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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
For more than a century, New York was the unofficial capital of the Jewish diaspora.
Yiddish newspapers were printed by the millions. Jewish immigrants built neighborhoods, unions, businesses, theaters, publishing houses, universities, charities, political machines, restaurants, synagogues, and entire industries.
The Lower East Side became one of the great Jewish population centers in history. Brooklyn became synonymous with Jewish life. Jewish humor became New York humor. Jewish food became New York food. Jewish expressions entered the vocabulary of people who had never stepped inside a synagogue.
New York taught generations of Jews something their ancestors had almost never experienced: You do not have to whisper here.
Today, nearly one million Jews still live within the five boroughs. The Jewish Federation’s 2023 study counted approximately 960,000 Jewish New Yorkers, making the city one of the greatest concentrations of Jewish life anywhere on earth. Muslim population estimates are less precise because the Census does not count religion, but New York City sources have cited figures ranging from roughly 765,000 to around one million.
So something remarkable is happening.
The most Jewish city outside Israel is becoming what New York Magazine recently christened “Habibi City.”
And the important part is not the hummus.
In August, New York devoted an issue to what it described explicitly as a “cultural shift” underway in the city: the emergence of a new SWANA — Southwest Asian and North African — cultural scene encompassing Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, and others. The piece celebrated new restaurants, magazines, artists, parties, bookstores, designers, and political networks. There is nothing objectionable about any of that. New York is supposed to absorb cultures. That is one of its miracles.
But read deeper and something else emerges: This new scene is not being described merely as a cultural renaissance. It has a political theology.
The magazine explained that participation in this new SWANA consciousness had come to mean embracing certain shared beliefs, including that what happened in Gaza after October 7th constituted “genocide.” It described people in the community as facing xenophobia, Islamophobia — and Zionism. And it portrayed Zohran Mamdani’s rise to the mayoralty as perhaps the clearest demonstration of the community’s arrival as a cultural and political force.
Read that again. Zionism is placed in the same conceptual category as xenophobia and Islamophobia. The national liberation movement of the Jewish People — the belief that Jews are entitled to sovereignty in the land from which Jewish civilization originated — is no longer merely something with which these activists disagree. It is something they must “face.”
That is the real story of “Habibi City.”
The story is that one ascendant cultural movement has made opposition to Jewish national identity one of the credentials of belonging. And perhaps nothing captures the inversion better than the role October 7th plays in its origin story.
New York Magazine’s own subsequent account of the controversy surrounding “Habibi City” acknowledged readers’ criticism that its package repeatedly referenced October 7th without directly confronting the massacre itself. Instead, October 7th becomes a timestamp preceding the flowering of a new political-cultural community in New York.
The massacre of Jews becomes background. The political awakening of everyone reacting against Israel becomes the story. And the allegation of “genocide” becomes liturgical.
“Genocide” is no longer an accusation to be proved. It is an admission ticket. And once you accept it as unquestionable truth, everything else follows. Israel is not defending itself; it is genocidal. Zionism is not Jewish self-determination; it is racism. People who support Israel are not neighbors with whom you disagree; they are accomplices.
Jewish institutions become suspect. Jewish money becomes suspect. Jewish political participation becomes suspect. Even Jewish landlords somehow become part of “Palestine.”
That last sentence would sound like parody if New York were not already living it.
In Chelsea this summer, flyers appeared around a contentious public-housing redevelopment project. One warned that “Talmudists are trained to cheat.” Another invoked the Rothschilds. Others complained about Zionist money and instructed residents to “Stop Zionist occupation of Manhattan.”
Think about the ideological journey required to arrive there. A dispute about Manhattan apartments somehow becomes the Nakba. A development project somehow becomes “Israeli occupation.” A Jewish text somehow becomes evidence of fraud. The Rothschilds somehow return. It would almost be impressive if Jews had not seen this movie so many times before.
Last year, Crown Heights Bites Back distributed material accusing “Zionist white supremacists” of threatening Black residents and tied Brooklyn rents to Israeli actions in Palestine. Within Our Lifetime leader Nerdeen Kiswani separately accused “Zionist landlords” of exploiting Black communities while supporting Israeli settlements.
More recently, congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier repeatedly paired AIPAC with corporate landlords and argued that American spending on Israel helped explain why apartments in Harlem and Washington Heights cost thousands of dollars per month. This is where anti-Zionism begins looking remarkably familiar.
Every society has real problems. Housing is expensive. Wages are tight. People are frustrated. And suddenly someone appears to explain that hidden Jewish power has something to do with it. Only now you do not say “Jews.” You say “Zionists.”
Mainstream Jewish civic life in New York has not organized itself around removing Muslims from public life. Jewish organizations are not demanding that Muslim candidates renounce Mecca before running for office. Jews are not plastering Queens with posters blaming “Islamic money” for rent increases. Jewish institutions do not generally demand that Muslim Americans prove their loyalty by condemning Muslim-majority countries before participating in civic life.
Yet an increasingly influential activist culture has decided that Zionism — something supported in one form or another by a large portion of world Jewry — is not merely a political position but a moral contamination. The message to Jews is therefore peculiar: New York is no longer a Jewish city.
Indeed, New York has elected a mayor whose political career embodies much of this shift. Zohran Mamdani did not accidentally stumble into controversy over Israel. Opposition to Zionism has been one of the most consistent ideological features of his public life.
