Last week a infamous group of pro-Palestine activists set its sights on Riverdale in The Bronx, as it publicized plans to march on a Saturday-night assembly for Jewish households contemplating shopping for a residence in Israel.
The group, Pal-Awda, didn’t submit an handle for its motion, and it didn’t want to; its folks have gotten very good at discovering Jews.
The incident introduced residence two chilling information: Jewish households in NYC can’t sit in a neighbor’s home and speak about actual property with out being hunted — and Gov. Kathy Hochul doesn’t appear to care.
Pal-Awda is the same group that massed a crowd outside Park East Synagogue last November to chant “globalize the intifada” and urge the “resistance” to “take another settler out.”
Ever since, it’s waged a marketing campaign of focused harassment against Jews who need to study about making a transfer to Israel.
It’s efficient: Late Friday, Pal-Awda claimed “Victory!” in a submit on X, bragging that the Riverdale session had been cancelled due to its scare ways.
“We will keep shutting down these events and making them untenable in the City,” the group vowed
Organizers of the real-estate occasion confirmed to me that the session was first set for a non-public residence, and that the threats had indeed spurred them to cancel the in-person gathering and transfer it to Zoom instead.
Earlier in the week, a group of Bronx Democrats including Rep. Ritchie Torres, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and Borough President Vanessa Gibson had collectively denounced Pal-Awda for its plans.
“Organizing a campaign to hunt down these gatherings and drive them out of our neighborhoods is an attack on Jewish New Yorkers,” they declared.
They were proper.
Yet Hochul continued doing what she does greatest: ignoring threats to Jews and their communities.
Last week she made a marketing campaign swing through Riverdale for espresso with Dinowitz and Gibson — and on Saturday night time, while Pal-Awda gloated, she tweeted about that pleasant outing with out a phrase about the concentrating on of Bronx Jews.
Not even an election marketing campaign can rouse her curiosity, it seems.
Riverdale was Pal-Awda’s second “victory” this month, after it pushed a Nefesh B’Nefesh aliyah honest out of Queens hours before it was to open on Oct. 11.
Funny how a struggle over “stolen land” retains touchdown outside synagogues, and now outside Jewish houses.
The real-estate speak is skinny cowl for the true motive: antisemitic hate.
New York regulation protects Jews wherever they collect.
Synagogues and public venues are coated by legal guidelines that assure entry to homes of worship and bar locations open to the public from turning folks away over faith or ancestry.
A gathering in a non-public residence falls under legal guidelines aimed squarely at anyone who threatens or intimidates Jews for who they are.
The native regulation against discriminatory harassment lets the metropolis go to court docket to cease such incidents, with fines of up to $100,000 for each risk of pressure; the state’s civil-rights regulation lets victims sue anyone who carries out or incites that form of harassment, and menacing or coercion aimed at Jews is a hate crime.
And sure, Zionist Jews are a protected group.
A Riverdale household trying at residences in Israel is appearing on an ancestral, cultural and typically non secular bond with that land and its folks, and the regulation protects that bond.
What’s left unprotected is political support for the state of Israel — and nobody speaking with neighbors about mortgages in Jerusalem is there to foyer for political motion.
Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric has invited all of this: Pal-Awda is leaping on his canine whistles.
Its Friday submit tagged the mayor and informed him he “can take tangible steps to put an end to this illegal activity once and for all” — that means Jewish real-estate gatherings.
The mayor has made no public remark about Pal-Awda’s bullying this month in Riverdale and Queens.
His silence tells every Jewish household in the metropolis that it’s on its own.
These shameful threats hit residence for me: One of Pal-Awda’s staunchest allies is CUNY for Palestine, a group of anti-Israel college and workers at my own office.
Yet again, both Mamdani and Hochul have failed: by refusing to inform Pal-Awda that no synagogue, college or establishment in this metropolis will pay a worth for welcoming Jews, and now by refusing to defend Jewish New Yorkers in their own houses.
Pal-Awda and its cheerleaders on CUNY’s college think Jewish neighborhoods, and now Jewish dwelling rooms, are honest sport.
And why not? Our governor and our mayor couldn’t care less.
Jeffrey Lax is a CUNY professor of regulation and co-founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY.