Fern Sidman is Senior News Editor at Jewish Voice.
For more than two years after the October 7, 2023 pogrom - the day Hamas terrorists slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, raped women, burned families alive, and dragged 251 hostages into Gaza - Jewish New Yorkers have lived in a city that suddenly felt foreign, hostile, and lawless. University campuses were transformed into encampments of intimidation. Street protests degenerated into rallies where “Globalize the Intifada," “From the River to the Sea," and even praise for Hamas were screamed into megaphones while Jewish students were chased, spat upon, and physically assaulted.
Synagogues required police barricades. Families hid Stars of David under their coats.
Throughout this metastasis of antisemitic intimidation, one voice was conspicuously muted: that of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Now, after years of silence as Jews were harassed, threatened, and beaten in the streets of the very state she was elected to protect, James has suddenly discovered her moral voice - not to confront pro-Hamas intimidation, but to pursue Betar US, a fiercely pro-Israel organization rooted in the Jabotinsky movement of revisionist Zionism, a movement whose members once smuggled Jewish refugees past British blockades and fought to rescue European Jews during the Holocaust.
The hypocrisy is not merely galling. It is grotesque.
Since October 7, pro-Hamas and anti-Israel mobs have engaged in an uninterrupted campaign of intimidation against Jewish New Yorkers. Protesters blocked entrances to Jewish neighborhoods, surrounded synagogues, shut down Israeli cultural events, and openly called for violence. Chants that any serious legal mind would recognize as prima facie evidence of bias-motivated harassment - “We don’t want no Zionists here," “Go back to Europe," “Death to the Jews" - were allowed to metastasize without consequence.
Not once did Letitia James announce a sweeping civil-rights investigation into the dozens of organizations that praised Hamas as “resistance." Not once did she characterize those actions as discrimination or racism. Not once did she convene press conferences about Jewish students being locked inside libraries or assaulted outside dormitories.
The standard was clear: when Jews are the victims, restraint; when Jews fight back, prosecution.
Betar is not a fly-by-night group born of internet radicalism. Its lineage traces back to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the visionary leader of Revisionist Zionism, whose followers organized Jewish self-defense units, smuggled Holocaust survivors into Mandatory Palestine, and laid the groundwork for the modern Israeli military tradition of never again being defenseless.
For decades, Betar activists have prided themselves on unapologetic Jewish self-assertion in the face of hostility. That reputation - fierce, unyielding, proudly Zionist - has now made them the perfect target for a politically motivated Attorney General eager to placate progressive activists while posturing as a defender of “civil rights."
James’ office now accuses Betar of harassment, intimidation, and bias-motivated conduct, imposing a settlement that forces the organization to wind down operations in New York under threat of a $50,000 penalty. The press release reads as though Betar is a criminal syndicate rather than a political advocacy group that dared to confront the same protest culture the Attorney General spent months ignoring.
The most damning aspect of this saga is not the allegations against Betar themselves - any organization must be held accountable if individual members engage in unlawful conduct (according to JPost, Betar says i never signed any confession of guilt, and denies all allegations of wrongdoing)- but the Attorney General’s breathtaking selectivity.
Since October 7, pro-Hamas demonstrators have physically assaulted Jewish students, protest leaders have publicly praised a genocidal terrorist organization, Jewish institutions have been vandalized, surrounded, and shut down and chants advocating ethnic cleansing of Jews have become normalized.
Yet Letitia James never once framed this as a civil-rights crisis demanding urgent enforcement of New York’s bias-crime statutes.
Instead, she waited - waited until the narrative shifted to allow her to strike at a group ideologically associated with Israel, Trump, and the political right. Only then did she unleash the full prosecutorial fury of her office.
This is not law enforcement. It is ideological theater.
For New Yorkers with functioning memories, this episode feels eerily familiar. Letitia James’ career has been punctuated by high-profile prosecutions that just so happen to align neatly with her political allegiances. Her crusade against President Donald Trump was not framed as a neutral application of law but as a moral mission - one she openly advertised on the campaign trail before ever reviewing evidence.
Now, the same template reappears.
Betar is not merely pro-Israel. It is unapologetically nationalist, proudly right-wing, and disdainful of the progressive orthodoxy that dominates elite institutions. That makes it, in James’ worldview, fair game.
The message could not be clearer: if you wave a Hamas flag, you are an activist. If you wave an Israeli one with too much conviction, you are an extremist.
Perhaps the most dangerous consequence of James’ action is the signal it sends to Jewish New Yorkers: self-assertion will be punished; submission will be rewarded.
The Betar settlement effectively criminalizes a posture of muscular Jewish advocacy while allowing pro-Hamas intimidation to flourish under the guise of “free expression." Jewish students are expected to endure harassment quietly, file reports that go nowhere, and trust institutions that have proven, repeatedly, that they will not protect them.
But when Jews organize, document threats, and confront intimidation - suddenly the machinery of the state roars to life.
Letitia James’ defenders will claim that this is about law, not politics. But no serious observer can ignore the asymmetry. Civil-rights law is not a buffet from which an Attorney General selects only the politically convenient cases. It is either universal or it is nothing.
By ignoring pro-Hamas intimidation while pursuing Betar, James has not upheld civil rights - she has redefined them to exclude Jews who refuse to be passive victims.
The tragedy is not merely institutional failure. It is moral betrayal.
New York is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel. Its Attorney General had a historic opportunity after October 7 to stand unequivocally against antisemitism in all its modern forms - left-wing, Islamist, academic, and street-level.
She chose instead to wait, calculate, and strike in only one direction.
The record will reflect that choice. And history, unlike press releases, does not forget.