Canaries in the coal mine? Jews see selves as targets under next mayor
A classic tale from the days of Communist Russia:
There is a long line at a butcher’s shop in Moscow, where meat is usually in short supply.
The butcher pokes his head out and says, “Comrades, we’re running short on meat today. All Jews go home.”
All the Jews leave.
After a while, the butcher tells the customers in line, “All Ukrainians go home.”
All the Ukrainians leave.
Then, the butcher tells the people in line, “All other non-Russians go home.”
All the non-Russians leave.
Soon, the butcher announces, “All non-party members go home.”
All the men and women who are not members of the Communist Party leave.
Finally, the butcher says “We have no meat at all. Everyone go home.”
And one of the people still in line turns to person standing next to him and says, “Damn Jews – they get all the breaks.”
A different time, a different culture, a different city – but the Jews in 2025 New York City know how the Jews in Soviet-era Moscow felt: the Jews, as an out-of-favor group in the eyes of people with power, were the first victims of prejudice. But in this typical communist-era joke, they were blamed for benefitting from their supposed ”privilege,” for getting “a break” when they had received no benefit.
Jews then were condemned as members of a ”rootless cosmopolitan” race. Now, among segments of the US population, they are condemned as members of the favored, oppressive White race. And, increasingly, as supporters of the “Zionist” state.
This unsettling condition is particularly pronounced in New York City, following the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor – a victory that, according to various polls, included the votes of 40 percent of Jewish New Yorkers.
The victor on the Democratic Party ballot, Mamdani is the new face of the party’s growing-in-influence progressive wing, a Democratic Socialist who is outspoken in his criticism of and contempt for the State of Israel – which he avers has no right to exist as a Jewish country.
Beliefs that frighten substantial parts of New York Jewry.
Though Mamdani has stressed that he opposes antisemitism, and has reached out to selected parts of the city’s Jewish community (“The Jews who don’t speak for us,”according to a headline on the Jewish News Service) who are either indifferent to or against political Zionism (Satmar chasidim) or are vociferous in their condemnation of many Israeli policies (“Progressive Zionists”), that gives small comfort to the majority of the Big Apple’s Jewish population. Particularly the members of the older demographic who unreservedly back Israel (though not necessarily its government), and have nostalgic memories of the time when Israel was viewed as the Middle East’s endangered David, not as its militaristic, “genocidal” Goliath.
Do they – and I include myself in this group – feel safe in New York City with Mamdani in City Hall?
In the aftermath of October 8, the situation of pro-Israel Jews in the US has been precarious. Will the matzav be even more precarious in New York City with a hater of Israel as the city’s mayor?
Do the unhinged supporters of Mamdani wish to create a New York City that is as judenrein as they want the State of Israel to be?
Intergroup relations – particularly between some Jews and some Muslims – have been frayed and tenuous in the last two years. Will they further deteriorate after January 1?
With the new prominence of the anti-Israel Democratic Socialists, will what takes place in New York City portend the future of Jews across the country?
It is too early, weeks before Mamdani’s New Year’s Day inauguration, to answer these questions.
But the fact that we have to ask them is very unsettling, very uncomfortable.
But, unfortunately, it’s very familiar. History shows that when times get tough, the tough go after the Jews. (Hence, a growing number of Jewish men who reportedly have taken to covering their heads in public with a nondescript hat or baseball cap, instead of a kipa. Is the Magen David next?)
But, said Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Manhattan’s high-profile Park Avenue Synagogue, “I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the New York Jewish community.”
Not that Jews are the only targets of bias in the current political era. The America First, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT mentality of the administration in Washington has made immigrants (whether here legally or not), gays (whether out of the closet or not), dark-skinned people (whether citizens or not), and Asians (especially Chinese, in the wake of the Covid pandemic) fearful of harassment or deportation.
In a time of inflamed animus of minorities, with government-sanctioned suspicion of anyone who does not fit a narrow White, Christian, native-born profile of an above-suspicion “real American,” Jews are again assuming our traditional place as the fabled canary in the coal mine. Among the first, if not always the very first, people to be targets of the intolerant.
Are Jews the most persecuted, endangered, minority group?
The answer is relative, depending on what group you affiliate with, which group you perceive as most vulnerable.
If perception is reality, the answer is “yes.”
The well-known metaphor features a canary, because the fast-breathing bird is particularly vulnerable to poisonous carbon monoxide gas – gas that will eventually prove fatal human beings, who succumb when it is too late.
Canaries were a warning. Just as antisemitism is. History shows that its acceptance leads to social insurrection and persecution of other groups – witness, Spain in the 14th and 15th centuries, Crusader Europe, and 1890s France.
Everyone in the coal mine should be on guard. Not only Jews.
Once the Jews are bullied, other minority groups are targeted. The sequence of bigotry is not important. In the end, all unfavored groups feel the bigot’s sting.
“We’re all suffering,” says Rabbi Robert Kaplan, senior advisor at New York City’s Jewish Community Relations Council, with an expertise in intergroup relations. By “we” he means all “emerging majorities” – i.e., minority groups.
In a recent op-ed he wrote, Rabbi Kaplan called antisemitism “a trauma that causes fear and anxiety for its members.” But, he added, the Muslim, Latino, Black, Asian Pacific and LGBT communities also “express their own concerns and sentiments. Hate has become ubiquitous, weaponized against us all.”
In other words, he says, it doesn’t matter which group is the first proverbial canary in the coal mine – we’re all in the same coal mine, and all are subject to similar forms of prejudice “under the assault of hate.”
We share the coal mine with other canaries.
Were we caught off guard by the electoral success of an outspoken hater of Israel?
