Leadership is not measured solely by speeches delivered, but by moments seized—or squandered—when moral clarity is most urgently required. Last week, outside the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills synagogue, demonstrators chanted praise for Hamas while an Israeli real-estate event was taking place inside a house of worship. It was not merely another protest. It was a desecration of civic decency and a public endorsement of a terrorist organization in the midst of a residential Jewish neighborhood.

And yet, the newly inaugurated mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, hesitated.

In a city where Jewish residents have watched antisemitic incidents metastasize from slurs to vandalism to violence, the mayor’s failure to immediately and unequivocally condemn those chants was not a neutral act. It was a signal—whether intended or not—that intimidation cloaked in the rhetoric of “protest” might be tolerated so long as it fits the political fashions of the moment.

The demonstrators did not merely criticize Israeli policy. They chanted slogans in praise of Hamas, an organization designated by the United States as a terrorist group and responsible for the mass murder of civilians. They did so outside a synagogue, in a neighborhood dense with Jewish families, forcing after-school programs to close early and parents to wonder whether their children were safe. That context is not incidental. It is the story.

When Governor Kathy Hochul promptly declared that such rhetoric was “disgusting” and “dangerous,” she demonstrated the reflex expected of any official entrusted with public safety. Mayor Mamdani’s initial silence, by contrast, spoke volumes. His later statements, while acknowledging that chants in support of terrorism have “no place in our city,” arrived only after a chorus of outrage had already formed—after former Mayor Eric Adams and others had moved to fill the void he left.

This delay matters. It reinforces a corrosive perception now circulating among Jewish New Yorkers: that their security is becoming conditional, filtered through ideological litmus tests. It suggests that when antisemitism wears the costume of anti-Zionism, City Hall may deliberate before defending its citizens.

New York is not an abstract battleground for global grievances. It is a mosaic of neighborhoods whose social contract depends on the firm understanding that political expression does not include the right to terrorize one’s neighbors. The mayor is the steward of that contract. When demonstrators praise a terrorist group outside a synagogue, the appropriate response is not calibrated phrasing hours later. It is immediate moral condemnation and visible enforcement of the boundaries between protest and persecution.

Nor has the mayor articulated any concrete strategy to stem the rising tide of antisemitism that now stains the city’s civic fabric. Jewish New Yorkers do not need rhetorical assurances that “everyone is safe.” They need policy: buffer zones around houses of worship, clear NYPD directives, and a mayor who treats intimidation as a crisis rather than a talking point.

This was the first major test of Mayor Mamdani’s tenure. It was not about zoning, transit, or sanitation. It was about whether New York remains a city where Jews can worship without being encircled by chants glorifying their would-be murderers.

On that test, his hesitation was a failure of nerve.

In times of rising hatred, silence is never neutral. It either interrupts the contagion—or accelerates it.