Duvi Honig is Founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce
New York’s Jewish community spent the past two weeks furious that Zohran Mamdani wouldn’t march in Sunday’s Israel Day parade.
I want to make the opposite case, and I want to make it clearly: good.
We didn’t want him there. The mistake was never his absence. The mistake was that we ever invited a man who calls Israel’s existential war a “genocide" to march alongside us in the first place.
Let’s start with what too many of us forget. Marching in this parade is not a right. It is a privilege. Mamdani became the first New York City mayor to skip the parade since it was founded in 1964, and the hand-wringing treats that streak as if every mayor is owed a spot. They are not. A place on Fifth Avenue celebrating the Jewish state is an honor extended to friends of that state. It is something you earn by standing with us, not something we hand out to anyone holding the title of mayor.
So why did so many of us spend the week pleading with Mamdani to show up?
We should never have put the invitation on the table to begin with.
Picture the alternative we were asking for. Mamdani on Fifth Avenue, waving at tens of thousands of Zionists under a banner that read “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists" - a man whose office, just two weeks earlier, released a video commemorating the Nakba, mourning the founding of the very state the parade exists to celebrate.
That would not have been a victory. It would have been a desecration. We would have handed our proudest day to a politician who’d use it as a photo-op while believing every word he has ever said against Israel.
I am hardly alone in seeing this. Rabbi Marc Schneier of the Hampton Synagogue said it to Mamdani’s face: no one wants him at the parade anyway, we don’t want his rhetoric and his diatribes to ruin our proud day. Republican Bruce Blakeman put it even more bluntly, saying we don’t want a wolf in sheep’s clothing marching in our parade.
They are right. We cannot demand his presence one moment and tell him he is unwelcome the next. Pick one. I will pick the honest one.
Because a politician marching for a cause he openly despises is a lie. It is the empty gesture politicians specialize in - show up, wave, get the picture, change nothing. We would have gained nothing except the sour spectacle of watching him pretend. He does not stand with us, and we should not want him faking that he does. The privilege of marching belongs to those who actually believe in what we are marching for.
And here is what actually happened while we were busy being outraged about an empty spot on the route. The parade went on, and it was magnificent. Organizers estimated more than 40,000 marchers, a record turnout, in what was billed as the world’s largest show of support for Israel. It was led by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish, who also ran the security operation, andwas joined by Governor Kathy Hochul, state Attorney General Letitia James, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, and a wall of other elected officials, with an unprecedented Israeli presence of some 26 officials.
That is the story. Not the man who stayed home, but the tens of thousands who showed up. Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said it plainly: while the mayor chose to turn his back on tens of thousands of Jews and supporters of Israel, the public came in droves to prove that the connection to Israel is stronger than any political campaign. Our presence on Fifth Avenue never depended on the approval of one politician. Sunday proved it.
Even the security worked, and worked under Mamdani’s own administration. He stood beside Tisch days earlier to outline what the NYPD called its most extensive security plan ever for the march, and insisted his absence would not affect the city’s responsibility to keep participants safe. The parade went off peacefully. So spare me the idea that his skipping it endangered anyone.
Here is where we are getting it all wrong. We poured our energy into the symbolism of an empty spot on a parade route while the fights that actually matter sat right in front of us. Consider what happened on that very stage Sunday. Governor Hochul signed a statewide law creating a 50-foot security buffer zone around houses of worship, a measure more expansive than the city-level bill that was watered down after Mamdani raised concerns and passed without his signature.
Read that again.
The protection our community needed came from Albany, not from City Hall, and it came precisely because the state stepped in where the mayor would not.
That is the real scoreboard. A signed law that guards our synagogues is worth more than a thousand mayors marching in a thousand parades. A watered-down bill is the actual injury. The empty spot on Fifth Avenue is not.
So if we want to hold this mayor accountable, let us hold him accountable for what he does in office, not for declining an invitation he should never have received. We have to stop chasing the approval of people who stand against Israel, stop treating their attendance as a prize, and stop extending the privilege of our proudest day to those who would dishonor it.
Our parade did not need Zohran Mamdani. Our community does not need his blessing. We marched, we were proud, we were strong, and we did it on our own terms, in record numbers, without him.
The mistake was never that he stayed away. The mistake was inviting him in. Let us stop courting those who are against us, and start fighting the battles that actually protect us.