The calls and texts started pouring in well before the race was even called. Friends, colleagues, rabbis, and former students — people who rarely agreed on anything — shared the same sense of shock.

“What happens now?” one message asked. “What does this mean for us?” said another. The tone was not rage, but grief along with fear, sadness, and concern about the Jewish future in New York.

Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor-elect of this city and presented a harsh and uncompromising vision of the future in his acceptance speech. These ideas would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Yet here we are. The question before Jewish New York is not whether the election was fair (it was), or whether we can wish the results away (we can’t), but whether we will have the courage to respond with clarity, unity, and purpose.

This was no fringe contest decided by radicals. Many Jews — especially in Orthodox and older communities — backed former governor Andrew Cuomo, drawn to his long record and his familiarity with Jewish institutions. But roughly a third of Jewish voters, disproportionately younger and more secular, cast their ballots for Mamdani.

They did so despite his open anti-Zionism, his refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” calls to end the Cornell-Technion partnership on Roosevelt Island, and his repeated portrayal of Israel as a colonial project.

That division tells a story larger than one election. It tells of a community that has mistaken assimilation for acceptance, comfort for civic strength, and political quietism for peace. Mamdani’s rise is a mirror. What it reflects is not only the left’s growing hostility to Jewish identity, but our own complacency.

For decades, many Jews in New York assumed the city’s liberalism was a shield; that education, affluence, and civic reputation would protect us from the oldest hatred. October 7, 2023, should have shattered that illusion. Mamdani’s victory should bury it.

This is a man who proudly calls himself anti-Zionist, who has justified slogans glorifying violence against Jews, and who has described Israel’s existence as a moral failure. His final campaign message had a Palestinian flag prominently displayed behind him to further cement those statements.

That such a candidate could not only run but win in a city once called the modern capital of Jewish life speaks volumes. It reveals how profoundly the moral vocabulary of our politics has changed and how hesitant too many Jews have become to defend our own legitimacy in public life.

Too many Jewish institutions were slow to react, slow to mobilize, and slow to sound more than vague alarms. That hesitation cost us ground and voices. It revealed that for all our communal infrastructure, the reflex was to retreat, not rise. Engagement is no longer optional, it is imperative.

The fragmentation of the Jewish vote reflects a generational and cultural drift. Many younger Jews, alienated from synagogues and federations, are drawn to movements that speak in the language of justice and belonging, the very language our tradition helped shape but we’ve allowed others to monopolize.

Their support for Mamdani is not betrayal so much as a symptom of neglect: of education, of meaning, of connection. We taught the Holocaust, but not covenant. We taught survival, but not sanctity. We taught tolerance, but not purpose. We let Jewish identity become a lifestyle brand instead of a moral calling.

If Mamdani’s election jolts us awake, it will have served one sacred purpose: to remind us that continuity requires more than nostalgia and philanthropy. It requires conviction: a belief that being Jewish in New York is not an accident of history but a mission in itself.

New York’s Jewish community has been tested before. In the 1970s, when the city teetered on bankruptcy and neighborhoods burned, many families fled. Yet those who stayed built anew: schools, community centers, newspapers, and cultural networks that became models for the nation. Jewish New York did not survive by retreating. It survived by rebuilding.

We face another such inflection point. The test is not whether we can out-organize a political movement, but whether we can rediscover the courage and confidence that once made this community indispensable to the moral life of the city.

The temptation in moments like this is to withdraw — to build higher walls, add more guards, host more closed-door meetings. Security matters. But civic withdrawal is suicide. Jewish life flourished in New York not because we hid, but because we built. Our response to hostility must be institutional vitality: new leadership, deeper partnerships, serious investment in Jewish education and culture.

We must engage Mamdani’s administration on issues of safety, education, and fairness — but engagement must never mean erasure. Jewish organizations should meet him firmly and respectfully, insisting that antisemitism be confronted, religious freedom protected, and Jewish schools and synagogues treated as full partners in civic life. If he governs all New Yorkers, he must prove it.

Every political earthquake exposes what is fragile and what endures. For all our anxiety, Jewish New York remains vast, creative, and resilient. There is an extraordinary opportunity now to rebuild communal strength; not in fear, but with faith. That means reclaiming Jewish education as the beating heart of continuity, alive with history, text, and moral reasoning, not rote or apologetic.

It means reinvesting in culture, music, art, and literature that express pride, humor, and belonging. It means reconnecting generations, letting older Jews teach courage and younger Jews teach empathy. And it means redefining leadership: raising voices who are intellectually serious, civically engaged, and unafraid to say that Jewish life has something vital to offer America.

As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded us, “The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference — can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, and ideals are different from mine?”

That must be our standard, not fearlessness as denial, but courage rooted in identity. New York has long been a proving ground for Jewish civic imagination from the Yiddish presses of the Lower East Side to the philanthropies that built hospitals and universities. The task now is to channel that same creative energy into a new era of pluralism without passivity.

In the short term, Jewish institutions must ensure that the mayor-elect’s administration guarantees security for synagogues and day schools, protects kosher and Sabbath accommodations, and confronts antisemitic hate crimes with the urgency they demand.

In the longer term, our challenge is civic and spiritual: to fortify a community that has grown affluent but unanchored, visible but unsure of its message. We cannot outsource Jewish identity to politicians or assume our moral credibility will be recognized automatically. It must be earned anew through learning, living, and leadership.

If Mamdani’s tenure tests us, let it also refine us. The health of Jewish New York will depend less on his rhetoric than on our resilience.

New York has always been more than a metropolis. For Jews, it is a covenantal space: a place where our story and America’s intersect. That story is now being rewritten, and we have a choice: to fade quietly into the background, or to remind the city that Jewish life is not a relic but a living force. Mamdani’s victory was democratic. Our response must be democratic too and rooted in persuasion, education, and courage. We will work with any administration that governs fairly, but we will speak plainly when Jewish dignity is at stake.

If this moment pushes us to strengthen our institutions, deepen our learning, and reassert our moral voice, then Jewish New York will emerge stronger, not weaker. The covenant did not end on election night. It begins again each morning — in our classrooms and sanctuaries, in our courage to speak, and in our refusal to disappear. That is how Jewish New York will endure: not by hiding, but by leading.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.