Note left on vandalized car belonging to Jewish woman who was visiting her brother when a still at large suspect vandalized her vehicle. Photo: Screenshot.
New York City has seen its latest antisemitic hate crime after a still-at-large suspect slashed the tires of a car in Manhattan on Monday and left a note on its windshield equating Jews with rodents, according to local reports.
The Jewish victim discovered the damage to her vehicle — along with a message scrawled in all caps on a piece of stationery reading “Zionist rats aren’t welcome anywhere but Antartica [sic] or Hell” — while visiting the city to see her brother, Yaron. He told reporters that the vandalism was not the first antisemitic incident the pair experienced that day; hours earlier, someone had shouted “Free Palestine” at them.
No media outlet has disclosed whether the family is Hasidic, but the apparent ease with which the perpetrator identified them as Jewish suggests they may be. The timing of the vandalism, coinciding with the woman’s absence from the vehicle, raises the possibility that the suspect had surveilled the family beforehand. More details are forthcoming.
A majority of hate crimes in New York City this year have targeted Jews, particularly the Orthodox community, whose plight has worsened sharply since the Israel-Hamas war began in Gaza in Oct. 2023. Antisemitic incidents in the city have risen year over year since then, with some attacks targeting Jewish children and others singling out Orthodox Jews for violence specifically because of their traditional dress.
Recent cases illustrate the pattern. In the span of eight days between late October and early November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were assaulted in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood — among them a 13-year-old boy struck while riding his bike to school. In March, an African-American assailant attacked Jeremy Garrett, a Jewish subway rider, knocking off his kippah. “I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett told a local ABC affiliate. He said the two men scuffled before his attacker fled as the train doors reopened. “It’s horrible because it happened on Purim, right before the holiday,” he said.
The city’s Jewish community remains acutely at risk, according to the New York Police Department (NYPD).
The NYPD confirmed 41 antisemitic hate crimes in May 2026, up from 24 in May 2025, even as overall major crime fell to historic lows. Antisemitic incidents accounted for 60 percent of all confirmed hate crimes that month, despite Jews making up only 10 percent of the city’s population. Muslims were targeted in five confirmed hate crimes in May, compared with three in 2025. Among reported but unconfirmed incidents, Jews were targeted 60 times, or 61 percent of the total.
So far in 2026, New York City has recorded 152 confirmed antisemitic hate crimes, up six percent from the same period last year. By comparison, the city recorded 17 confirmed hate crimes against Muslims, 18 against Black people, and nine against Asians over the same period.
Some in the Jewish community allege that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has fostered the most anti-Zionist climate in New York City’s history. On his first day in office, he rescinded the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, lifted the ban on city contracts with companies boycotting Israel, and narrowed an executive order directing police to monitor anti-Israel protests near synagogues.
“From swastikas appearing on homes and in parks, to increased anti-Israeli demonstrations, [Mayor Zohran Mamdani] has created a climate in which bigotry is allowed to flourish,” Rabbi Mark Wildes, director and founder of the Manhattan Jewish Experience organization, told The Algemeiner earlier this month. “His irresponsible rhetoric calling Israel an ‘apartheid’ state committing ‘genocide’ only emboldens antisemites to target Jews across the city.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.