When Jews are on the ballot, it’s time to get out.

I want to warn people that I’ve seen the future of Jewish New York, and it doesn’t look promising. New York is over for Jews. We had a wonderful city and a glittering life once, but that time is gone.

photo: Ian Dooley/Unsplash

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This is a guest essay by Hana Raviyt Schank, a writer and fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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After 9/11, we had to get out of New York.

The city had a gaping, smoldering hole in the middle of downtown. The acrid smell and smoke blew over to Brooklyn, so we smelled death and burning steel all day. And there was no work.

The dot-com bubble burst the year before, sending me to London and my then-boyfriend (now husband) to Kyiv in search of work. But a year in London and Kyiv was enough. Now in our late 20s, we were ready to come home and start our lives. On September 1st we unpacked in a temporary sublet — our first time living together, testing to see where this relationship was going.

On September 10th, I hit send on my very first book proposal, a reported memoir about living through the dot-com boom and bust. By September 17th, my agent told me no one was ever going to read or buy another book about anything but terrorism for a long time, and maybe ever. No one cared about the dot-com world anymore. It was all anthrax and the Taliban. Did I have a memoir about either of those?

Eventually, my boyfriend and I filed for unemployment insurance, pooled our frequent flier miles, and left for Bangkok with a plan to travel for three months, live off our unemployment checks, and wait for things in New York to settle. We were unprepared for every other traveler we met to have an opinion about the terrorist attacks in New York.

Wherever we went in Southeast Asia, when we told people we were from New York, they swallowed hard and replied, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” This was different from that one time on a chair lift in Utah when a skier from Texas asked where I was from. “New York,” I said. “I’m sorry,” he quipped, insultingly. He was sorry I had to live with all those Jewish homosexual communists.

But in Southeast Asia, when we said we were from New York, we knew people were picturing airplanes flying into the Twin Towers. They were thinking about the firefighters who ran up the stairs of the burning towers, the business people who leapt out of windows, the desperate phone calls from the planes.

I’d been on the subway when the first tower fell. I walked from Times Square to Brooklyn, then over the Williamsburg Bridge with people coated in ash, some bleeding, a silent zombie parade. On the other side of the bridge Hasidic Jews handed people bottles of water. It was a hot day, and people were grateful for the kindness.

When people in Thailand, Cambodia, or Laos learned we were from New York, reliving the trauma was inescapable. Our hosts and fellow travelers’ hearts went out to us poor New Yorkers, whose city was smoldering and wall-papered with missing signs for people who would never turn up.

But retelling the story of 9/11 was exhausting and upsetting. We debated telling people we were from somewhere else. Chicago? Canada?

It was the first time I had a terrible story people wanted to listen to, wince at, and then ultimately feel good about not having such a terrible a story in their own past. It was a story that made you grab your loved ones and hold them tight. I hated telling it.

Eighteen years later, I had another horrible story to tell, after surviving a head-on car crash with a wrong-way driver. First, I had to tell the story to doctors. Many, many, many doctors.

I began by explaining about the car crash, that it wasn’t our fault, and that my husband and young kids were in the car. After a few retellings, I learned it was best to state early on that everyone was alive and on the road to recovery, otherwise the listener would become overwhelmed with the potential trauma of hearing about kid death.

“Everyone’s alive,” I reassured my doctors. They needed to be reassured or they wouldn’t be able to concentrate at the problem at hand, which was my follow-up care. I watched the doctors’ faces grow pinched as their brains protected them from potentially horrible news. Why was I now taking care of my doctors’ emotional wellbeing?

Sometimes they said aloud what everyone who heard the story thought: how lucky we were to be alive. “I don’t know what you believe,” two different doctors said. “But seems like someone was watching out for you.”

Finally, I wrote my story down, thinking that if anyone wanted to hear the details of the car crash I could just send them a link. Eventually, I became inured to telling the story, and could rattle off the details without reliving the trauma at the same time. It helped that people requested the story less frequently, plus I’d learned to live with my injuries. As time went by, I thought less and less about the person I was before the car crash, and more about the person I am today.

