When we talk about Jewish safety, whose safety, exactly, are we talking about?

I found myself mulling that question after Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, of Manhattan’s Park Avenue Synagogue, recently came out against Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Instead, Cosgrove encouraged his congregants to support former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He said he was moved to take that public stance out of concern for Jewish safety and the Jewish future.

“It’s not my style to endorse any candidate. But as a rabbi, when there’s a threat to the Jewish community, I believe it’s my responsibility to call that out,” Cosgrove told Haaretz in a follow-up interview.

Cosgrove was articulating one understanding of Jewish safety — an understanding contingent on politicians voicing support for Israel. He has been far from alone in the run-up to this election, for which early voting is already underway.

The American Jewish Committee expressed “alarm” at Mamdani’s charge that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, and his refusal to say he supports the existence of Israel as a specifically Jewish state, among other positions. (Mamdani has said he does not support any state’s right to a racial or religious hierarchy.) The group urged Mamdani to better consider the concerns of the Jewish community, and “change course.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, has attacked Mamdani as being insufficiently committed to Jews and Jewish safety. More than 1,000 rabbis across the country signed a letter, citing Cosgrove’s speech, that denounces Mamdani and the political normalization of anti-Zionism.

But there’s an understanding of Jewish safety missing from that viewpoint — one that largely impacts Jewish women.

Cuomo resigned as governor after being accused of sexually harassing multiple women — 13, per the Department of Justice — while in office. He was accused, in one case, of attempted retaliation; in another, he sought the gynecological records of one of his accusers.

Why is his alleged behavior not also seen as a threat?

I don’t live in New York City. I can’t vote in the mayoral election. But the failure of so many Jewish leaders to meaningfully engage with what Cuomo’s election might mean for women has deeply alarmed me.

I do not know how to be just Jewish or just a woman. I only know how to be a Jewish woman. And the idea that I, or any woman, has to pretend that the normalization of sexual harassment in politics is somehow irrelevant to our day-to-day safety — because our commitment to Jewish peoplehood comes first — seems to me to be an extremely limited understanding of Jewish safety. And, for that matter, of Jewish peoplehood.

For many Jewish women, we cannot talk about threats to our safety and dignity, and the importance of preserving our ability to move through the world without fear — all subjects rightly brought up when we speak of Jewish safety — and not talk about sexual harassment. That harassment is wrapped up in how we experience antisemitism: Antisemitic abuse toward women often includes sexist language. For example, in response to my writing as a Jewish woman weighing in on Jewish politics, I have been told more than once that I deserve to be sexually assaulted.

And sexual harassment has been a serious issue in explicitly Jewish spaces. For just two examples: Leading Jewish sociologist Stephen M. Cohen was accused of sexual harassment and forcible touching by multiple women in 2018. Leading Jewish philanthropist Micheal Steinhardt was accused of a pattern of sexual harassment the following year. More generally, a 2023 poll found that 35 percent of women in the US have been sexually harassed or abused in the workplace. 81% of women nationwide report experiencing sexual harassment at some point in their lives; it stands to reason that, for Jews, that statistic is likely similarly, shockingly high.

There is a meaningful risk that the election of a mayor with a record like Cuomo’s would make women feel less secure reporting harassment to those in power. It’s also possible his election would make women more likely to experience harassment from those who might see his victory as an opening to resume patterns of behavior briefly made taboo by the #MeToo movement. To avoid seriously contemplating those prospects when considering which mayoral candidates might endanger the wellbeing of New York City’s Jews is to treat the specific safety of Jewish women, and other Jewish victims and survivors of sexual harassment and assault, as secondary.

I know that not every Jewish woman will agree with me. Many of the rabbis who signed the letter warning against Mamdani were women. I know that there will be those who say that this is irrelevant, or not a Jewish issue. I know there will be others who feel, even if they wouldn’t say so, that Jewish women should, in this instance, place concerns tied to their womanhood behind concerns tied to their Jewishness.

But I can’t untie the two. And I can’t understand why so many leaders in my community seem not to have even considered the possibility that the return to power of an accused serial sexual harasser might be relevant to Jewish safety and dignity.

It’s true that many of those who have spoken out against Mamdani have not explicitly thrown their support behind Cuomo. But as Cosgrove noted, to not support one is effectively to support the other.

And here is the broader picture of what we risk supporting by not treating sexual harassment as a real danger: We live in a country in which the president has been found liable of sexual abuse and was still reelected; two Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments despite having been accused of sexual harassment and assault; and the Defense Secretary was accused of sexual assault and was confirmed anyway.

