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New York Isn’t the Same for Jews

The term ‘hate crime’ didn’t exist when I was growing up in Queens in the 1970s.

By Tevi Troy

Aug. 20, 2026 12:02 pm ET

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A man blows a traditional shofar, a ram horn, during the Israel Day Parade in New York, May 31. Emil T. Lippe/Associated Press

Many people know that Jews blow the shofar, or ram’s horn, on the holy days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Less well-known is the custom of blowing the shofar at the end of the daily morning prayer service for the month preceding the High Holy Days to provide a warning that the days of judgment are coming. These days New York Jews sense a different kind of warning.

When I was growing up in Queens in the 1970s, about 2,000 Jews would worship on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur at my synagogue, the Hollis Hills Jewish Center. The back doors to the main sanctuary would be open, and the banquet hall behind it would be filled with seats, going all the way up to the stage at the end of the room. If there were police outside, they were there only to direct traffic, not to provide protection from any kind of “hate crime,” a term that didn’t exist yet.

This year, as the High Holidays approach, the Jewish community in New York is thinking about holiday services differently. Every synagogue has a security committee; police presence is a necessity—not because of traffic—and in many synagogues the process of passing through security at the entrance reminds me of my time working in the White House.

In the New York of my youth, the annual Israel Day parade was a great celebration, nearly always attended by a mayor, who stood in solidarity with Israel. This year, there was no mayor in attendance, and Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the New York City Police Department, said that the parade required “the most extensive security plan that the NYPD has ever put together.”

While Jews once felt safe walking the streets of the city—or at least only as threatened as everybody else—now they feel, with good reason, as if they have targets on their backs. Most hate crimes in New York are directed at Jews, even though they’re nowhere near a majority of the population. In July, 70% of hate crimes targeted Jews in the city. Last week an antisemite disrupted a synagogue service and assaulted a congregant. Last month, a Jew was stabbed leaving prayer services on a fast day.

The pervasive threat is a constant topic of conversation in a way that crime was when I was growing up: who had been mugged, whose apartment had been robbed, whose car had been stolen. With the anticrime policies of Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, crime receded, but now discussions with Jewish New Yorkers are about the latest hate crime, or about new communal or personal security measures, or about who is no longer comfortable taking the subway.

The pervasive nature of the threat has Jews continually thinking about it. Before going out to a kosher restaurant, do you want to become a target just to get a burger or a slice of pizza? When going to synagogue, can you focus on contemplative prayer knowing that just being there makes you vulnerable? When you visit a Jewish institution, why don’t comparable non-Jewish institutions need the same layers of security?

In my weekly teaching visits to New York from Maryland, I choose—for now—to continue taking the subway, going to synagogue, eating at kosher restaurants. But other Jews may make different choices. They may stop being observant, or may stop doing things that identify them as Jewish. They may move to Florida or Texas or out of a Jewish neighborhood. Put all those individual choices together and we lose the things that for more than a century made New York such a Jewish city.

What’s happening in New York is about more than one mayor running an administration oddly focused on demonizing Israel. The atmosphere is changing the character of what was once America’s most Jewish city and making it simply another place. It feels to many New York Jews as if something is being taken away, an atypical feeling in the American Jewish experience.

In this period before Rosh Hashana, the daily shofar blasts are supposed to get Jews thinking about what they have done wrong in the past year and how they could be better in the next. This year that sound is also having them look to the city that has long been the center of American Jewish life and hoping against hope that it too can be better in the year ahead.

Mr. Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute and a senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5895710&forum_id=2~#50083584)