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From Texas to Tel Aviv, invitations go out to Jews fleeing ‘Mamdani’s New York’
(JTA) — Just hours after New York City’s mayor election was called for Zohran Mamdani, a top Israeli official issued an invitation.
“New York will never be the same again, especially not for its Jewish community,” Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted. “I invite the Jews of New York to seriously consider making their new home in the Land of Israel.”
Chikli’s call dovetailed with another appeal to Jewish New Yorkers made by a spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron, Yishai Fleisher.
“Indeed, it was a great run, and you were a blessing to NYC. But Jews will feel less and less comfortable in the Big Apple,” tweeted Fleisher. “So do yourself a favor, buy real estate in the Land of Israel.”
The outreach from Israel sought to reach the majority of New York Jews who voted against Mamdani, many of whom saw his criticism of Israel as a warning sign for the safety of the city’s Jewish communities under his leadership.
While Mamdani has frequently reiterated a commitment to protecting Jewish New Yorkers, the impulse to flee the city following his win loomed large over Jews attending Andrew Cuomo’s event on election night, when the former governor came in second.
“One-hundred percent people are going to be leaving New York City under this mayorship,” said Joshua Friedman, a 32-year-old Orthodox Jew from the Upper East Side, in an interview. “There’s no reason to stay. Someone that hates you in your own backyard, why would you want to be here?”
After the election was called, Victoria Zurkiev, an Orthodox Queens resident and social media influencer at the event, said she predicted that “people who are successful will leave New York because they wouldn’t want to put their life in danger.”
“I believe that there is no life with Jewish people in New York going forward,” Zurkiev said. “I’m a New Yorker, this is my town, and to now sit there and think, where are we going next? It’s pretty sad.”
Vowing to move after a disappointing election result is almost a cliche, and not just for Jews in New York — exit talk is high among the wealthy in the city, whom Mamdani hopes to tax at a higher rate.
But actually leaving — and uprooting homes, careers and family life in the process — is much rarer. Still, while it remains unclear how many Jewish New Yorkers will finalize plans to leave the city, some communities have begun pitching themselves as destinations.
In Annapolis, Maryland, which currently has a Jewish candidate leading its mayoral race, plans for a new Jewish federation to serve the state’s capital and Chesapeake region were quickly shored up to coincide with New York City’s election outcome, according to Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a co-founder of the new federation.
“We do expect that we’ll be making an appeal to new Jewish New Yorkers,” Laszlo Mizrahi, who is active in Democratic politics, said in an interview. “We feel that we are uniquely well positioned for people who want to have a warm and wonderful Jewish life that is without drama.”
Rabbi Marc Schneier, a prominent rabbi of the Hampton Synagogue and friend of Cuomo, announced that he was planning to build the first Jewish day school in the Hamptons.
“This is in anticipation of the thousands of Jewish families that will flock to the Hamptons and greater Suffolk County to escape the antisemitic climate of Mamdani’s New York City,” Schneier wrote in a post on Facebook.
Les Schachter, the board president of Congregation Nishmat Am, a Conservative synagogue in Plano, Texas, issued an “open invitation” to New York’s Jews to settle in North Texas.
“With the recent changes in New York City’s political leadership, I’ve heard from many Jewish families and business owners who are weighing their options,” said Schachter in an email. “If you’re considering a new start, I invite you to look closely at Plano and the greater North Texas region — where Jewish life is thriving, community is strong, and you’ll be genuinely, unmistakably welcome.”
Michael Benmeleh, a real estate agent in Miami, a city with a sizable, and growing, Jewish population, also emailed an appeal to Jewish New Yorkers on Thursday, writing “Tired of traffic, taxes, and Mamdani? Stop kvetching, start packing.”
Perhaps the most intense response has come from Israel, a country built in large part by Jews who left places that had gone from hospitable to hostile. While Chikli and Fleisher are right-wing figures, the assumption that New York Jews would want to leave was so widespread that it was the subject of a skit on the satirical show “Eretz Nehederet.”
In the skit, a New Yorker and an Israeli fleeing their home countries cross paths at Ben Gurion Airport. The New Yorker making aliyah says, “Trust me, it’s just not safe for Jews,” to which the Israeli, on his way to New York, replies, “You literally came to the most dangerous place for Jews on the planet.”
A poll of 501 Israelis published Thursday found that nearly half said they would avoid traveling to New York while Mamdani is mayor. The Jerusalem Post dedicated its front page on Thursday to an image of a disintegrating Statue of Liberty under the headline “Jews at risk in New York City.” And a satirical image shouting out Mamdani as the employee of the month at Nefesh B’Nefesh, an agency that supports Jews in claiming Israeli citizenship, went viral on social media.
Widespread social media comments suggest that some New York Jews at least thinking about moving to Israel, or making aliyah, in response to Mamdani’s election can be found widely.
“We need to take all our money, all our business, and ourselves and go back home to Israel,” one Jewish New Yorker who said she had already “updated my Aliyah paperwork” wrote in a Facebook comment. “Not because we are afraid ( even though many of us are) but because we need to SHOW the world why it looks like when we take away all we give and bring it to the only place we are safe- Israel.”
But even among those who see Mamdani’s win as a potent portent of antisemitic trouble, the idea of a Jewish exit from the biggest Jewish city in the world doesn’t always hold attraction.
“Don’t allow anyone to push you out,” Mayor Eric Adams told the Israeli journalist Neria Kraus in July, months before he dropped out of the election Mamdani won. “If I’m a Jewish person I’m not plotting out my plan to flee. You’re not going to run around the country every time someone does something antisemitic.”
Rabbi Tali Adler, a faculty member at Yeshivat Hadar who lives in New York City, wrote in a Facebook post the morning after the election that she understood why Jews in the city were scared about its result. But, she reminded them, thinking about or planning to flee was not the only traditional Jewish path ahead of them.
“We are the descendants of ancestors who not only knew when to leave, but so much more often, how to stay,” Adler wrote.
The post From Texas to Tel Aviv, invitations go out to Jews fleeing ‘Mamdani’s New York’ appeared first on The Forward.
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An activist Jewish artist who used his work to fight fascism
The heroic image of George Washington standing in a boat as it cuts through the icy Delaware River on Christmas Eve in 1776 is etched into the collective American consciousness. But when Polish-born political artist Arthur Szyk painted the scene in 1942, he recast it for a nation at war.
In his Washington Crossing the Delaware, the soldiers are not uniform. Instead, they reflect a diverse America, where freedom and protection belong to everyone. Intricately detailed, the richly pigmented painting is one of more than 100 works by Szyk on view in Art of Freedom: The Life and Work of Arthur Szyk at New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. The exhibition pulls together rarely seen material into public view as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
“What makes this exhibition and celebration of Arthur Szyk important for 2026 — 250 years on from the American Revolution and subsequent Declaration of Independence — is how he framed freedom as something to fight for. He loved America and was granted citizenship in 1948,” said Sara Softness, the museum’s director of curatorial affairs. “The title ‘Art of Freedom’ has a double meaning: not only that the artist made pictures about or featuring themes of democratic ideals, anti-Fascism, and pro-pluralism, but that freedom itself is a practice, a metier, a life’s work.”
Born in Łódź, Poland in 1894, Szyk experienced major upheavals of the 20th century: two world wars, the rise of totalitarianism, and Nazism, the founding of the State of Israel, McCarthyism, as well as deeply entrenched American racism and antisemitism.
After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he, his wife and two children fled to London, ultimately immigrating to the United States in 1940.
While Szyk was an established artist when he arrived in the U.S., most Americans first encountered him through the lavishly illuminated Szyk Haggadah. Completed in Poland in the 1930s and published in London in 1940, The Times of London praised the work as “worthy to be placed among the most beautiful of books that the hand of man has ever produced.”
Running through July 26, 2026, the show includes 18 never-before-seen pieces and 38 original works, the majority of which are on loan from Irvin Ungar, a rabbi-turned-antiquarian.
The show includes commercial cartoons Szyk produced for Collier’s Magazine and illuminated manuscripts, as well as his 1928–1929 sketchbook for the Washington and His Times series. Visitors get an up close look at the painstaking labor required to accurately show pivotal battle scenes from the American Revolution as well as Szyk’s efforts to draft the highly specific weaponry and military dress of the Revolution’s fighters.
A fierce anti-fascist, themes of military might pervaded Szyk’s works throughout World War II.
This is never more evident than in his 1942 suite illustrating the Four Freedoms that hung in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House. Each miniature, on display for the first time in 80 years, portrays a medieval knight on a quest to secure Roosevelt’s four essential freedoms — Speech, Religion, Want and Fear.
Freedom of Speech shows the knight wearing a red and blue cape pounding a lectern as he speaks freely; a shield embossed in the colors of the American flag rests nearby. In Freedom from Want, abundant food surrounds the knight, in Freedom of Religion he kneels in prayer and in Freedom of Fear he charges into battle.
Many of Szyk’s works meld American ideals with his firm belief that the government must do all it can to rescue Jews. During this period, many of his miniatures were sold as stamps and posters to generate much needed wartime funds. In this way, Szyk not only highlighted the fight against the Nazis, he cemented the defense of these freedoms as a moral obligation for all Americans.