He has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. He introduced the “Not on Our Dime” legislation targeting New York charities connected to Israeli activities in the territories. During his mayoral campaign, when repeatedly asked whether Israel had the right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, he would not say yes, instead saying that Israel should exist as a state with equal rights and that he was uncomfortable supporting a state he believed created a religious hierarchy.
Asked about the slogan “Globalize the intifada” — language that many Jews associate with periods in which Israeli civilians were blown apart on buses and in restaurants — Mamdani declined to condemn it.
He campaigned on the extraordinary promise that Benjamin Netanyahu could be arrested if he entered New York. As mayor, after his own legal review concluded that New York City lacked the authority to execute the International Criminal Court warrant, Mamdani abandoned the municipal arrest threat — and then urged the federal government to arrest Netanyahu instead, calling him a war criminal and the architect of a “horrific genocide.”
On his first day as mayor, Mamdani revoked all of his predecessor Eric Adams’ executive orders issued after September 2024. The blanket repeal consequently eliminated Adams measures adopting the renowned International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and restricting city participation in BDS-aligned activity.
And when tens of thousands gathered on Fifth Avenue this year for New York’s Israel Day Parade, Mamdani declined to attend, explaining that he had already made his position on the Israeli government clear.
Protecting Jews from being punched while helping normalize the ideology that tells them their national movement is uniquely illegitimate is a very strange definition of Jewish security.
Antisemitism does not begin with assault; it begins with permission. Permission to speak about Jews differently, permission to attribute unrelated social problems to Jewish power, permission to treat Jewish collective identity as morally suspect, permission to impose tests on Jews that nobody would dare impose on other minorities.
And eventually, permission changes the atmosphere.
Through August 2026, the New York Police Department recorded 229 confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City, an eight-percent increase from the same period the year before. Jews were the targets of more than half of all confirmed hate crimes in the city despite representing roughly one-tenth of its population. The numbers make one fact impossible to wave away: Jewish fear in New York is not imaginary.
And that is why the phrase “Habibi City” struck a nerve. We Jews are not frightened by Arabic. Many of our ancestors spent centuries speaking it. We Jews do not object to Muslim political success. Muslims have every right to run New York City, vote, build mosques, open restaurants, produce magazines, elect politicians, and shape American culture. That is America.
The problem begins when diversity becomes ideological replacement; when one minority’s arrival is celebrated alongside the delegitimization of another minority’s homeland; when Palestinian nationalism is treated as liberation but Jewish nationalism as racism; when Arab attachment to ancestral lands is identity but Jewish attachment to ancestral land is colonialism; when a Palestinian flag is cultural pride but a Zionist symbol becomes provocation; when Muslims are encouraged to bring their complete identities into public life while Jews discover that one particular component of theirs must increasingly be checked at the door.
That is not pluralism.
For generations, Jews helped build the liberal New York that made this Muslim political and cultural flourishing possible. They fought housing discrimination, university quotas, and religious tests. They built companies and organizations. They defended immigrants. They supported a conception of America capacious enough that people could arrive from Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, Karachi, Ramallah, Cairo, or Kabul and become New Yorkers without surrendering who they were.
That victory should be celebrated.
But Jews are entitled to ask for the same bargain. We should not have to become less Jewish to make someone else feel more at home. And Zionism is not some embarrassing appendage that can simply be amputated from modern Jewish identity.
Israel contains nearly half the world’s Jews. Most American Jews have family, friends, religious ties, cultural ties, or emotional ties to Israel. Hebrew prayers are filled with Jerusalem. Jewish holidays are organized around the Land of Israel. Jewish history did not suddenly begin in Brooklyn.
Demanding that Jews detach themselves from Israel is not asking Jews to adopt a foreign-policy position. It is asking us to rewrite our heritage.
That is the danger of what is happening in New York. The city is not becoming Muslim because more Muslims live there. It is becoming “Habibi City” because a new cultural and political establishment is gaining confidence in defining what respectable New Yorkers are supposed to believe — and increasingly, one of those beliefs is that Zionism belongs outside the boundaries.
For Jews, that should sound an alarm because New York’s greatness was never that Jews controlled it. New York’s greatness was that Jews did not have to disappear inside it. They could build synagogues without apology, speak Hebrew without embarrassment, wear a kippah without explanation, raise money for Israel, march down Fifth Avenue carrying Israeli flags, and be American and Jewish and Zionist simultaneously. That was the promise.
And if the new New York welcomes every identity except the Jew who refuses to apologize for Israel, then what is being constructed is not a more tolerant city. It is merely a city with a new hierarchy of acceptable identities.
New York can become more Muslim without becoming less Jewish. It can become more Arab without becoming anti-Zionist. It can celebrate an Arab restaurant without treating Israel as a disease. It can elect a Muslim mayor without making Jewish national self-determination a civic embarrassment. That is what genuine pluralism would look like.
But that requires one principle that New York’s new cultural vanguard seems increasingly unwilling to accept: Jews do not need permission to be Zionists. We do not need to apologize for surviving. And we certainly should not have to explain that in New York, of all places.
Muslims in NYC are doing to the city’s Jews what Muslims try to do Jews throughout the world - marginalize, vilify and erase.
Wife & I are from NYC. Shocked, disappointed, angry.