But you never know when life is going to hand you a story everyone needs to hear.

When I told the teller at Hapoalim Bank that I’d moved to Israel from New York, her face lit up. Israelis love New York, maybe even more than New Yorkers love New York, and certainly more than Americans love New York, except for those few months post-9/11 when Rudy Giuliani was “America’s Mayor” and everyone at least felt bad about New York, even if they didn’t love it.

“I love New York!” the bank teller said. Then her face darkened. “But what’s happening there is horrible.” I nodded, aware of what was coming next: “My friend in New York said everything there is ‘Free Palestine’ now?”

Yes, I told her. There is antisemitism in the schools. There is antisemitic graffiti scrawled over the whole city. People throw red paint on the homes where Jews live. Jewish restaurants are vandalized. It’s become a scary place for Jews.

“But in Miami Beach my friend walks around with a giant Star of David, everything is Jewish, everyone is Jewish.”

“Yes,” I nodded. Florida is currently an American Jewish paradise, as long as you don’t mind that everyone is armed and women can’t get reproductive healthcare.

“But your new mayor!” said the teller.

No one in Israel thinks there are two sides to having a mayor of New York who celebrated October 7th and wants to “globalize the intifada.” No one wants to talk about his ideas on rent control and government supermarkets, because we all know a Jew-hater when we see one, so who cares what other bullsh*t he spews?

Yes, I nod sadly. Our new mayor will make things worse. And things were already bad. Our synagogue can be locked down at the touch of a button. Our friends and neighbors hate us and support Hamas. Children are being radicalized against Jews. Nannies wear Palestinian keffiyehs ordered from Amazon.

Israelis want to know: How could this happen to the most Jewish city in America? As a real-life New York Jew, I make a great conduit for these questions. We sit in heavy silence. I have trauma, and everyone wants a piece. With Jews, I know the highlights to hit. I know that telling them my teenage daughter was excommunicated from her friend group for being a “baby killer” lights up a flashing neon sign in their brains that reads, “BLOOD LIBEL.” I know they’ll be horrified by the security situation at our synagogue, and that the story about our local Israeli restaurant being vandalized lights up the “KRISTALLNACHT” sign.

In Israel, I have this conversation at least once a day, depending on my schedule. All doctors’ appointments begin with a discussion of antisemitism in New York, segueing into a discussion of antisemitism in whatever country my doctor fled — most likely France but sometimes England or Russia. Tel Aviv is thick with French Jews who had to get out of Paris. At the beach on Shabbat, we hear more French than Hebrew.

When I ask what life was like for them in Paris, they describe the world that is coming for New York. The French refugees have been here long enough that their story of forced migration is like my car crash story. It still hurts a little — they always wince when talking about how Paris used to be — but they’ve condensed the story to protect themselves from feeling the full horror with every retelling.

I’m not there yet. I still need to tell people the whole story, even though I know it will be painful for them to hear. Maybe I want community — someone to hear my pain, acknowledge it and shake their heads at the pitiful foolishness of the world. How can this be happening again? In New York, the crown Jewel of modern Jewish life? How can it be?

But mostly, I want to warn people that I’ve seen the future of Jewish New York, and it doesn’t look promising. Thanks to my proximity to former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration, as well as my previous work in Democratic Party politics and campaigning, I knew a year ago that Jews and Israel would be on the ballot in the New York City mayoral race, though I didn’t then know what that would look like. Thanks to my book research into my own family’s story of forced migration, I know that when Jews are on the ballot, it’s time to get the f*ck out.