“The exhibition is a portrait of a person who, with his pen, inks and gouaches, never put down the fight — whether for Allied victory or Jewish salvation or, what his career embodied so thoroughly, for freedom of expression,” Softness said.
The latter eventually drew the glare of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Szyk was primarily investigated for his works that challenged racism, whether it was highlighting the experience of Black veterans during World War II or the segregationist policies of the South, as well as his outspoken support for Jewish refugees.
Like the medieval knight he depicted in Freedom from Fear, Szyk charged ahead. Indeed he threw down the gauntlet in his 1951 piece, Thomas Jefferson’s Oath.
The jewel-toned work illuminates Jefferson’s famous quote: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
74 years after he died in his home in New Canaan, Szyk’s legacy endures.
“He refused to dilute identity or politics. He worked loudly, explicitly, and without apology — a proud American, a committed Jew, and a relentless defender of civil rights,” Softness said.
The post An activist Jewish artist who used his work to fight fascism appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Top Diplomat Calls on Jews to Make Aliyah Amid Global Surge in Antisemitic Violence
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar attends a press conference with the Danish Foreign Minister (not pictured) in Jerusalem, Sept. 7, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Ida Marie Odgaard/via REUTERS
Amid a global surge in antisemitic violence, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar has urged Jews living abroad to make aliyah to Israel, warning that diaspora communities are increasingly vulnerable to hatred and hostility as foreign governments fail to protect them.
“Over the past year, we have concentrated efforts in the fight against the rising antisemitism around the world,” Saar said Sunday during a Hanukkah candle-lighting event in Rishon LeZion, a city in central Israel.
“We demanded that foreign governments take real steps against the new antisemitism. Few did so. Most allowed an unrestrained surge of overt antisemitism in the public sphere,” the top Israeli diplomat continued.
Saar’s latest remarks come in the wake of a deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach last Sunday, which left 15 dead and at least 40 injured.
Earlier this year, a string of deadly terrorist attacks also targeted Jewish communities, including the Yom Kippur assault in Manchester that killed two Jewish men, the firebombing of a march for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado – which killed one and injured 13 – and the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
“Jews have the right to live in safety everywhere. Today, Jews are being hunted across the world. Today I call on Jews in England, Jews in France, Jews in Australia, Jews in Canada, Jews in Belgium: come to the Land of Israel! Come home!” Saar said during his speech.
“We are waiting for you here with open arms. With love. In the true home of the Jewish people. Why raise your children in this atmosphere?” the Israeli diplomat continued. “Come with your families to the land of our forefathers, to the State of Israel, where the Jews taught the entire world what Jewish self-defense means. The time has come.”
Jewish communities around the world, especially in Europe, have faced a troubling surge in antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel sentiment since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jewish leaders have consistently called on authorities to take swift action against the rising wave of targeted attacks and anti-Jewish hate crimes, ranging from the vandalism of murals and businesses to violent physical assaults, that their communities continue to face.
In the United Kingdom, more than half of British Jews — 51 percent — believe they have no long-term future in the country or elsewhere in Europe, according to a survey conducted by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released Monday.
Amid this climate of rising hostility, almost half of British Jews (45 percent) report feeling unwelcome in the UK, while a majority (61 percent) have considered leaving the country in the past two years, citing the recent surge in antisemitism as the main reason.
The newly released report also found that 59 percent of British Jews try to avoid displaying visible signs of their Jewish identity out of fear of antisemitic attacks, while 96 percent believe that Jews in Britain are less safe now than they were before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Fewer than one in ten British Jews believe authorities are doing enough to tackle antisemitism, with only 14 percent feeling that the police are adequately protecting them.
In France, the local Jewish community has also faced a growing climate of hostility and antisemitic violence, which has even extended into politics, sparking national debates and drawing condemnation from leaders and civil society groups.
In one of the latest controversies, Bernard Bazinet, the mayor of Augignac in the southwestern Dordogne region, was expelled from the French Socialist Party earlier this month after posting antisemitic comments online about Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.
“France is too Jewish to boycott [Eurovision]!” Bazinet wrote in a post on Facebook.
French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez strongly condemned Bazinet’s comments, warning that he could face sanctions ranging from suspension to outright dismissal.
However, the rising wave of antisemitic attacks and hatred has spread beyond Western countries, reaching nations across the Eastern Mediterranean and other regions worldwide.
On Sunday, a group of Jews in Istanbul were attacked by pro-Palestinian protesters while on their way to light the eighth and final Hanukkah candle at the Neve Shalom synagogue.
According to widely circulated social media videos, the attackers approached the group while shouting, “These Zionists should leave this country,” waving Palestinian flags as they tried to get closer.
In a separate incident over the weekend, an Israeli man was attacked outside the hotel where he was staying in Limassol, Cyprus, after assailants reportedly heard him speaking Hebrew on the phone.
