The Fall of New York

The city that once promised safe harbor has become the place where Jews are hunted in print and on the street.

I grew up right over the George Washington Bridge. Minutes from Manhattan. New York was the promised land where many of our grandparents, who fled Europe with nothing, found safety. Where Jews walked openly, proudly wore Stars of David, sent kids to Jewish Day School, and never looked over their shoulders.

That New York is dying. And watching it happen breaks my heart.

There is a moment, just before everything collapses, when the signs are everywhere, but we convince ourselves they mean nothing. A swastika on a synagogue is just paint. A blood libel in a national paper of record is just an opinion. A child with a strobe light thrown in his eyes is just a protest.

But the signs are not nothing. They are the writing on the wall.

And if you are a Jew in New York today, that writing is blinking in bright neon.

The first sign came in print.
On May 11, 2026, The New York Times, the so-called «newspaper of record», published an opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof claiming that Israel has trained dogs to sexually assault Palestinian prisoners.

Let me say that again.
Dogs. Trained. To rape.
This is not journalism. This is a medieval blood libel dressed up in the prose of a two-time Pulitzer winner. It is the same poison that has been spewed at Jews for centuries, the accusation that we are monsters, that we weaponize our bodies and our animals to commit the darkest acts imaginable.

The evidence? Anonymous testimonies. A single NGO whose founder called the October 7th attackers «heroic knights.» And a complete absence of verified fact.

James Crosby, a canine aggression expert affiliated with Harvard, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that it was «highly unlikely that anybody is going to be able to train a dog to successfully commit a sexual assault.»
But the Times didn’t let the facts get in the way.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now instructed his legal advisers to pursue legal action against the Times and Kristof. A lawsuit is the least of what they deserve.

But here is what keeps me up at night: The Times printed this because they knew they could get away with it. Because the old rules, the ones that said you don’t publish unsubstantiated atrocity propaganda about Jews, no longer apply.

The second sign came in the streets.
On the same week the Times was publishing its blood libel, Brooklyn erupted. Outside a synagogue in Midwood, anti-Israel demonstrators, including one waving a Hezbollah flag, clashed violently with Jewish protesters. A Jewish woman had her hair yanked from behind. A masked provocateur flashed a strobe light directly into the eyes of a young Orthodox boy.
Four people were arrested. The Justice Department is now investigating potential federal charges. But where was the NYPD when Jewish families were under assault? For many Jewish New Yorkers, the answer is nowhere to be found.

The third sign came in Queens.
Just days before the Brooklyn assault, swastikas were spray-painted on multiple synagogues and Jewish homes in Forest Hills and Rego Park.
One of the targets was a plaque honoring survivors of Kristallnacht, the «Night of Broken Glass,» when Nazi Germany showed the world what it planned to do to the Jews.

A swastika on a Kristallnacht memorial. If that is not a message, I don’t know what is.
The Rego Park Jewish Center was defaced with the word «Hitler» in red paint. One of the targeted sites houses a pre-K program, where young children arrived to find swastikas greeting them at the door.

And the fourth sign came from City Hall.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has called Israel an «apartheid regime,» issued statements condemning the swastikas. But his actions have spoken louder than his words.

His spokesperson has suggested that synagogues violate international law when they host pro-Israel events. Antisemitic incidents have jumped 182 percent between January 2025 and January 2026. Eighty-two percent of Jewish voters, including two-thirds who voted for Mamdani, have signaled concern over the rise of antisemitism in New York City.

The message sent to Jews is clear: You are a problem to be managed, not a community to be protected.

Here is what everyone needs to understand. New York is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Nearly 2 million Jews live in the tri-state area. We represent all walks of life: teachers and doctors, plumbers and lawyers, artists and athletes, grandparents and children.

And for generations, New York was our safe harbor. I remember what that felt like, growing up just across the bridge, knowing that the city was ours as much as anyone’s. That feeling is gone.

The signs are everywhere, in the op-eds, on the streets, in the graffiti on our synagogues, in the masks of the protesters who think a child’s pain is a political statement.

This is the writing on the wall.
I don’t say this to scare you. I say this because we have seen this movie before. We know how it ends when good people stay silent. We know what happens when the institutions that are supposed to protect us decide that we are acceptable collateral damage.

So here is what we do:
We fight. We speak. We document. We hold the New York Times accountable. We demand that the NYPD protect Jewish neighborhoods the same way it protects every other community. We vote. We organize. We refuse to be intimidated.

And we remember: The Jewish people have survived worse than Nicholas Kristof and masked protesters and swastikas on our synagogues. We have survived Pharaoh and Rome and the Inquisition and the pogroms and the Holocaust. We are still here.

And we will still be here long after the New York Times is a footnote in history. Am Yisrael Chai. The Jewish people live. And in New York City, we will fight to make sure we keep living…openly, proudly, unafraid.

• If this piece moved you, share it. Send it to your neighbors. Post it on your social media. And next time you walk down a street in New York, look around. See the writing on the wall. And refuse to look away.*