Jews were on the ballot in Russia when the nation briefly experimented with being more tolerant of Jews, followed by a violent backlash that forced millions of Russian Jews — and half of my family — to flee to New York. Jews held office in Germany and were thoroughly assimilated into German society before the nation turned on them. My Hungarian ancestors waited hundreds of years for Hungary to acknowledge them as full citizens. As soon as they were allowed, they enlisted in the Hungarian army to prove their patriotism. But Hungarians changed their minds about Jews. My Hungarian cousin Deso Roth was murdered at Auschwitz.

A national discussion about Jews never works out well for the Jews.

After the car crash, I harbored a horrible secret. You can do all the things you’re supposed to do in life — eat whole grains and buckle your seatbelt, show up for jury duty, sit through endless school talent shows, put your garbage out on the right days, separate the cans and compost — and someone still might come out of nowhere and kill you and your whole family. Sometimes, bad things happen for no reason, and we are powerless to stop them.

Today, I harbor another terrible secret, perhaps even a worse one: New York is over for Jews. We had a wonderful city and a glittering life once, but that time is gone.

Last June, before we left for Israel, I spent hours walking through the city, saying goodbye to the garment district, Washington Square Park, my first apartment in the East Village, and Lord & Taylor, which is inextricably linked in my mind to my grandmother.

On my walks, I saw that much of my New York was already gone. The garment district has mostly moved to New Jersey, where rent is cheaper. Washington Square Park has been colonized by the “Free Palestine” crowd and is therefore off-limits for Jews who don’t want to be traumatized. Lord & Taylor has gone out of business; the building where I spent much of my childhood and bought my bat mitzvah dress is being converted to apartments. My old East Village apartment building, once on the border of an artsy but slightly dangerous neighborhood, now sits across from a Le Pain Quotidien and a high-end marijuana store. I’m sure the rent is laughably unaffordable.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to stop telling the story of New York. I suspect the stories there will get worse, as Jews follow the same pattern they have in London and Paris. First, Jews will leave the public schools, forced into the modern ghettos of Jewish day school. There will be more violence. Synagogues will burn. Antisemitic graffiti will appear everywhere. Jews will be pushed out of civic life, forced to remove their last names from mailboxes, change their last names on delivery and car service apps, and take down mezuzah.

In my old Brooklyn neighborhood, Jews are already fleeing the local food co-op, which has been colonized by the boycott Israel movement. Assuming that New York follows the path of so many other once-glorious cities, when the Jews leave, things go from bad to worse. Vienna, Toledo, Berlin, Budapest, Cracow, Minsk, Warsaw — these cities too once had a thriving intellectual life, filled to bursting with creativity, art, and science. Today, it’s just a list of European cities whose best days are behind them.

In 1992, when I was a college student, my family and I visited the towns our ancestors once inhabited in Hungary. We left rocks on the gravestones of our great-great-great grandparents. The family lived in Hungary long enough to amass a lot of graves. Thanks to the work of one of my cousins, the stones are still intact, unlike most Jewish cemeteries in Hungary, where Hungarians dragged the expensive gravestones away to sell, or use as steps into their homes.

“It’s never been the same here since the Jews left,” a woman in Hungary told us, shaking her head. Such a shame, those Jews leaving like that. My cousin Imre later told us he’d known the woman before the war. Her husband was a Nazi.

When the Jews left, the color drained; even the vineyards look grey and sad. The Hungarian towns that were once filled with my family are now just depressed, soggy fields filled with ghosts. The spark of life, intellectual curiosity and creativity left with the Jews, never to return to Hungary.

This is what lies in store for New York. I am thankful I only have to observe it from a distance as my family and I build our new lives in Israel, but being separated by an ocean doesn’t make it any less painful. Watching your hometown choose a dark future, while the nation crumbles around it, is devastating. Losing people is one kind of pain. Losing my home — the city that raised me, taught me who I was, and showed me who I wanted to be — feels like someone pulled out a vital organ that made me a New Yorker and shoved it through a sieve.

For now, all I can do is tell my story. In this way, I am like any other survivor — wanting people to know the horror, to wince at the story, and to make sure it never happens again.

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