New York’s Jews fear a Mamdani win Antisemitism is on the rise

For generations, the Harmonie Club has served as a haven for New York’s Jewish elites. Founded in 1852, the club has since 1905 occupied an elegant eight-story building at 4 East 60th Street, a townhouse with lovely painted ceilings and a handsome Victorian facade designed by Stanford White. The names of its most illustrious members — the Bloomingdales, the Guggenheims, Alfred Ochs, founder of the New York Times Company — are intimately connected with the history and character of New York. Whatever persecution Jewish people faced elsewhere in the world, here was a place they could thrive.

Just recently, however, its members have been feeling considerably less secure. Zohran Mamdani — a socialist, a Muslim and a fierce critic of Israel — is the city’s likely next mayor. His emergence is eliciting palpable concern among the club’s members. “We are being erased in our own city,” says Sam Abrams, club member and prominent political scientist. At the Harmonie, as in various less illustrious Jewish institutions, the talk is of rising antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and an increased feeling that the city is turning against its Jewish communities. Elliot Cosgrove, rabbi at the generally liberal Park Avenue synagogue on the Upper East Side, sees Mamdani as a lethal threat. “If there’s a celebration of Israel and 10,000 people show up, will they be safe under Mamdani?”

New York’s Jews have suffered periods of exclusion, as they have elsewhere. Indeed, that’s one reason why the Harmonie was founded in the first place: Jews were largely unwelcome at the immaculately WASPish Union Club. But never before has New York had a mayor who is so apparently anti-Zionist; who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”; who has defended the phrase “Globalise the Intifada”; and who has appeared to celebrate terrorists and their supporters. All this in a city that, for most of the 20th century, hosted the largest Jewish community in world history.

Not that New York has always been welcoming to Jews. The first to arrive came in 1654, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. They were a cause of consternation for Dutch colonial administrator of the time, Peter Stuyvesant, but the refugees had enough connections in Holland to force him into allowing them to stay. The first synagogue rose in 1682. The American Revolution brought full citizenship, while through the 19th century, New York welcomed thousands of largely German-speaking Jews: it’s no accident that the Harmonie was originally called Gesellschaft Harmonie. By the American Civil War, the city was home to 150,000 Jews, yet the largest influx came around 1900, when over two million Jewish migrants, including my own grandparents, arrived from Eastern Europe.

Having travelled the filth and stench of steerage class, these immigrants did much to shape the 20th-century city. It is frankly hard to imagine a successful, prosperous New York without Jews — just as it is hard to imagine New York culture without Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow; George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein; Barbra Streisand and Stephen Sondheim; Stan Lee and Diane Arbus; Woody Allen and Mel Brooks; the Beastie Boys and Lou Reed; Fran Leibovitz and Lena Dunham. Jews are critical players in the philanthropic structures of the city, from the Metropolitan Opera to the Philharmonic to the New York Historical Society near Central Park. They have been prominent among the big donors to the city’s great universities, notably NYU and Columbia.

It was New York’s Jews who, for better or worse, founded Goldman Sachs and the Lehman Brothers, and the modern mafia too. “In New York,” suggests Yeshiva University historian Jeffrey Gurock, “you could feel like the whole world was Jewish.” Even on the streets, the Jewish heritage persists: besides selling falafel and kebabs, the ubiquitous halal vendors also hawk knishes and kosher hot dogs. The essayist Milton Klonsky was only half joking when he called the Big Apple the “Ghetto of Eden”.

But New York’s Jewish character has been waning for decades. In 1950, the city was home to 40% of America’s Jews. Now, it represents well less than 15%. When I was growing up in the late Fifties, New York had some two million Jewish inhabitants; today the population is slightly less than half that. Much of that population headed to the suburbs through the Sixties and Seventies, an era of marked urban decline in New York as elsewhere.

The million or so Jews who remain in New York are still a largely affluent community. Yet they inhabit a city with new cultural influences, from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia — and the Middle East. The city’s Muslim population has grown to roughly 750,000, and may soon match or exceed the Jewish population. All the while, New York’s institutions have also become less culturally Jewish. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have poured money into Manhattan’s universities, and its campuses have become flashpoints of anti-Zionism. The current holder of the Herbert Lehman chair at Columbia University, established in memory of the financier, a dedicated Zionist who served New York as both senator and governor, is none other than Mahmood Mamdani: Zohran’s virulently anti-Zionist father.

Nonetheless, New York’s large Muslim population is not Mamdani’s most critical constituency. His remarkable rise has come by appealing to well-educated, but often moderately paid, professionals. Like everyone else, New York’s Jewish middle classes find the city too expensive. Many continue to leave, particularly young families. The ones who remain are hemmed in by costs that reduce their quality of life on a daily basis. There remains a large group of young people, usually long-term renters, often single and/or childless, mostly concentrated in progressive enclaves, who want to stay — but look to Mamdani to help curb rising housing, food and transport costs.

