Mamdani Can Skip the Israel Day Parade. He Can’t Erase Jewish New York. |
Today the mayor of New York will do something no mayor has done in the over sixty years of the Israel Day Parade. He will intentionally not attend. His predecessors, Ed Koch and David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, men who agreed on almost nothing else, each marched the same blocks of Fifth Avenue in solidarity with the Jews of New York. Zohran Mamdani will not.
Mayor Mamdani turns out for nearly all of the city’s other parades yet stays away only from this one. He is sending an unmistakable message: the Jews who support Israel, that overwhelming majority of American Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, are not part of his New York. The hurt and the anger of his deliberate absence are completely justified. But every hour spent dwelling on the mayor’s snub surrenders to him a power that is not his to hold.
Yes, this mayor can do a great deal to harm New York Jews. He can weaken their protections, look away while the mobs gather outside Jewish institutions, frighten their children, and try to make the Jewish........