All of that is normal now. You can be accused, credibly and repeatedly, of sexual harassment or worse and still be given immense power. So, I have to ask: Isn’t that normalization a threat to the safety and dignity of the many Jews who are women? And if not: why not?

The post In the Mamdani-Cuomo race, why should I choose safety as a Jew over safety as a woman? appeared first on The Forward.

Maccabi Tel Aviv midfielder Sagiv Jehezkel and AFC Ajax Amsterdam defender Anton Gaaei play during the Ajax vs Maccabi Tel Aviv match at the Johan Cruijff ArenA for the UEFA Europa League in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on November 7, 2024. Photo: Stefan Koops – EYE4images via Reuters Connect

Street thugs across Europe are making Israeli athletes and their supporters unsafe. At the same time, bureaucrats are attempting to make Israelis unwelcome at international competitions.

Earlier this month, police in England, citing the potential for violence, barred Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending a key match against Birmingham’s Aston Villa on November 6.

As British Culture Minister Lisa Nandy pointed out in a parliamentary speech against the ban, it was the first time in 25 years that visiting fans have been barred from attending a game in the United Kingdom.

The British government — embarrassed by the effective exclusion of Jewish attendees on the heels of an attack by a radical Islamist on a Manchester synagogue that claimed two lives — attempted to reverse the decision, but Maccabi’s management opted to refuse their ticket allocation, regardless.

“The wellbeing and safety of our fans is paramount,” Maccabi Tel Aviv said in a statement, “and from hard lessons learned, we have taken the decision to decline any allocation offered on behalf of away fans.”

Violence between opposing fan bases is all too common in soccer. But fans of Italian sides Genoa and Sampdoria aren’t barred from watching games their teams play in England, nor are supporters of Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid. That’s despite the fact that all of these fanbases have participated in bloodcurdling brawls in the last year.

Israel, however, is held to a different standard.

In this case, Maccabi’s traumatic night in the Netherlands last year was cited as a reason to fear violence. In Amsterdam, local Islamist vigilantes, not fans of Ajax, whom Maccabi were playing, launched a “Jew hunt” against the traveling Israelis on various messaging apps, using the raucous behavior of a tiny minority of Israeli supporters — behavior familiar to all soccer clubs — as cover for what Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, called a “pogrom.”

Maccabi correctly grasped that a repeat experience might await their fans in Birmingham, where radical Islamism among the city’s large Muslim population has proliferated over the last decade.

Four Islamist members of the House of Commons who were recently elected as independents standing on a Gaza solidarity platform helped instigate the Aston Villa ban.

Their campaign rested on claims that Maccabi fans had sparked the violence in Amsterdam. This overlooked the Dutch authorities’ conclusion that the Israelis were not responsible for the violence despite the bellicose chants of some of them. The police also “ignored” the advice of the British government’s advisor on antisemitism, Lord John Mann, who said that responsibility for the violence did not lie with the Maccabi fans.

Indeed, Nandy pointed out that the ban “was a decision not taken [because of] the risk posed by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans; it was a decision taken because of the risk posed to them, because they support an Israeli team and because they are Jewish.”

In reaching their decision, local police are also said to have used a report by the extreme anti-Zionist Hind Rajab Foundation — run by Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Belgian-based Islamist with ties to Hezbollah — which predictably blamed all the trouble on the Tel Aviv fans. The foundation’s purpose is to hunt down Israelis traveling overseas to have them arrested on allegations of war crimes.

By banning Israelis from a public event, British authorities placated virulent anti-Israel activists rather than confronting them. This kind of response is hardly limited to soccer and is not unique to the United Kingdom.

Following the circus of demonstrators harassing the Israeli cycling team in a Spanish tournament in September 2025, a major Italian cycling tournament banned the Israeli team for “public security” reasons.

In 2024, Israeli competitors were similarly excluded from a climbing competition in the Netherlands and a hockey tournament in Bulgaria — though pressure from the NHL reversed the hockey ban. Even if officially presented as concern for their safety, sports organizers are punishing Israelis for receiving death threats rather than standing up to violent agitators.

If not for the ceasefire in Gaza, UEFA, European soccer’s top governing body, likely would have ejected Israel. The proposed move rested on activists falsely depicting Israel’s war against the terrorist group Hamas as genocide. The exclusionary move was the boardroom version of the Amsterdam Jew hunt — a tyranny of the majority that holds anti-Israel views. Both the bureaucrats and the street brawlers justify their discrimination and harassment as responses to perceived Israeli crimes.

But the reality is that the Maccabi ban is an extension of the so-called “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) campaign that solely targets Israeli individuals and associations — and which is itself the outgrowth of an Arab League boycott of Israel instituted three years before the Jewish State came into being.