Mamdani’s promise to make New York more affordable appears to cut across any concerns voters might have about his anti-Zionism — some polls have him winning a third of the Jewish vote, though more recent surveys are less enthusiastic. Whatever the exact numbers, they imply a new version of the class divide that has long separated New York’s Jewish populations. “There’s more than one Jewish New York,” says Rabbi Cosgrove. “Things look different on the Upper East Side than in parts of Brooklyn or Washington Heights.” Many families are divided, he laments. It’s not just progressive activists who are backing Mamdani but in many cases the children of the sorts of moneyed families who might frequent the Harmonie Club.

Indeed, New York’s Jews are turning on each other. The most staunch defenders of Israel accuse Mamdani’s Jewish supporters of being, like the old Jewish Bolsheviks, “Jews in Name Only” — choosing progressive bona fides over the deepest traditions of the tribe. For many of Mamdani’s champions, it suffices to call pro-Israelis “Zionists”, which many consider slur enough.

The frightening prospect for New York Jews is that antisemitism will become more commonplace, as it increasingly appears to be in Europe, reinforcing the notion that, as the Jewish political consultant Hank Sheinkopf put it, “every galut (place of exile) ends up in tragedy.” In Europe, demography favours a growing and far larger Muslim population, as well as their allies in established progressive parties.

As Muslim power, awkwardly allied with the secular Left, grows, an increasing number of Jews feel they can no longer count on protection from what were once considered friendly states. Some American Jews have noted the vicious antisemitic murders in Manchester — are they justified as part of the “global intifada”? — and conclude they can no longer count on the British sense of fair play. In the violence that accompanied the football match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam last year, Dutch police were notably lax in protecting both visiting football fans and Amsterdam’s Jewish residents. Even Amsterdam’s progressive, anti-Israel Green mayor, Femke Halsema, was forced to admit that the attacks resembled Nazi pogroms.

Rather than restrict openly antisemitic acts, then, it’s Jews who are now being restricted: witness the ban on Israeli soccer fans being enforced in Birmingham. When the keffiyeh crowd is out in force, it’s a “no-go zone” for British Jews. Many New York Jews worry this is their future too, with community leaders fearing that Mamdani’s election will accelerate Jewish flight from the city: both to surrounding suburbs and further afield. Florida remains one popular option here. But as Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami demographer explains, Jews are also heading to cities as varied as Dallas, Raleigh, Austin, Atlanta and Las Vegas. All these places now have among the fast-growing Jewish communities in the nation.

Of course, this will be a slow process. New York is not about to lose its Jewish character overnight. Nor will the city’s economy collapse, at least immediately, if Mamdani is elected. Life goes on. Surging tourism and the Wall Street boom keep Manhattan as frenetic as ever.

But, for all this, the city has clearly changed, its inequalities all too evident in an economy where almost all job growth is in low-wage sectors like tourism. Indeed, low wages and high rents have proved a boon to Mamdani, whose gaggle of proposed rent freezes, higher minimum wages and free childcare offer succour to the over-extended. New York also continues to attract the largest pool of the world’s ultra-rich, but Gothamites typically spend over 40% of their incomes on rent — the highest proportion of any large US city.

Yet if that explains the popularity of Mamdani’s economic positions, his radical political views may help explain why a growing number of American Jews are taking their religion more seriously. These trends favour more conservative branches of the faith, with nearly two thirds of New York Jewish children now raised Orthodox. Chabad, the most prominent Jewish traditionalist movement, and based out of a handsome neo-gothic house in Brooklyn, is ubiquitous on campuses and storefronts. Rabbi Mottie Seligson, Chabad’s public relations officer, points out that while temples are closing in much of the city, his movement continues to build new synagogues right across the five boroughs. For those younger Jews who eschew Mamdani’s anti-Zionism, Seligson adds that Friday night Shabbat attracts over 1,000 participants.

Altogether, Seligson argues that attachment to Judaism must replace the “religion of the Ivy League”. Young Jews, if they embrace their identity, will increasingly send their kids to Jewish schools and organise such things as local volunteer patrols: which may yet become necessary given many police officers are threatening to quit should Mamdani win.

As for the traditionally liberal Jewish establishment, frequenting spots like the Harmonie Club? It will take more than one term of anti-Zionist radicalism to overcome centuries of achievement. The great Jewish real estate families — the Zeckendorf, Rudin and Tishman — have their vast fortunes invested in the city. For many Jewish New Yorkers, there is nothing like Gotham, not just for making money but living a fully-rounded life.

In the near term, meanwhile, New York’s Jews may also turn to their own considerable resources, riding out the storm until reality impinges on Mamdani’s socialist dreams. “When you feel under attack, and you feel the city will no longer protect you, you need a sanctuary,” says Sam Abrams. He’s presumably thinking of places like the Harmonie — outposts of Jewish life over almost two centuries of upheaval, and which will surely endure long after Mamdani leaves the scene.

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