Yesterday’s stabbing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in which the assailant reportedly yelled “Allahu akhbar” before attacking two men — one of whom was visibly Jewish and attacked as he left a nearby synagogue, the other was not — with a screwdriver in what police are investigating as a hate crime, caught no one by surprise. 

Jewish leaders and organizations have regularly warned about precisely this type of violence, including in the day preceding the attack. In a statement on Wednesday responding to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s viral video calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal and making the idle threat of considering arresting the prime minister despite knowing definitively he had no legal authority to do so, UJA-Federation of New York, along with several other Jewish groups, lambasted Mamdani for what it described as an obsession with Israel. 

“New Yorkers elected a mayor to lead this city — not to make Israel the centerpiece of your political grandstanding. At a time of rising antisemitism, repeatedly singling out and vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for perceived political benefit is repugnant, puts Jews at greater risk — and leaves many Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted and unwelcome in the city we call home,” the organization wrote, concluding it: “Shame on you.”

Last night, shortly after the attack, Mamdani released a statement denouncing the stabbings, calling them “hateful and despicable.” Mamdani noted that while the attack was being investigated as a possible hate crime and that victims said the assailant screamed “Allahu akhbar” before stabbing them, “mental health may have been a factor,” citing NYPD findings. (It was lost on no one that it is normally conservatives who highlight the factor of mental health in cases of gun violence.) 

Mental health issues surely played a role here — people who are not struggling with mental health issues rarely stab strangers on the street — but a political discourse that invariably and infuriatingly focuses on Israel, and thus Jews, is certainly a contributing factor.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin acknowledged that the investigation into the attack is ongoing, but that the Jewish community overwhelmingly views the stabbings as antisemitic, raising the level of concern. 

“The fear in the Jewish community is real. Every New Yorker deserves to feel safe in their neighborhood, regardless of their faith or identity,” Menin wrote in a statement.

Menin has been joined by a wide array of Jewish and Israeli figures and organizations, tying Thursday’s attack to Mamdani’s video and policies. 

David Greenfield, a longtime figure on the New York political scene and current CEO of the anti-poverty Met Council, noted that however true, these tweets and statements about the stabbing will not change the situation for the city’s Jewish community. 

“I know this is painful to hear, but your tweet is NOT going to make the change you want. I’m angry too, but I’m convinced we need to make actual change. Tweeting makes it feel like we’re doing something. The real work happens off of X,” he wrote on X. 

Within the Jewish community, the Manhattan attack is sure to intensify the ongoing debates about antisemitism and security: Are communal funds best spent on combating antisemitism and fortifying institutions or would those resources be better spent on Jewish education and initiatives to deepen Jewish identity and pride? 

Earlier this week, at a hearing before Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which was launched in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack in December, Jewish leaders offered a glimpse into how rising antisemitism in the country is affecting communal dynamics. 

Naomi Levin, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, noted that the growing threats against the community made local institutions unwelcoming and ruined easygoing socializing before and after events — of particular interest given that yesterday’s attack occurred as one of the victims was walking away from a synagogue after prayer services. 

“When Jewish community events finish, it’s … ‘head to your cars quickly; don’t loiter.’ This limits the opportunities we have with social ties … we’re losing the opportunity to have those informal opportunities … It will ultimately weaken the fabric of our community,” Levin said, according to The Age. 

“We’re creating unwelcome facades on our Jewish community facilities,” she said at the hearing. “I think it creates an impression of our community that couldn’t be further from the truth, that we want to be closed or locked in.”

In a recent onstage interview at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, before yesterday’s stabbing, the organization’s president, Yehuda Kurtzer, and Barry Finestone, CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation, discussed the tensions between those who in the Jewish community who want to focus on combating antisemitism and those who want to focus on “Jewish thriving” through education.

While Finestone stressed the need for security, he described efforts to combat antisemitism as a waste of resources and even counterproductive. He recalled an effort early in the post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas to flood social media with pro-Israel content through AI-generated bots, only to find that “the bots multiplied at a rate so that the more money that was spent for pro-Israel, pro-Jewish messaging, the more hate was spewed exponentially.” Ultimately, the effort was abandoned.

Kurtzer offered a third option, not surviving or thriving but what he dubbed “excelling,” focusing not on expanding Jewish education — though both he and Finestone said this was surely a worthy cause — but on improving Jewish communal morality. 

“Excelling is something different. It is a discourse about purpose, who the Jewish people are supposed to be, not just to produce more Judaism or live more Jewishly, but to actually excel,” Kurtzer said.