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 community feel unwelcome on city streets. He would also not be the first leader to try it in New York. When the first Jews stepped off the boats into New Amsterdam in 1654, the man who led the colony at the time, Peter Stuyvesant, tried to expel them. Stuyvesant was ultimately overruled and Jews have lived in that city ever since.
But Jews do not merely “live” in New York. They helped build that city. They stitched the garment trade industry and strengthened the labor movements that made New York more humane. They established hospitals, libraries, lecture halls, synagogues, newspapers, theaters, universities, and venerable institutions. They filled Broadway stages and Lower East Side bookshops. They pressed their humor, argument, appetite, ambition, memory, and moral restlessness so deeply into the streets that the world now mistakes Jewish culture for New York culture itself. A Jewish New Yorker named Emma Lazarus wrote the words that still greet the world in the harbor: give me your tired, your poor. A Jewish boy raised on the Lower East Side, Irving Berlin, wrote “God Bless America.” Milton Glaser, the Jewish son of immigrants, designed the I ♥ NY logo. The Bronx native gave the city not just a brand, but a heartbeat the whole world could recognize.
Jews don’t need permission to belong to New York. They are what belonging to New York means.
Jews don’t need permission to belong to New York. They are what belonging to New York means.
This mayor can skip the parade. But he cannot tear down what the Jews built in New York. He cannot pry the Jewish roots from the foundation of a city he only lately came to govern. Mamdani may imagine he is remaking New York in his own image, a city with little room for Jews who refuse to sever their bond with Israel. After all, he has already revoked the city’s use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, declined to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada,” and positioned Jewish attachment to Israel as something suspect rather than something central to Jewish life. But none of it will hold. He will be a footnote in New York’s history, while Jews are as New York as New York itself.
He will be a footnote in New York’s history, while Jews are as New York as New York itself.
This is the profound meaning the parade has always carried, a spirit captured perfectly in this year’s theme: “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.” Zionism, at its root, was the resolution of a battered, brilliant, exhausted people’s desire to stop asking permission to exist, to stop begging to their gatekeepers.
The tens of thousands of Jews who march up Fifth Avenue this Sunday beneath the blue-and-white Israeli flags are the bearers of the hardest-won victory of the last century of Jewish life: the era of Jews asking to belong is over, mayor or no mayor on Fifth Avenue.
So the most radical thing a people so often told to disappear can do today is plant itself in the middle of the most public and iconic street in the world and declare, visibly and stubbornly: We are proud Zionists. We are proud Jewish Americans. We are proud Jewish New Yorkers. And we are not going anywhere.
Jacki Karsh is a six-time Emmy-nominated journalist, philanthropist, and Jewish media thought leader. She has reported for over a decade on social impact stories for LA36’s LA County Channel and interviewed hundreds of global innovators across politics, business, and culture. She is also the founder of the Karsh Jewish Journalism Fellowship, an incubator for future Jewish journalists. She serves on the boards of the Jewish Federation of LA and the Columbia SoCal Alumni Association.