andrew Cuomo – who had long served its former European imperialist masters.
Mamdani mentioned Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s longest serving mayor, but he quoted India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – a leader of the Soviet-leaning Nonalignment movement during the Cold War who opposed Israel’s creation and claimed all of Palestine rightfully belonged to the Arabs.
At the height of the celebration, Mamdani slipped seamlessly into Arabic, invoking a saying from a street in the heart of Queens’s “Little Egypt” neighborhood.
“We will fight for you because we are you,” he told the crowd. “Or as we say on Steinway, ana minkum wa ilaykum – I am from you and for you.”
His supporters roared their approval. It was a moment carefully crafted to signal identity and allegiance, and it succeeded.
He promised to represent all New Yorkers, yet his roughly 13-minute, grievance-filled diatribe showed that this was an empty promise. The speech wasn’t a unifying message; it was a declaration of ideological priorities.
Mamdani spoke of combating “the scourge of antisemitism,” but the focus of his words – and his passion – was “Islamophobia” and his own Muslim identity.
Consider this: In November 1973, when New York elected its first Jewish mayor, Abraham Beame, he didn’t pepper his election night remarks with Hebrew or Yiddish words and phrases. The 67-year-old city comptroller, a City College of New York graduate who was raised on the Lower East Side, didn’t say nu or shoin, or toss in a mazel tov for effect. He didn’t need to. His identity spoke through his decency, not his diction. He spoke in the shared civic language of all New Yorkers.
Mamdani chose otherwise.
He declared that his New York is a city of immigrants – but his examples told the story: he spoke only of those from the developing world, rather selectively at that, and not of the generations of immigrants from Europe, Ukraine, and Russia who built and sustained the city – and are still arriving.
“I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas,” he shouted. “Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.”
He went out of his way to cite “a New Yorker” who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because she can’t afford to live in the city, vowing to be her mayor – not the mayor of those who actually live here, pay taxes, or own homes.
The New Yorkers who are descendants of the Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants who settled in lower Manhattan and on the Upper West Side and East Harlem – it was obvious to anyone listening that they don’t count. Are the histories of their communities to be ignored – or erased? That appears to be the case.
For the record, New York City is home to about 376,000 Irish Americans; 492,000 Italian Americans; 180,000 Polish Americans; 250,000 German Americans; 140,000 Ukrainian Americans; and 67,000 French Americans. The nearly one million-strong Jewish community includes at least 20,000 Israelis – more residents than the approximately 19,000-member Uzbek community that got a call-out.
You wouldn’t know any of that from Mamdani’s speech.
Nor would you know that the city’s Black population is close to two million – about 22 percent of the total N.Y.C. population. The Black community’s contributions, achievements, sacrifices and struggles, its entire rich history – Mamdani essentially reduced it all to “the many Black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job,” promising to fight for them.
There are about 600,000 Puerto Rican New Yorkers. Mamdani’s speech ignored them, too.
As of 2023, approximately 628,200 Chinese Americans live in New York City. They weren’t mentioned, either.
Overlooked also: about 700,000 Dominican and some 246,000 Indian New Yorkers.
The liberal white Millennial and Gen-Z New Yorkers who voted for him tellingly didn’t rate a mention. Does Mamdani see them as too privileged to be treated as anything more than invisible foot soldiers in his struggle to liberate New York from the supposedly ruling “billionaire class?” Are the Park Slope Progressives of Mamdani’s DSA today’s equivalent of yesteryear’s Useful Idiots – the true believers of Stalin’s Communist Party USA? That appears to be the case.
New York’s Muslim population is reliably estimated at around 756,000 – about nine percent of the city’s total population of approximately 8,400,000. But Mamdani apparently expects a surge in immigration, because he promised to make New York a city “where the more than one million Muslims know that they belong – not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power.”
Christianity is still the city’s dominant religion, by the way. The number of New Yorkers who identify as Catholic ranges between 2,300,000 and 2,800,000, followed by 1,600,000 to 2,300,000 who identify as Protestant.
