The recent violent disruption of Shabbat services at Central Synagogue was not an isolated incident—it was the visible culmination of an escalating environment of intimidation. Across New York City, Jewish residents face verbal attacks, harassment, and overt discrimination on public transit, university campuses, K–12 schools, sidewalks, and workplaces. This crisis is not confined to houses of worship; it compromises the daily safety and fundamental rights of individual New Yorkers in every public space.
To Mayor Zohran Mamdani:
Leadership is measured by the boundaries you set and the atmosphere you cultivate. Your persistent demonization of Israel dehumanizes the vast majority of New Yorkers who support Israel and its right to exist and defend itself. In practice, extremist actors treat anti-Israel rhetoric as open permission to target Jewish individuals and institutions across the five boroughs—and beyond.
To govern New York City credibly, you must adhere to basic standards of executive responsibility:
- End the weaponization of City Hall against Israel: Your role is the civic governance and safety of New York City, not using municipal power to wage political campaigns against Israel that directly endanger your own constituents.
- Cease excusing violent slogans: Stop offering semantic rationalizations for rhetoric such as “globalize the intifada.” When rhetoric incites hostility against a community, leadership must call it what it is—anti-Semitism—without caveat.
- Demand accountability within your political and social orbit: Draw an unequivocal line against individuals and political allies who traffic in anti-Jewish hostility or justify harassment under the banner of political activism.
Both city and state leadership will be judged by whether you dismantle the permission structures of hate before legitimized hostility turns into further violence.
To Governor Kathy Hochul:
Passivity from the state executive is unacceptable. Polite disagreements or generic statements of concern are far beneath a person entrusted with your responsibilities.
As governor, you are the ultimate guarantor of civil rights and public safety in New York State. You must explicitly denounce Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric, publicly reprimand his administration for prioritizing anti-Israel hostility to the obvious and documentable cost of municipal safety, and enforce state-level oversight to ensure Jewish citizens and all New Yorkers are protected against pervasive intimidation.
Statements issued after an altercation occurs will not protect anyone—in fact, they are an inducement, because criminals are never cowed by scoldings. Both city and state leadership will be judged by whether you dismantle the permission structures of hate before legitimized hostility turns into further violence.
Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is documented to have received funding from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), exposed in federal court in 2008 for having laundered money for Hamas, the terrorist organization which committed the massacre of October 7, 2023. CAIR is an apparatus of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global syndicate that has supported Sunni Islamic terrorism worldwide since its founding in 1928 by Nazi enthusiast Hassan al-Banna. It should also interest the state—indeed federal—Department of Justice that the Brotherhood’s many terrorist offshoots include al-Qaeda, which carried out the massacres of 9/11. This is precisely why the mayor has been repeatedly told by the victims’ families not to attend this year’s commemoration.
Passivity from the state executive is unacceptable.
To the public:
Europe has come to painfully and belatedly recognize that empty, perfunctory gestures of sympathy only lead to the making of more room to kill Jews. Moral leadership demands more of our leaders and its citizens, who, throughout history, have possessed all the power, but accepted bystander status instead.
America must not make the same mistakes as Europe, which welcomed in millions of unvetted migrants from the most anti-Western of cultures because of a belief that past colonialism must be punished by a new colonialism. These people neither assimilated into European culture, nor agree with Europe’s supposed ethic of “tolerance.” Today, far fewer Jews remain in Europe than in 1945.
White Rose Magazine, named after Sophie and Hans Scholl’s anti-Nazi student resistance group, is obliged to respond in kind to any instance of politics being organized against the Jews and Western values. Given that most have forgotten all the reasons to do so, we choose to remember why such trends do not end with the Jews. With five churches torched in the city since Mamdani took office, it is clear that even if all the Jews leave, no one is safe.