Apparently so. Rabbi Kaplan cites a “circle the wagons” mentality among many Jews in this country, because we had largely felt safe, immune from widespread antisemitism and immune from ICE deportations, and were largely unaware of the extent of what other minority groups had suffered.
First they came for …
Any educated Jew who grew up post-Holocaust is familiar with Martin Niemoller’s post-WWII declaration about hatred, and indifference, taking place in stages, with the by-standers becoming the final victims of persecution. In his aphorism, based on various speeches he gave, mentioning different victims of Nazi totalitarianism, Jews were the penultimate victim … before the speaker himself.
In other words, different canaries.
Niemoller, a Lutheran pastor in Germany who was an early supporters of the Nazi Party but spent eight years in Nazi concentration camps for his eventual, outspoken opposition to the regime, typically cited communists, socialists, and trade unionists as the Nazis’ first victims.
Then “they” came for the Jews.
“Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me.”
Which is what we fear.
As survivors of millennia of anti-Jewish/antisemitic/anti-Zionist discrimination, we take a perverse pleasure in our status as the figurative canaries in the coal mine of intolerant societies. When times become tough, when the disadvantaged and uneducated and the unvarnished bigoted seek a scapegoat for whatever inequities, actual or imagined, bother them, they need look no further than the Jews who live among them, either as their neighbors or in separate communities. Jews who are usually few in number, but large in prominence and achievement.
We are not alone in being the punching bags of bigots – or in thinking we are the first victims.
As Tevye said, victimhood “is no great honor.”
If we’re not afraid, we’re not alert. And we’re not realistic. While pogroms are probably not around the corner with Mamdani as mayor, his antagonistic, tone deaf words about Israel may embolden people in the city who already hold no affection for Jews and who want to express their disaffection through confrontations. First they used Israel’s post-October 7 war in Gaza as justification for their selective ire; now a mayor from their ranks gives them cover.
If Mamdani won’t apologize for taking up the “globalize the intifada” banner, can the thugs of New York City be blamed for bringing the intifada to the city? Will they, who shout “from the river to the sea,” bring their eliminate-the-Jews philosophy to the borders of “sea to shining sea”?
That’s what we fear the future holds – Jews serving as the target for those who hide their antisemitism behind the Palestinian cause.
In an atmosphere of increasing antisemitism in the US, particularly in academia and in left-leaning parts of the media, Jews understandably feel vulnerable. Particularly those who are visibly Jewish or visibly supportive of Eretz Israel.
If Mamdani, a Muslim, were to win election as New York City’s mayor, “it’s about to get so much worse,” a Muslim friend of New York Times Opinion section editor Meher Ahmad declared the other day.
Ahmad’s friend was referring to “the wave of anti-Muslim vitriol already swelling toward Mr. Mamdani and his campaign, including suggestions that he was a terrorist sympathizer – or even a terrorist himself,” Ahmad wrote in an op-ed essay in the Times. “The higher Mr. Mamdani’s star rose, the worse the anti-Muslim racism would get. With every inch of progress, we’ve come to expect bigoted outbursts against people who share our faith and take up places of prominence.”
Sound familiar?
In other words, Mamdani is Islam’s Joe Lieberman, an observant member of a minority religion who has reached unexpected heights in the US political world. But there is a crucial difference: the Senator from Connecticut and history-making Democratic Party vice presidential candidate never denied a country’s right to exist; none of his statement’s ever gave members of another faith reason to fear for their safety; the Senator earned his reputation and electoral victories on the basis of what he stood for, not what he stood against.
And Lieberman never cited antisemitism as opponents’ primary reason for opposing his candidacies.
With increasing controversy surrounding Mamdani’s imminent ascension to the mayoralty of New York City, fellow Muslims may have legitimate reason to feel concern about a rise in anti-Muslim feelings of many New Yorkers. As do Jews about the rise in antisemitism they fear.
Islamophobia and antisemitism.
About the former … Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Service (JNS), calls it “a myth – almost everything that is defined as ‘Islamophobia’ is nothing more than drawing attention to the Jew-hatred that is normative among American Muslims and Arab-Americans.
“There never has been any empirical evidence of an [post 9/11 anti-Muslim] backlash” in the United States, Tobin wrote in a JNS essay.
Some statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests that Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, is going up in this country.
But there is one significant difference. They largely fear vitriol and accusations; we fear beatings. And who often beats up whom?
The people who disproportionately have threatened us in the last two years see themselves as society’s victims.
My ophthalmologist, from an Indian family, shared his concern about this with me the other day. He has a traditional Sikh name, though he is not a Sikh. But identified Sikhs, he pointed out, are subject to increasing prejudice because they often have dark skin (maybe they are Hispanic) and because they often wear turbans (maybe they are Muslim) and attract unwarranted attention.
Many minority groups, my ophthalmologist said while examining my eyes, experience bias in the current social-political climate.
With Mamdani as mayor, he said, the Jews probably are next.
His assertion: New York City’s Jews have not been the only canary in the coal mine of the city’s ethnic mosaic — but they, in the next mayoral administration, will experience what other minorities have been experiencing to a larger degree.
Stay tuned!
In the post-9/11, post-George Floyd, post-Gaza United States, various excuses have arisen for attacking Jews. Mamdani’s election is only the latest justification.
Within weeks, or months, after his inauguration, we will see if our communal fears are overblown. In an era of scarce resources, which are sure to become more scarce as the bad relations between Mamdani and purse-strings-controlling President Trump escalate, will life for Jews – the avowedly pro-Israel ones – indeed become dangerous? Will it be fashionable for the “anti-Zionists” (i.e., the haters of Jews) who put Mamdani into the city’s highest office to openly express the belief that “Damn Jews – they get all the breaks.”?
