In New York City—the beating heart of the American Jewish experience—the unthinkable has happened. A metropolis that once stood as a beacon of Jewish resilience and political sophistication has now delivered its crown to a man whose public record is defined by open hostility toward Israel and the Jewish people. Zohran Mamdani’s rise to power as mayor is not simply a political event—it is a moral indictment. It represents not only the failure of liberal politics but, more profoundly, the catastrophic dereliction of duty by the very Jewish institutions created to prevent such a moment.

This is not merely the worst of times; it is a reckoning. For decades, the Jewish establishment in New York—once vigilant defenders of Jewish security and Zionist conviction—has allowed itself to be co-opted by the same ideological forces that now dominate City Hall. The organizations that once spoke with courage and clarity against antisemitism have become bureaucratic echo chambers, obsessed with fashionable progressive causes and paralyzed by their own moral confusion.

The great tragedy is that none of this was unforeseeable. Mamdani’s contempt for Israel was never hidden; his statements supporting Hamas-aligned rhetoric and his repeated refusal to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada” were well-documented. Yet, as his movement gained traction, New York’s major Jewish organizations—the Agudath Israel of America, the UJA-Federation of New York, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the American Jewish Congress, AIPAC, Hillel International, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), the Orthodox Union (OU) and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism—stood in silence, issuing platitudes instead of taking principled stands.

These institutions, flush with endowments and prestige, were designed to confront precisely this sort of menace. Their leaders were entrusted with the moral guardianship of a city that holds the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Yet, faced with the ascendancy of a man who has repeatedly endorsed the very ideology that threatens Jewish life and the State of Israel, they blinked. They equivocated. They failed.

Where was the UJA-Federation, that vast philanthropic empire that claims to represent the interests of 1.5 million New York Jews? Where were the spokesmen of the American Jewish Committee or the JFNA, with their Washington offices and their polished mission statements about “fighting hate”? Where was AIPAC, once the most formidable defender of Israel’s legitimacy in the public square?

Their silence was not neutrality—it was complicity. While Mamdani’s anti-Israel allies mobilized digital armies, held rallies, and flooded social media with venomous propaganda, these Jewish institutions were busy curating interfaith luncheons, writing checks to diversity initiatives, and debating gender-neutral Hebrew in their seminar halls.

In truth, these organizations long ago traded vigilance for access. They became addicted to proximity to political power, even when that power turned hostile. They chose invitations to city receptions over confrontation with injustice. They conflated diplomacy with cowardice.

And nowhere has this betrayal been more profound than in the failure of the Anti-Defamation League. Once revered as the vigilant sentinel against antisemitism, the ADL under Jonathan Greenblatt has become the very caricature of institutional rot. Instead of confronting the virulent anti-Zionism spreading through universities, city councils, and activist groups, the ADL has spent years waging partisan crusades against conservative figures—most notably President Donald Trump—while downplaying or outright ignoring antisemitism emanating from the left.