New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, faces a chilling reality: NYPD data shows antisemitic hate crimes account for over 50% of all hate incidents, fueling fears among Jewish residents as mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, a staunch anti-Zionist, gains momentum amidst alarming reports of Jew-hatred, even “dehumanization approaching Nazi levels,” from Canada’s schools.
New York City, a global epicenter of Jewish life, is teetering on the edge of a perceived precipice, with growing alarm that it could soon become the most unsafe city in America for its Jewish residents. This escalating fear is tightly linked to the likely ascension of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the extreme anti-Zionist movement he champions.
The current situation is already dire. According to recently published statistics from the NYPD, the first half of 2025 saw a shocking surge in antisemitic hate crimes. Out of a total of 300 hate incidents recorded from January to June 2025, a staggering 170 were antisemitic, meaning Jewish individuals were the targets in more than half (56.7%) of all hate crimes in the city. To put this in perspective, anti-black hate crimes, a distant second, accounted for just 26 recorded incidents, while anti-Muslim hate crimes were the fourth-most common at only 15 incidents, less than one-tenth the number of crimes committed against Jews. These figures highlight a disproportionate targeting of the Jewish community.
This alarming trend is occurring while New York still has a mayor who has publicly supported Israel and taken antisemitism seriously. Critics now question what will happen if the city’s leadership aligns with ideologies perceived to enable such crimes. Parallels are being drawn to recent reports from Canada, which has seen its own alarming rise in antisemitism. A Tuesday report on 2024 hate crimes by Statistics Canada indicated that Jews are 25 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than other Canadians, according to Noah Shack, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). The Canadian antisemitism envoy has since stepped down, underscoring the severity of the crisis.
Adding to the chilling narrative are the findings from a federally commissioned survey on antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, released less than two weeks ago by the Canadian Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. The report detailed shocking levels of dehumanization directed at Jewish children, often under the guise of “anti-Zionism,” with some incidents described as “approaching Nazi levels.” In one particularly harrowing account, a teacher allegedly told a six-year-old Jewish girl she was “half-human” because one of her parents is Jewish. While not as extreme as Nazi ideology which would deem such a child “completely inhuman,” the comparison highlights the perceived severity of the rhetoric. This dehumanization, critics argue, inevitably paves the way for violence, with Canada already experiencing multiple incidents of Jewish schools being shot at since October 7.
Zohran Mamdani has faced intense scrutiny for defending the slogan, “Globalize the Intifada,” a phrase widely interpreted as a call for violence against Jews globally, encompassing acts from stabbings and shootings to bombings and mass murder. This slogan is associated by critics with the mindset of those who allegedly called for violence against Jewish students at Columbia University and the perpetrators of deadly attacks at a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., and the murder of an elderly Jewish woman in Boulder, Colorado.
Concerns are mounting that if Mamdani, who is the presumptive Democratic mayoral candidate, wins the election – a scenario considered highly probable given the current political landscape – the city’s leadership could implicitly or explicitly endorse ideologies that endanger its Jewish constituents. Critics argue that a Mamdani administration would prioritize activists perceived to harass or commit violence against Jews over the safety of Jewish victims, entrenching the dehumanization of Jewish adults and children in City Hall, and placing synagogues, Jewish schools, restaurants, and the Jewish community at large in significantly greater peril.
The argument is made that Western anti-Zionism now poses a more immediate threat to Jews outside of Israel than to the State of Israel itself, as anti-Zionists are perceived to target local Jewish communities and individuals when opportunities arise. This ideology, it is claimed, has been used to justify violence against Jews in major Western cities and the dehumanization of Jewish children in public schools.
