The city that former Carolina Israelite editor Harry Golden described in his 1972 book The Greatest Jewish City in the World, celebrating New York City as the world’s preeminent Jewish city, died with the election of Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor.
To be sure, nothing specific will change for Jews on the day Mamdani takes office. It is unsafe for some Jews to walk the streets of New York today, and it will continue to be unsafe after his inauguration. But normal daily life will continue, people will still go to work, still maintain their lives as Jewishly as they wish, have family get-togethers and frequent their preferred synagogues as before.
However, the flavor of New York as a Jewish city will be gone.
I grew up in the borough of the Bronx during my first 20 years of life, from 1940-1960, and it was like living in a shtetl. In that place at that time, there were more than 600,000 Jews (37% of the population), with the others being predominantly Catholic of either Italian or Irish origin. The Catholics went to their own schools, so the public schools, as they were called, were 90%-95% Jewish. So much so, that I even learned popular Yiddish songs in their original language in PS 11, the public school that served my Highbridge neighborhood.
High School was no different. The Bronx High School of Science, where I studied, while it drew students from the entire city, was also about 80% Jewish, as were most of its faculty and its founding principal. As a matter of fact, the largest cohort of the school’s alumni living abroad resides here in Israel. In effect, the street was Jewish, with a plethora of kosher delis, synagogues, and cultural organizations catering to the population of the times.
That New York has been gone for many years, as large segments of the Jewish population moved to the suburbs as they became wealthier. Still, other sections of the city grew, and areas such as Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Borough Park welcomed new Jewish growth, as did areas of the Bronx such as Riverdale and Pelham Parkway.
Nevertheless, the Jewishness of the city, the feeling of people living there that the city was incredibly hospitable to Jews and Jewish life, remained and, in many respects, even grew. There is no city in the US today with more kosher restaurants, more yeshivot, more Jewish cultural institutions than what one will find in New York.
Yet, now there will be a mayor who, in addition to being an observant Muslim, holds views that are anathema to a large portion of the Jewish community, albeit a significant number did vote for him, presumably identifying with his plans to address the social and economic ills of American society.
For example, Mamdani is an open and long-term supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which lobbies for an economic and cultural boycott of Israel. He has said, “My support for BDS is consistent with the core of my politics, which is nonviolence. And I think that it is a legitimate movement when you are seeking to find compliance with international law.”
While a student at Bowdoin College, where he co-founded the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, Mamdani agreed with the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli academic institutions in 2014.
He has said on more than one occasion that if Prime Minister Netanyahu were to come to New York City, he would have him arrested, given the decisions handed down by the International Court of Justice.
He regularly describes Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas as genocide and chooses to describe Israel as an apartheid state, both of which we reject.
The electorate has spoken
NEVERTHELESS, THE electorate has spoken, and Mamdani will take office on January 1, as the law dictates. Just over eight months later, on September 11, he will preside over the ceremonies marking the 25th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that caused the deaths of 2,977 innocent Americans at the hands of crazed Muslim terrorists.
That event will either demonstrate how far New York has progressed, intellectually and emotionally, in coming to terms with the events of September 11, or mark one more step in the slow but often clear intent of the Muslim world to exert its influence over all of us.
Let us hope it is the former and not the latter. Yet either way, Jewish New York died on November 4.
The writer, a New York native, is an international business development consultant, founder and chairman of the American State Offices Association, a former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel, and a past chairman of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.