According to the victim’s father, his son was talking on the phone when a man approached him, asked for a cigarette, and then brutally assaulted him.
The victim was rushed to a local hospital and then flown to Israel on Sunday for emergency eye surgery after the attack, but doctors were unable to save his vision.
“My son, a young Israeli, was violently attacked at the entrance to the hotel where he was staying in Cyprus. Not on the street, not in a bar. At the entrance to the hotel — a place that is supposed to be safe and secure,” the victim’s father wrote in a post on Facebook. “He was brutally beaten, injured in the head and face, and evacuated for medical treatment.”
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Northwestern University’s Doha Campus a ‘Pipeline’ for Qatari Elites, New Report Finds
Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani speaks on the first day of the 23rd edition of the annual Doha Forum, in Doha, Qatar, Dec. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa
The children of the Qatari aristocracy are vastly overrepresented at the Northwestern University campus in Qatar (NU-Q), a fact that, according to a new report, undermines the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by acting in practice as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
The Middle East Forum (MEF), a think tank whose mission is to protect Western values and promote US interests in the Middle East, published its findings on NU-Q in a damning new report. MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
“Northwestern’s Qatar (NU-Q) campus has become a de facto elite access pipeline, admitting members of Qatar’s most powerful royal and ruling families at rates that bear no resemblance to the country’s demographic reality,” says the report, titled “How the Qatari Royals and Elite Conquered Northwestern University’s Qatar Campus in Doha.”
“Rather than functioning as an open academic institution, NU-Q operates as a selective training ground for the same families who finance and control the campus, effectively blurring the line between a US university and a state-run patronage system,” the report continues. “What emerges is not merely an educational partnership, but a closed-loop system of influence production which a US university’s foreign campus helps cultivate the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class, with direct implications for US policy, national security, and foreign influence.”
The report goes on to say that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continues. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
MEF’s report has deep roots in debates over the Middle East and the ambiguities inherent in how countries conduct their international affairs.
Until the collapse of the British Empire in the years following the conclusion of World War II, Qatar functioned as a pillar and beneficiary of Great Britain’s regional order in the Middle East, having agreed to be one of many Persian Gulf protectorates which blocked Ottoman expansion and protected Great Britain’s sea route to its imperial holdings in India. The US opened diplomatic relations with the oil-rich kingdom in 1971 after it achieved independence from Great Britain, and the two states continue to enjoy what the US State Department describes as a “strategic partnership” for fostering economic growth, counterterrorism, cultural exchange, and defense and security cooperation.
The US designated Qatar as a major non-NATO ally in 2022, and President Donald Trump earlier this year committed, via executive order, to defend it if attacked.
However, Qatar has also been a patron of Hamas for years, hosting the Palestinian terrorist group’s political bureau in Doha since 2012.
During the same period, the Middle Eastern monarchy has invested tens of billions of dollars in the US. MEF released a separate report in May exposing the extent of Qatar’s far-reaching financial entanglements within American institutions, shedding light on what experts described as a coordinated effort to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. The findings showed that Qatar has attempted to expand its soft power in the US by spending $33.4 billion on business and real estate projects, over $6 billion on universities, and $72 million on American lobbyists since 2012.
This effort has focused heavily on higher education.
A recent report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), for example, found that Qatar has funneled roughly $20 billion into American schools and universities over five decades as part of a coordinated, 100-year project to embed Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in the US.
The 200-page report, unveiled in Washington, DC to members of Congress, chronicled a 50-year effort by Brotherhood-linked groups to embed themselves in American academia, civil society, and government agencies, exposing what ISGAP called the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy, while maintaining an agenda fundamentally at odds with liberal democratic values.
In June, ISGAP released a separate report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood,” a 132-page document which described dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown University’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its Qatari benefactors — who have given it over $1 billion over the past decade — the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
“The Qatari regime targets Georgetown due to its unrivaled access to current and future leaders. Over two decades, that investment has paid off — embedding Muslim Brotherhood scholars and narratives deep within the American academic and political culture,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, executive director of ISGAP, said in a statement on the report. “This masterful use of soft power is not only about Georgetown. It is how authoritarian regimes are buying access, narrative control, and ideological legitimacy — and too many universities are willing sellers.”
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, located in the Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report said, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Trump signed an executive order last month directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
The order did not mention Qatar, but experts have flagged Doha’s support for a wide range of Islamist groups.
“From the Taliban to Hamas to violent Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to Somalia’s Al-Shabab, Qatar allows the groups it hosts to access the global financial system and launder money,” American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Michael Rubin wrote in September. “Qatar has long been part of [a] war on the West, even as it tries to escape accountability for its actions. Moral clarity matters.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.