The article also criticizes US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jewish politician, for not condemning Mamdani’s stance. Despite Schumer’s self-proclaimed role as a “shomer” (guardian), he reportedly praised Mamdani after his primary win, rather than sounding the alarm about the perceived threat to the Jewish community. The piece concludes that the anti-Zionist ideology represented by Zohran Mamdani must be defeated for the safety of Jews worldwide, asserting that it is “an evil that must be destroyed if Jews are to ever be safe again.”New York City, a global epicenter of Jewish life, is teetering on the edge of a perceived precipice, with growing alarm that it could soon become the most unsafe city in America for its Jewish residents. This escalating fear is tightly linked to the likely ascension of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, and the extreme anti-Zionist movement he champions.
The current situation is already dire. According to recently published statistics from the NYPD, the first half of 2025 saw a shocking surge in antisemitic hate crimes. Out of a total of 300 hate incidents recorded from January to June 2025, a staggering 170 were antisemitic, meaning Jewish individuals were the targets in more than half (56.7%) of all hate crimes in the city. To put this in perspective, anti-black hate crimes, a distant second, accounted for just 26 recorded incidents, while anti-Muslim hate crimes were the fourth-most common at only 15 incidents, less than one-tenth the number of crimes committed against Jews. These figures highlight a disproportionate targeting of the Jewish community.
This alarming trend is occurring while New York still has a mayor who has publicly supported Israel and taken antisemitism seriously. Critics now question what will happen if the city’s leadership aligns with ideologies perceived to enable such crimes. Parallels are being drawn to recent reports from Canada, which has seen its own alarming rise in antisemitism. A Tuesday report on 2024 hate crimes by Statistics Canada indicated that Jews are 25 times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than other Canadians, according to Noah Shack, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA). The Canadian antisemitism envoy has since stepped down, underscoring the severity of the crisis.
Adding to the chilling narrative are the findings from a federally commissioned survey on antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, released less than two weeks ago by the Canadian Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism. The report detailed shocking levels of dehumanization directed at Jewish children, often under the guise of “anti-Zionism,” with some incidents described as “approaching Nazi levels.” In one particularly harrowing account, a teacher allegedly told a six-year-old Jewish girl she was “half-human” because one of her parents is Jewish. While not as extreme as Nazi ideology which would deem such a child “completely inhuman,” the comparison highlights the perceived severity of the rhetoric. This dehumanization, critics argue, inevitably paves the way for violence, with Canada already experiencing multiple incidents of Jewish schools being shot at since October 7.
Zohran Mamdani has faced intense scrutiny for defending the slogan, “Globalize the Intifada,” a phrase widely interpreted as a call for violence against Jews globally, encompassing acts from stabbings and shootings to bombings and mass murder. This slogan is associated by critics with the mindset of those who allegedly called for violence against Jewish students at Columbia University and the perpetrators of deadly attacks at a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., and the murder of an elderly Jewish woman in Boulder, Colorado.
Concerns are mounting that if Mamdani, who is the presumptive Democratic mayoral candidate, wins the election – a scenario considered highly probable given the current political landscape – the city’s leadership could implicitly or explicitly endorse ideologies that endanger its Jewish constituents. Critics argue that a Mamdani administration would prioritize activists perceived to harass or commit violence against Jews over the safety of Jewish victims, entrenching the dehumanization of Jewish adults and children in City Hall, and placing synagogues, Jewish schools, restaurants, and the Jewish community at large in significantly greater peril.
The argument is made that Western anti-Zionism now poses a more immediate threat to Jews outside of Israel than to the State of Israel itself, as anti-Zionists are perceived to target local Jewish communities and individuals when opportunities arise. This ideology, it is claimed, has been used to justify violence against Jews in major Western cities and the dehumanization of Jewish children in public schools.
The article also criticizes US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jewish politician, for not condemning Mamdani’s stance. Despite Schumer’s self-proclaimed role as a “shomer” (guardian), he reportedly praised Mamdani after his primary win, rather than sounding the alarm about the perceived threat to the Jewish community. The piece concludes that the anti-Zionist ideology represented by Zohran Mamdani must be defeated for the safety of Jews worldwide, asserting that it is “an evil that must be destroyed if Jews are to ever be safe again.”
