Dovid Margolin
WSJ, July 3, 2025
“It is ironic that many of the young transplants to New York who voted for Mr. Mamdani live in such places as Crown Heights, unaware that had it not been for increased policing, government reforms they despise, and, most important, the locals who persisted during the city’s darkest days, they wouldn’t have dared enter the neighborhoods they now colonize.”
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary has scared many people. The reasons are varied and warranted, from the eye-watering tax hikes he proposes on businesses to his old commitments to defund the police. Mr. Mamdani’s defense of violent slogans such as “globalize the intifada” doesn’t help.
In recent days many Jews have asked themselves: Where to now? My sister sent me house listings in Maryland, and a friend made the case for Florida. “We won in Tehran and lost in New York,” I heard someone say.
Jews in particular are nervous because they know. Whether from Europe or North Africa, they know what it means to have to flee. They know what it looks like in America, too, when their homes are no longer safe and there is no one to call for help.
They know about the consequences of grand schemes of social engineering. They know what drugs and homelessness do to streets, what government interference does to blocks. They know the human costs of neutering law enforcement, and the antisemitic violence and murder that emerges.
Jews know what it means to see neighborhoods they called home for decades suddenly disintegrate. Go to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville or to the Bronx, to urban neighborhoods from Boston to Chicago, and you can still see the ruins of grand old synagogues and Jewish community centers…..SOURCE