Mamdani’s exaggeration of the city’s Muslim population probably has less to do with his own religious affiliation – he identifies as a practicing Shiite Muslim – than his political ideology. Postcolonial theory generally views Christianity as historically intertwined with Western imperialism, colonization, and cultural domination. In contrast with Christianity, Islam is seen as both a symbol of endurance under colonial oppression and a vital force resisting supposedly ongoing Western imperialist policies and projects.
Which explains both the international left’s seemingly self-destructive alliance with rightwing political Islam, commonly called Islamism – dating to the 1979 overthrow of Iran’s pro-Western, modernizing monarch, the Shah – and, starting in the late 1960s, the depraved depiction by domestic leftwing radicals of America’s police departments as murderous agencies tasked with controlling oppressed communities of color resembling internal colonies.
“When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Mamdani once told a DSA gathering. The poisonous metaphor distilled his worldview: to Mamdani, the Israel Defense Forces and the New York Police Department aren’t protectors of life and property, but twin symbols of oppression.
“Safety and justice will go hand in hand,” he said on election night, as he yet again promised to “create a department of community safety that tackles the mental health crisis and the homelessness crisis head on.”
None of this is reassuring. On the contrary, it shows why preparation – not wishful thinking – is now an urgent necessity.
History offers lessons worth remembering. In early 20th century Russia, Jewish youth organized self-defense groups to confront pogroms. During the 1940s, rescue committees acted while others hesitated.
If history teaches anything, it’s that talk alone changes nothing. Hope isn’t a plan – and vigilance isn’t paranoia. Those who prepare for the worst survive. Those who wait for others to act often pay the price later.
The time for action has come. A new, independent organization should be created – the Emergency Defense Committee – with a clear and lawful purpose: mobilizing and managing the defense of New York’s Jewish community if the worst fears about the Mamdani administration prove justified.
The Committee’s work should center on security and legal affairs. Security should mean deploying professional protection for synagogues, schools, community centers, and other soft targets – with rapid-response capability and coordination with police and federal authorities. The legal arm should be ready to act swiftly and forcefully – seeking injunctions, filing civil-rights cases, and using the courts as instruments of lawful defense whenever city policies endanger the Jewish community.
The security mission is more challenging than it seems. New York currently faces a shortage of licensed armed guards amid unprecedented demand. The shortage is compounded by regulatory barriers such as strict licensing and training requirements that slow the onboarding process for new guards. While unarmed guards can contribute notably to general safety, armed guards are essential where there is a tangible security threat. Houses of worship and private schools increasingly rely on a layered security approach incorporating both types of guards.
Surely, the financial resources and expertise exist within the American Jewish community to meet the needs of the New York community at a time like this.
There will be those who say that even speaking in these terms is provocative – that preparing for the worst somehow helps to bring it about, that defense itself is an act of aggression. That argument is paralysis masquerading as virtue. Caution and preparation don’t create danger; they recognize it. Refusing to prepare never prevents the storm. It only ensures that when it comes, the unprepared suffer most.
This is no longer about politics. It’s about safety and survival.
The American Jewish community has faced moments like this before, and the record isn’t pretty. In the years before and during the Holocaust, too many leaders failed to speak out or act. One prominent Jewish newspaper publisher even suppressed news of the persecution, fearful of offending isolationist and pro-Nazi sentiment. That failure cost countless lives. It should never happen again.
The great Zionist statesman Ze’ev Jabotinsky said it best: “Silence is filth.”
Put differently, silence and hesitation are forms of surrender.
The Jewish response now should be calm, deliberate, and firm – rooted in organized self-defense and unbreakable solidarity.
One more thing: the Israel Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in 2026 should be the largest in history. The annual event, to be held on Sunday, May 31, should be a clear statement that the Jewish people of New York, and of America, stand together, unbowed and unafraid.