New York City, which has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel, is about to become the most unsafe city in America for Jews, all thanks to its likely mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and the extreme anti-Zionist movement he represents.
The situation in New York is already very bad. According to recently published statistics from the NYPD, antisemitic hate crimes already accounted for more than half of all hate crimes in the city in the first half of 2025. In all, 170 antisemitic hate crimes were recorded from January-June 2025 out of a total of 300 incidents. Anti-black hate crimes were a distant second at 26 recorded hate crimes. Anti-Muslim hate crimes were the fourth-most common at just 15, less than one-tenth the number of hate crimes committed against Jews. So much for islamophobia.
This, while New York still has a mayor who supports Israel and takes antisemitism seriously. Imagine what will happen once the city’s leader supports the same evil causes as those who commit these crimes.
Perhaps we do not have to imagine. Look at recent reports from Canada, such as Tuesday’s report on hate crimes in 2024 by Statistics Canada. According to Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs CEO Noah Shack, the figures show that Jews are 25 times more likely to be the victims of hate crimes than other Canadians. Canada's antisemtism envoy has since stepped down.
Less than two weeks ago, the Canadian Special Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism released a report detailing the results of a federally commissioned survey on Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools, and the results were shocking. The level of dehumanization Jewish children are being subject to, ostensibly in the name of “anti-Zionism,” is approaching Nazi levels. In one of the most shocking incidents, a teacher told a six-year-old girl she was “half-human” because one of her parents is Jewish.
I suppose that isn’t quite as bad as the Nazis, since Hitler would say the child was completely inhuman if just one of her grandparents was Jewish. When anyone, children or adults, is dehumanized to this extent, violence inevitably follows. Canada has seen multiple incidents in which Jewish schools were shot at since October 7.
Mamdani is a defender of the slogan, “Globalize the Intifada,” a rallying cry for the murder of Jews wherever they may be. It is a call to stab Jews on the street, commit shootings at synagogues, blow up Jewish restaurants, and commit mass murder. It is the cause of the wannabe Hitlers who called for Hamas to murder Jewish students at Columbia University and of the killers who shot dead a young couple at a Jewish museum in Washington, DC and burned an elderly Jewish woman to death in Boulder, Colorado.
The man who will likely run New York supports this murderous cause. Should he win, and it would take a miracle for him to lose at this point since his rivals cannot seem to get together to support just one candidate, the mayor of New York City will represent Hamas and its genocidal ambitions over his Jewish constituents.
-The well-being of the jihadist or Marxist activist who comes from out of town solely to harass or commit violence against Jews will be more important to his government than the well-being of their Jewish victims.
-The dehumanization of Jews and Jewish children will be entrenched in City Hall for four years, and violence will follow.
-Synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish restaurants, and Jews in general will be in far greater danger when the mayor and his administration agree with those who seek to cause Jews harm.
There is no escaping that reality.
At this stage in history, Western anti-Zionism poses a much bigger threat to Jews outside of Israel than it does to the State of Israel, which can act to protect itself regardless of world opinion. Western anti-Zionists will attack Israelis who visit their countries whenever they get the opportunity, but they are more than happy to take their hatred out on local Jews. Anti-Zionism has been used to justify violence against Jews in many major Western cities and the dehumanization of Jewish children in public schools.
Anti-Zionism always leads to the downplaying of the Holocaust, as happened in Virginia’s Nysmith School, where students were taught to view Hitler as a “strong leader” and terrorise their Jewish peers as the direct result of the lessons they were taught. Anti-Israel protests frequently feature screaming at Jews that Hitler should have killed them all.
Mamdani himself famously refused to support a resolution condemning the Holocaust, just as his reaction to the worst massacre committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust was to condemn Israel and Netanyahu rather than Hamas.
I have criticized US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer multiple times before, but it is impossible to discuss Mamdani without mentioning Schumer’s latest betrayal of all American Jews. Schumer, who is Jewish and fatuously likes to call himself a “shomer,” a guardian, based on the pronunciation of his last name, is once again failing in his duty to protect his constituents. He still has not condemned Mamdani’s involvement in the murderous anti-Zionist cause. Instead, he actually praised Mamdani when the latter won the Democratic mayoral primaries.
Schumer, more than anyone, should be sounding the alarm about the danger Mamdani poses to his own community. He should be attempting to mitigate the threat an anti-Zionist government in New York City represents to all Jews who aren’t extreme Marxists. He should be leading the vanguard against the Democratic Party’s embrace of an ideology that seeks to murder Jews. Instead, Schumer seems to be actively trying to prove President Trump right when the President calls him a “Palestinian.” Maybe he does not have the power to prevent the harm Mamdani will cause, but he has a duty to at least try, and he is not lifting a finger to do so.
The anti-Zionism Zohran Mamdani represents must be defeated, not for Israel’s sake, but for the sake of every Jew who does not live in Israel. It is an evil that must be destroyed if Jews are to ever be safe again.
Gary Willigis a veteraan member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.