Yael Bar Tur Activists Say the Anti-Israel Cause Is Mainstream. New York Proves It’s Not Despite the rise in hate crimes, not everyone wants to “normalize the Intifada.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-jews-israel-hamas-anti-semitic
You knew something was off when Kylie Jenner deleted her Instagram story. On October 7, 2023, as terrorists dragged hostages into Gaza and roamed the streets of Israel, the reality star posted that she “stand[s] with” the Jewish state, a familiar “thoughts and prayers” gesture, typical of celebrities after tragedies.
But faced with a backlash from her millions of followers, Jenner deleted the post. Others followed suit, removing their own expressions of solidarity. The message was clear: acknowledging Israel’s suffering had become, at best, “problematic”—and, at worst, unwelcome in polite society.
Silence has become all too familiar to American Jews. They’ve experienced it from international organizations and women’s advocates in the face of the devastating evidence of Hamas’s sex crimes; from academic institutions as Jewish students were harassed on elite university campuses; and from fellow New Yorkers amid rising anti-Semitic hate crimes, particularly in New York City.
That silence has been broken—not by Jewish defenders, but by voices that accept or even condone violence against Jews, Zionists, and the people of Israel. Arguments once unthinkable are now aired openly: that the atrocities of October 7 were justified resistance; that Israel should be abolished; that terrorists held in Israeli prisons are morally equivalent with Jewish civilians held hostage in Gaza.
These views have proliferated in part because of our academic institutions. Schools offer students a distorted, one-dimensional portrait of the Middle East. They depict the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a simplistic struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Young users on social media, where many Americans get their news, see these views reinforced in short, viral videos.
Such content helps explain the meteoric rise of Zohran Mamdani and his fellow democratic socialists, who have long opposed Israel. The Democratic Socialists of America, for example, posted “End the Violence, End the Occupation, Free Palestine” on October 7, 2023. Mamdani has refused forthrightly to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a particularly troubling choice for the potential leader of a city where Jews make up about 11 percent of the population but more than half of hate-crime victims.
For a small but growing number of New Yorkers, anti-Israel sentiment has become a routine part of their social media feeds and conversations with friends. Some in this group dismiss videos of Jews being harassed or attacked on city streets as a small price to pay in the cosmic struggle for justice.
But not everyone is willing to normalize the Intifada. New York isn’t a campus. The average resident spends most of his time offline, where crime, disorder, and mayhem are daily concerns. You don’t need to be a card-carrying AIPAC member to want the police to remove masked men blocking traffic on your commute; to consider the organizations that celebrated in Times Square on October 9, 2023 depraved; or to be uncomfortable with politicians cozying up to social media figures who believe America “deserved” the 9/11 attacks.
New Yorkers shouldn’t be fooled by activists’ efforts to present the anti-Israel cause as mainstream. Most are old enough to remember the city council vote in June 2020, slashing $1 billion from the NYPD’s budget in response to activist calls to “Defund the Police.” Then, as now, activists weren’t representing popular opinion.
Just because a certain view dominates our social media feeds—or certain political circles—doesn’t mean it’s popular. For every hundred angry comments on a pro-Israel post, there may be thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of quiet viewers who support, or at least don’t oppose, the message. Look closely and you’ll realize that even if elites swear something is the next “big thing,” New Yorkers (and voters) don’t always agree. Just ask the Metaverse, or rainbow bagels.
That leaves room for optimism. For all the troubling signs, New York in 2025 is not Germany in 1932. The city’s Jewish community is vocal, vibrant—and it votes. But we don’t want to live as Jews in New York; we want to live as Jewish New Yorkers. For that, we need our fellow New Yorkers to do what they’ve always done best: think for themselves and resist the pull of propaganda.
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