Israel is now a crime in New York City.
A synagogue was surrounded by a mob, and the mayor-elect blamed the Jews inside.
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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”
On the Upper East Side of New York City this week, “sacred space” acquired a new, ugly definition.
Inside Park East Synagogue, a Nefesh B’Nefesh seminar was doing something Jews have done for a hundred years: explaining how to move to Israel. Outside, a mob of protesters chanted about intifada, cursed the IDF, and jeered Jews walking into shul.
First of all, the likelihood is that this was not an ordinary, grassroots protest. Earlier in the week, it was reported that anti-Israel agitators who spread disruption at U.S. colleges were awarded $1,000-checks by a chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.1
And second, this was not City Hall, not a consulate, not a weapons factory. It was a synagogue on a Wednesday night. The “crime” was thinking aloud about Israel.
Faced with this, New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, had a choice. He could say what any minimally decent official should say: You do not surround a synagogue and menace Jews at the door. Full stop.
Instead, he attacked the Jews inside.
Mamdani’s statement included that he “believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation, and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
The Nefesh B’Nefesh event, he pronounced, misused sacred space and violated international law. In Mamdani’s moral mathematics, the impropriety lay not in the mob outside but in the fact that Jews, in a synagogue, were discussing living in a Jewish state.
When he visits a shul on Rosh Hashanah, the building is holy. When Jews gather there to plan a Jewish future in Israel, it becomes a war crime with stained-glass windows. It’s not about settlements; it’s about sovereignty itself, about whether Jewish self-determination is a right or an offense.
As for Nefesh B’Nefesh, it is not a “settler recruitment office.” It’s a travel agent for Jewish history. The organization helps North American Jews move anywhere in Israel, as it has for decades. Mamdani’s quarrel is not with zoning; it is with Zionism.
The pattern is familiar: Support for BDS, efforts to gut New York City’s working definition of antisemitism, loose talk of Israeli “genocide,” months of refusal to denounce “globalize the intifada” before finally offering to “discourage” it when the heat rose. Now, as mayor-elect, he has graduated from theory to practice. From statements about The Hague to treating an Israel seminar as a moral trespass.
This is not “critique.” This is doctrine: Jewish sovereignty is inherently illegitimate, and Jews who wish to live under it are fair game.
No such project can proceed without a kosher seal of approval, and Mamdani has it in abundance. Rabbis and activists obligingly step forward to assure us that his politics “stem not from hate,” that this is all a matter of conscience and “deep moral conviction.”
This is the “As-a-Jew” caucus. Their function is to convert harassment into “complexity.” If you feel threatened when a synagogue is ringed by people chanting for intifada, that’s not because something is wrong; it’s because you lack nuance.
Mamdani supplies the ideology and the crowd. The “As-a-Jew” chorus supplies the hechsher (kosher certification). If they declare it’s not antisemitism, it isn’t. And if you think otherwise, you’re the problem.
Hovering over this little morality play is Chuck Schumer, the wannabe custodian of America’s Jews. This same week, Schumer proudly unveiled a Senate resolution condemning Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi livestreamer whose contribution to civilization is a camera, a Wi-Fi connection, and an endless stream of Jew-hatred.
Good. Fuentes deserves every ounce of congressional opprobrium. But watch the split screen.
In Washington, Schumer is a lion. He denounces a fringe fascist he will never have to shake hands with. In New York City, confronted with a mayor-elect who wants to dismantle the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, backs BDS, and now treats Israel in a synagogue as a “desecration of sacred space,” the lion becomes a house cat. No endorsement, but no condemnation either. Just warm talk about “good conversations” and “keeping the dialogue open.”
Moral clarity for the podcaster. Moral equivocation for the mayor.
It’s courage at a safe distance. Schumer will pass all the Fuentes resolutions you like. The test of his much-advertised guardianship is whether he will plainly say that a mayor who criminalizes Jewish sovereignty and excuses synagogue intimidation is beyond the pale of a party that once prided itself on U.S. President Harry Truman’s recognition of the State of Israel in 1948, just 11 minutes after its proclamation of independence. (The United States was the first country to formally recognize the new nation.)
So far, the guardian is guarding his own flank.
Then there are Josh Shapiro and Rahm Emanuel, the designated adults of the Democratic Party.
Shapiro, to his credit, once told the truth. He warned that Mamdani’s campaign left “far too much space” for “blatantly antisemitic” rhetoric and called for “moral clarity.”
That was the trial run.
Now that the mob has moved from campus to a Manhattan shul, and now that Mamdani has treated the whole of Israel as a violation of international law, the moral clarity has gone missing. The governor with national ambitions suddenly has other things to do.
Rahm Emanuel, long eager to scold Republicans for normalizing bigots, has been busy assuring donors that Mamdani is “manageable,” that he’ll focus on rent and transit rather than revolution. Translation: We can live with him.
Imagine the tableau as a cartoon: Schumer covering his eyes, Shapiro his ears, Emanuel his mouth, a synagogue in the background, a crowd in the foreground. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil — the Democratic sages of New York.
Jews have been here before.
In the 1930s, when the German-American Bund and homegrown Nazis tried to rally in Jewish neighborhoods, the establishment tut-tutted, police looked the other way, and “respectable” leaders urged restraint.
It was not the bien-pensants who stopped them. It was, often enough, Jewish gangsters — hardly pillars of virtue — who understood that brownshirts understand only consequences. They broke up rallies and, sometimes, ribs.
No one is suggesting a return to that world or those methods. But they understood a fundamental truth: If you let people terrorize Jews with no price at all, they will keep coming back.
What we need today is the same instinct, channeled into lawful, disciplined power: professional security, organized volunteers, lawyers who can turn harassment into cases, and political pressure that imposes a cost on those who treat synagogues as free-fire zones for intimidation.
The sobering conclusion is this: No one is coming to save Jews. We have to fight even as we consider immigrating to Israel, or establishing a second home there.
Not Schumer, who roars at a YouTube Nazi and whispers about the mayor-elect of the most Jewish city outside of Israel. Not Shapiro or Emanuel, whose “maturity” consists of managing Mamdani rather than opposing him. Not a media class that frames Jewish fear as just another “narrative” in a dispute over sacred space.
So Jews in New York — and beyond — must do what they have always done when history knocks: Protect themselves and act.
That means serious, permanent security at every synagogue and school. It means trained volunteers who know how to secure entrances, document threats, and work with professionals — so that anyone who menaces Jews pays a legal, political, and social price.
And it means something else.
Mamdani and his allies have made clear what most frightens them: Jews voting with their feet. Israeli officials are already inviting New York Jews to come. The answer to a mob outside one Israel seminar is not to cancel it; it is to multiply it.
Every synagogue in New York should host Israel evenings — same night, same hour. Let the mayor-elect and his “As-a-Jew” validators explain why Jews quietly exploring the possibility of living in the one Jewish state on earth are a desecration of sacred space, while mobs chanting outside their shuls are the exercise of civil rights.
In Jewish history, clarity rarely comes from committees or resolutions; it comes from reality. The mob at Park East has told us who they are. Zohran Mamdani has told us who he is. The studied silence and strategic half-measures of Schumer, Shapiro, and Emanuel tell us who they are.
The only remaining question is who we intend to be. And that will depend on whether we fight.
“Muslim group CAIR cutting $1,000 checks for anti-Israel agitators who have been disciplined by colleges.” New York Post.