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Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel?
New York mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s recently resurfaced remark that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” has renewed concerns from some Jewish voters about his potential administration’s attitude toward Israel — and renewed questions about the Israeli military’s relationship with police departments across the U.S.
Mamdani made the comment during an August 2023 conference for the Democratic Socialists of America. Mamdani, a DSA member representing Queens in the New York State Assembly, was a keynote speaker at the conference and appeared on a panel about “Socialist Internationalism.”
Mamdani said during the panel that for Americans to care about international issues, “We have to make them hyper-local. We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF. We have to make — not specifically that example all the time — just to say that for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn’t much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life.”
Mamdani told CNN last week that he had been referring to training exercises that have taken place between the New York Police Department and the Israel Defense Forces, not suggesting that the two were in close collaboration.
American Jewish leaders have widely objected to the comments. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the head of prominent New York Reform congregation Central Synagogue, said it “contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism.” Meanwhile, progressive groups outside the Jewish establishment say Mamdani hit on an uncomfortable truth about American law enforcement.
The image of an NYPD boot laced by an IDF soldier evokes a broader claim that the militarism and brutality of American law enforcement was imported from Israel in police training programs. The claim first gained traction in anti-Zionist spaces following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin.
The relationship between American police departments and Israel has since become the subject of ongoing criticism by groups who say Israel’s law enforcement practices promote aggressive surveillance, discrimination and violent intervention, and otherwise infringe on human rights.
But police aggression in the U.S. long predates Israel’s founding, much less American law enforcement training visits. The anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace, though it opposes the trips, has cautioned against the notion that Israel is the origin of American police violence or racism, saying that such claims “obscure the fundamental responsibility and nature of the U.S.” and “further an antisemitic ideology.”
So what is the actual relationship between Israel and American police today, and what is its impact on law enforcement tactics in the U.S.?
Roots in counterterrorism
American law enforcement’s relationship with Israel dates back to the 1990s, but accelerated after 9/11, when police departments across the U.S. were responding to the threat of terrorism. In September 2002, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, an American nonprofit, brought high-ranking law enforcement officials from several major U.S. metro areas — among them New York, Los Angeles, South Florida and Dallas — to Israel to learn best practices for terrorism deterrence and response.
According to a press release JINSA issued at the time, the Americans observed “methods and techniques” that included bomb disposal, forensics, crowd control and coordination with the media and the public. The release also said the group visited police and IDF outposts to study Border Guard operations in the Galilee and the West Bank.
Since then, the trips have become routine. As of 2020, more than 1,000 American police officers from across the country have made similar training visits, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. JINSA isn’t the only group organizing the trips; the Anti-Defamation League and a program called the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange have also led American police trips to Israel.
JINSA maintains that its trips focus on management and policy issues, and that officials do not learn about physical tactics. But that may be little consolation to groups that oppose the visits in the first place, who say that observers of any Israeli police operation in Palestinian areas are witnessing live demonstrations of repressive violence.
The trips are only one aspect of the relationship. There is also a more direct collaboration between the NYPD and Israel: the former has had an office — though it reportedly consists of a single officer — at the Israeli police headquarters since 2012, as part of the NYPD’s counterterrorism efforts.
Backlash to the relationship
One group leading opposition to the trips is JVP, which in 2018 published a 57-page report about them called “Deadly Exchange.”
The report documented not only what officers encounter on the trips — for example, a network of hundreds of surveillance cameras around Jerusalem’s Old City — but also their parallel tactics in the U.S.; it points to a 5,300-camera surveillance system in Atlanta that the Atlanta Police Department said was modeled after the command center in Jerusalem. It also claimed that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police used Skunk, a foul-odor spray, on protesters in Ferguson in 2014 after seeing it deployed in Israel.
Not all of its claims are substantiated. One section that describes a Jewish lawmaker’s push for increased surveillance states that he was influenced by Israel’s example; that lawmaker never said such a thing and had not attended a police exchange program. Other cases cited in the report show similarities in American and Israeli law enforcement practices but do not show a causal link between them.
Still, the JVP report became a proof text following George Floyd’s death, when Black Lives Matter protesters were building coalitions with the pro-Palestinian resistance. Protesters pointed to the Minneapolis police officers’ attendance at a security exchange conference at the Israeli Consulate in Chicago in 2012, saying the knee-to-neck restraint Chauvin used to strangle Floyd was a hold IDF soldiers often employed on Palestinians.
Palestinians have described similar treatment by IDF soldiers. But records show neck restraints had been used in MPD training since at least 2002, and it’s unclear whether Israeli officials even taught the chokehold at the conference, or whether Chauvin — who was on the force at the time — was in attendance.
Moreover, reasons for increasing militarism in American police forces are manifold. To explain why American police departments look more like military bases now, observers would point to the military industrial complex and civilian access to military-grade weapons (which led law enforcement to keep up).
Nevertheless, the charge of Israeli influence has become all-encompassing; as in countless other examples, it is a simple explanation for complicated, maddening and seemingly unsolvable American institutional dysfunction. And as Mamdani said in 2023, it’s a convenient way to make international concerns feel “hyper-local.”
The post Mamdani said NYPD boots were ‘laced by the IDF.’ What is the relationship between American police departments and Israel? appeared first on The Forward.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.