Zohran Mamdani’s win isn’t just New York’s loss — – Latest News
On Zohran Mamdani’s anointment as New York City mayor, we collect in sorrow to mark the passing of a once-great metropolis.
This temple of the American Dream and home to the most important Jewish neighborhood within the United States has exhaled its final breath.
To perceive the magnitude of this loss, one should first perceive New York City is inexorably tied to the historical past of Jews in America.
The first 23 Jewish refugees landed in New Amsterdam in 1654. By the early 1900s, the pushcarts on Orchard and Rivington streets birthed the garment industry, Yiddish theaters created vaudeville and the ingenuity of the scrappy Jewish youngsters from the tenements reworked America into a financial superpower.
From this crucible of ambition rose Jewish New Yorkers who cast America’s greatness.
Irving Berlin wrote “God Bless America” in a Bronx residence. Jonas Salk eradicated polio at NYU. Ralph Lauren and Estée Lauder outlined the American look, and Sandy Koufax redefined baseball.
The New York City formed by Jewish immigrants just elected intifada-supporting Zohran Mamdani. Javier Soriano
My personal New York story started when my mother and father, grandparents and I arrived Aug. 13, 1981, at JFK. (My sister was born three months later.)
Behind us: the antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the ghosts of the Holocaust. Ahead: a new life within the “Goldene medina” (“golden land” in Yiddish).
It was right here the town’s pulse turned my own. I dated my future spouse, a Barnard scholar, on the Upper West Side. We bought married and moved to Midwood. She took the F practice to Maimonides Hospital for her medical faculty rotations, and I schlepped to Battery Park on the Q for my first actual job. Our son was born at Mount Sinai.
My life turned completely interwoven with the material of Manhattan. I earned a grasp’s on the School of Visual Arts in Chelsea, labored at The New York Times across the nook from Times Square and chased my American dream as an advert man by way of the town’s neon arteries. My story, like New York’s, additionally carries scars: On Sept. 11, 2001, I misplaced a childhood pal when terrorists introduced down the Twin Towers.
The writer (within the center) poses along with his mother and father and grandparents on the eve of their departure from the Soviet Union to New York City in summer season 1981. Courtesy of Len Khodorkovsky
Despite triumphs and struggles, the New York Jewish neighborhood all the time managed to persevere. Then got here Oct. 7, 2023.
Incredibly, Hamas’ bloodbath of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 in Israel — the worst atrocity towards Jews because the Holocaust — didn’t elicit sympathy for the victims.
Instead, it unleashed a world tsunami of antisemitism that reached my beloved New York City.
At Columbia University, Jewish college students have been bodily blocked from attending lessons and barricaded behind “Zionists not welcome” indicators.
In Times Square, pro-Palestinian protesters shouted “Globalize the intifada” — a call for violence towards Jews — whereas throughout the town, gleeful haters tore down hostage posters of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, the red-haired child Hamas kidnapped and later murdered in captivity.
In Midtown, kosher eating places have been smashed, and in Brooklyn alone, 147 synagogues confronted bomb threats in a single 12 months.
Masked people disrupted a Columbia class and threw flyers like this one at college students. X/LishiBaker
This raging Jew-hatred discovered a handy arsonist in Zohran Mamdani.
When requested about Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group, the socialist assemblyman “didn’t really have an opinion.”
When pressed on his supporters’ requires an “intifada,” he refused to sentence it.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, non secular chief of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, mentioned, “Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” citing his surprising 2023 assertion on the Israel Defense Forces: “When the NYPD boot is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” More than 1,000 rabbis, cantors and yeshiva college students joined in her rebuke of the mayor-elect.
But Mamdani’s win isn’t just New York’s loss. It’s a five-alarm warning for America. Historically, the mental vacuum and ethical rot that triggered states to tolerate Jew-hatred signaled the start of these states’ finish.
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The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, then fell. Oppression towards Jews in historical Greece broke the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties. Rome’s destruction of the Second Temple foreshadowed the Roman Empire’s fall. Spain skilled a golden age during the Maimonides period, which ended with the 1492 expulsion. The purge of Jews during the Holocaust resulted in Germany’s national suicide. In the Soviet Union, the place I grew up — and earlier than it, czarist Russia — state-sponsored pogroms and institutionalized antisemitism led to the mass exodus of Jews and helped sow the seeds of each regimes’ collapse.
But we don’t need to look a lot additional than trendy Europe, the place antisemitic assaults have surged at an alarming fee, pushing the continent towards its breaking level.
Over and over, societies that focused their Jews invited their own decay and destruction.
America was speculated to be completely different, however the Jewish American neighborhood now finds itself focused concurrently by each the acute left and proper.
George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, RI, laid out America’s core tenet of non secular tolerance: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants — while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Many Jewish New Yorkers no longer really feel protected underneath their own vine and fig tree, and the Big Apple might no longer be saved. We at the moment are left to ponder: Can America?
Len Khodorkovsky is a former deputy assistant secretary of state.
