Jewish Leaders Blame Mamdani’s Criticism of Netanyahu for a Manhattan Stabbing

The US Jewish establishment is seizing on a frightening stabbing on Manhattan’s Upper West Side early Thursday afternoon as the pretense for a sweeping political attack on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the surging pro-Palestine left he represents.

Local Jewish leaders lost the battle to keep Mamdani from City Hall last fall and since then have faced one humiliation after another, including a disastrous pro-Israel parade in late May that ended with their political allies needing to apologize for marching with a fascist, and stunning defeats in last month’s Democratic primaries.

Now, they’re trying to use a scary midday attack to hit back at the mayor.

Around 1:30 pm on Thursday, a 51-year-old named Raul Morales allegedly stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife near Central Park, then walked four blocks and stabbed a kippah-wearing Jewish man with a screwdriver. Both men are expected to survive. Less than three hours after the attacks, at 4 pm, before the police had provided any public statement on the circumstances of the attack or its motive, the City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has allied with the local Jewish establishment against Mamdani, was calling the stabbing “antisemitic,” and posting that “what is happening in our city is abhorrent.” By evening, the UJA-Federation of New York was blaming the mayor, writing that the stabbing “came soon after Mayor Mamdani once again used his platform to viciously attack Israel.”

Pro-Israel Jewish groups were primed for a renewed fight with Mamdani. Late on Tuesday night, the mayor had posted a two-minute video in which he walked back a campaign promise to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York City but reiterated his condemnation of the leader. In the video, Mamdani did not mention Jewish people, or even name the state of Israel. He said that Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for the killing of “more than 73,000 people,” and that there is an active warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court.

On Wednesday, pro-Israel groups worked to whip up Jewish communal anxieties over the video, which had spread widely online. The UJA-Federation posted that “repeatedly singling out and vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for perceived political benefit is repugnant.” That news cycle was still churning on Thursday, when the attacks took place. “No matter what, the next terrible thing to happen to a Jewish person was going to be blamed on the mayor,” a person close to City Hall told me Friday morning.

For all its predictability, the Jewish communal response to the stabbing was no less dangerous and irresponsible. “The mayor is not responsible for this awful stabbing incident,” Brad Lander, the Jewish Mamdani ally who won a closely watched congressional Democratic primary in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan last month, said to me on Friday. “The effort to connect the mayor to that, when it seems straightforward to me that the mayor does not bear any responsibility, is a political effort to shut down criticism of Israel,” he said. “That is what we mean when we say weaponizing antisemitism, right? It doesn’t help us fight antisemitism.”

Jewish establishment groups escalated their campaign early Friday, summoning friendly elected officials to a press conference on an Upper West Side street corner, where Jewish leaders denounced Mamdani. UJA-Federation’s outgoing CEO, Eric Goldstein, demanded the mayor stop “using the most vilifying rhetoric, focused solely on the only Jewish state and the supporters of it” and “using the most horrible, difficult language that inflames, that terrorizes, that causes people to do terrible things.” Mamdani’s “words have profound real world consequences on us, and shame on him, shame on him, for doing this for perceived political benefit,” Goldstein said. “He must stop.”

Goldstein was joined at the press conference by a long list of elected officials, including Micah Lasher, who endorsed Mamdani last fall but won a Democratic congressional primary in the neighborhood last month with the Jewish establishment’s backing, and who called on Mamdani to “help take the temperature down.” Even leading progressives, including public advocate Jumaane Williams and state attorney general Letitia James, turned up for the press conference, though they didn’t attack the mayor in their own comments.

The details of the Thursday stabbings remain unclear. The police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said Thursday that the attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” during both stabbings, but that “initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.” Neither police nor prosecutors have said whether or not they think the Jewish victim, Moshe Grunhaus, was targeted because of the kippah he wore on his head. There’s also been no claim from authorities thus far that there was racial motivation in the targeting of the first victim, a 57-year-old named Chok Sung.

Whatever the reason, the attack was jarring. Both victims could easily have been killed. These blocks where the stabbings happened hold a particular place in the American Jewish imagination: Grunhaus was stabbed on 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, the emotional center of the Upper West Side, half a block from the classic smoked fish spot Barney Greengrass and the former site of the lamented Popover Cafe. Modern Orthodox Jews have moved to this particular part of the neighborhood in larger numbers in recent years, such that many of the people on the street now wear kippahs and other signals of Jewish identity. If Grunhaus was targeted for being visibly Jewish on 86th and Amsterdam, it could mean that many thousands of others are similarly vulnerable.

The city’s Jewish leaders, many of whom live within blocks of where the stabbing took place, saw that their friends and neighbors were scared. And they chose to wield that fear against the mayor, who has bested them again and again over the past eight months.

There were signs by early Thursday night of a coordinated effort to take advantage of the stabbing. Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar and the pro-Israel Democrats Rep. Ritchie Torres and Rep. Dan Goldman, the latter of whom recently had his re-election hopes snuffed out by Lander, all posted similar tweets on the attacks that ended with the line “Enough is enough.” On Friday, the Jewish Federations of North America’s internal messaging newsletter Project Halo, which offers public relations guidance to local Jewish communities, issued a bulletin suggesting that Jewish leaders say that the attack “shows the danger that anti-Israel rhetoric can have on the safety of Jews around the world.” The Anti-Defamation League’s unsubtle CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Friday wrote on social media that Mamdani should “step down and let someone else take over.”

In their rush to politicize these attacks and to insist that an attack on Netanyahu is an attack on all Jews, the UJA, the ADL, and their fellow travelers only added credence to the antisemitic logic that that all Jews are responsible for Netanyahu’s depravations. “When the public is outraged, and there’s a climate of indignation against a state that’s tied to the Jewish people in the public imagination, that can boomerang in the form of antisemitic attacks,” Ben Lorber, a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, told me. “That’s of course indefensible. But to me it points to the need for Israel to stop associating the global Jewish community with its war crimes.”

In the Middle East on Friday, meanwhile, Israeli forces were pouring into the West Bank after a settler attack on the village of Tal led to a violent incident in which four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed. There are fears now that the killings could give Israel its long-awaited pretense to justify a major military escalation in the West Bank. While American Jewish leaders attack Mamdani for his clear accounting of what Netanyahu did in Gaza, the prime minister now seems to be preparing some new horror for Palestinians in the cities and villages of the West Bank. Today’s political maneuverings from the Jewish establishment are a warning to elected officials who would speak out against this latest state violence that they, too, could be blamed for violence in the US.

For American Jews, meanwhile, these efforts to defend Netanyahu in our name put us in danger of taking the blame. “These groups are proactively, constantly pushing out a narrative that conflates all Jewish people with a war criminal, and with a state that is committing a genocide,” said Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action. “That is dangerous. And that is what puts Jews at risk.”