Today, tens of thousands will march up Fifth Avenue for Israel Day, the largest pro-Israel parade anywhere outside the Jewish state. Every sitting New York City mayor has joined them for 61 straight years.
His police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, will serve as grand marshal, and the city has promised a full security plan for the day. So the mayor will protect the parade. He just will not be seen at it. That contradiction tells you most of what you need to know about how he sees the people who will be marching.
None of this is sudden. Mamdani backs the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, calls himself an anti-Zionist, and took office in January.
On his first day, he scrapped two of his predecessor’s orders: one that kept city agencies from boycotting Israel, another that adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the move antisemitic gasoline on an open fire. It was not wrong.
A pattern of anti-Israel behavior amid rising antisemitism
Look at the pattern, not the single day. He will not call Israel a Jewish state. He skipped Israel’s Independence Day. He is skipping the parade. And in January alone, antisemitic hate crimes in New York rose 183%, with 31 attacks on Jews against 11 in the same month a year earlier.
The man running the city has pulled down the guardrails his predecessor built, at the very moment the danger to Jews is climbing.
Mamdani wants New Yorkers to believe he can oppose Israel and still stand with the city’s Jews. They are not buying it. The UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council, the two largest Jewish bodies in the city, boycotted his own Jewish Heritage Month event.
When the major Jewish institutions will not show up to a mayor’s pre-Shavuot reception, his talk of cherishing Jewish New Yorkers falls apart on contact.
The episode has split even Israel’s own representatives. World Zionist Organization chairman Yaakov Hagoel invited Mamdani to march beside him, beside tens of thousands of Jews, for the people and the State of Israel.
Hagoel had also written to him on Holocaust Remembrance Day and got no reply. Consul General Ofir Akunis then slapped down the invitation itself, saying Hagoel had no standing to invite a man who refuses to call Israel a Jewish state.
The two disagreed on how to handle Mamdani. Neither of them doubted for a moment what his absence would say.
Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of the New York Board of Rabbis put it simply: it is not a policy parade, it is a Jewish people parade. Rabbi Marc Schneier was harsher, telling the mayor that no one wants him there anyway, and that he should not ruin a proud day with his rhetoric.
Mamdani has made his choice. New York’s Jews should believe him.
He keeps drawing a line between Jewish culture and Jewish statehood, between the Jewish people and their right to a country of their own.
That line does not hold because it does not exist. You cannot honor Jewish peoplehood while treating its national expression as something shameful. A mayor who will not stand with his Jewish constituents on their proudest public day, because standing there would tie him to the existence of Israel, has told them plainly where he stands and what he thinks of them.
Assemblyman Michael Novakhov said the mayor is boycotting the parade because he would rather appease extremists than stand with Jewish New Yorkers.
The record supports the charge. Protections gone on day one. A Holocaust Remembrance Day letter ignored. Independence Day unmarked. And now, for the first time in 61 years, an empty space on Fifth Avenue where the mayor of New York should be standing.
No city on earth outside Israel holds more Jews than New York. They vote, pay taxes, build institutions, raise families, and today will march up Fifth Avenue with their flags and their pride.
They deserve a mayor who marches with them, not one who sends his police commissioner in his place and calls that leadership. Mamdani had six decades of precedent and a single morning to stand on the right side of it. He chose the empty chair.