Cloaked in the language of human rights, BDS seeks to eradicate the Jewish State and harass its supporters.

Jews getting chased in the streets and forced into hiding in the same city where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis is obviously abhorrent. But the anti-Israel discrimination presented as safety concerns or human rights protection is more complicated to outside observers. Among Jews, as well as all those who understand the trajectory of antisemitism, both carry an unmistakable echo of the past: Jews are not wanted here.

Ben Cohen is a senior analyst and the rapid response director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where David May is a senior research analyst and research manager. For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow Ben and David on X @BenCohenOpinion and @DavidSamuelMay. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Ari’el Stachel in “Other.” Photo: provided.

Theatre has always been one of the most powerful spaces for self-reflection. It is intimate and raw, placing us in the dark together while a performer unfolds a story that demands our attention. Unlike film or television, there is no screen to hide behind, no pause button, no escape. We share the same room, the same air, and we can’t look away.

Ari’el Stachel’s new solo play — originally staged as Out of Character and now retitled Other — leans fully into that vulnerability. Stachel, who grew up with a Yemeni-Jewish father and a European Ashkenazi mother, has lived his life moving between worlds. His Jewish story is the entry point, but the performance quickly expands outward. He is able to pass as Jewish, Arab, Middle Eastern, and even Black, depending on context. At times, this mobility is liberating, opening doors to multiple communities. At others it is alienating, leaving him with the disorienting sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. Other is about carrying multiple voices within a single body and still searching for one authentic voice.

The backdrop of 9/11 looms large in Stachel’s account. As a boy in California, he watched his father — darker-skinned, bearded, recognizably Middle Eastern — suddenly become a figure of suspicion. Overnight, his family’s presence was filtered through the fear and mistrust that saturated America after the attacks. For Stachel, it was a formative trauma. He recounts how he began distancing himself from his father’s appearance and heritage, denying or reshaping parts of his identity in order to escape the judgments of others. What might have been a simple story of a mixed-heritage Jewish boyhood became a painful initiation into the politics of race, religion, and suspicion in post-9/11 America.

The performance is brutally honest. Stachel doesn’t just tell stories; he embodies dozens of characters — parents, teachers, classmates, inner demons — giving voice to the forces that shaped him. Critics who saw the earlier Out of Character noted how he performed more than 40 roles over the course of the evening, slipping between them with humor and intensity. At the center of it all is his anxiety, personified on stage as a relentless voice; a tormentor who exposes his insecurities and self-doubt. Even the physicality of the performance matters: at times, Stachel literally sweats under the strain, his body underscoring the emotional labor of wrestling with self-hood in public.

What makes Other so compelling is how it resists flattening. Stachel could have chosen to present a neat identity that pleased everyone. He could have leaned into his Ashkenazi heritage in Jewish spaces, downplayed his father’s Arab and Yemeni roots in the broader culture, or passed as Black when it fit. Instead, he embraces contradiction. He admits to the pain of passing, to the shame of dissembling, to the exhaustion of being welcomed everywhere but rooted nowhere. His honesty is not tidy, but it is deeply human and it is precisely what gives the play its moral force.

For Jews, Other carries special resonance. Too often, American Jewish life is imagined narrowly, as if it were monochrome and monolithic. In reality, it encompasses Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi heritages, as well as countless blends created by Diaspora and intermarriage. Stachel’s story insists that Jewish identity is wide, textured, and complex. By putting a Yemeni-Ashkenazi household on stage, he gives voice to Jews of color and Jews of mixed heritage who have too often felt peripheral in communal narratives. Other says clearly: you belong.

But Other is not just a Jewish story. It is also an Arab story, a Middle Eastern story, a Black story, and an American story. It is about what it means to be welcomed conditionally, mistrusted reflexively, and asked to define yourself in ways that never quite fit. For Arabs and Middle Eastern Americans, it is rare representation that does not reduce or stereotype. For Black Americans, it echoes the struggle of reconciling self-knowledge with the perceptions imposed by others. And for every young American navigating multiple expectations — between family and school, tradition and modernity, online and offline — it is a reminder that identity is not a slogan but a journey.

The play also speaks to our cultural moment. Cancel culture and digital performance have created an environment where young people feel pressure to present a polished, singular self for approval. Nuance is suspect. Ambiguity is punished. Doubt is treated as weakness. Other resists that world. It demonstrates that wholeness comes not from clarity but from wrestling — not from erasing contradictions, but from inhabiting them.

That is why Other deserves more than applause from Jewish audiences. It deserves to be seen as a work that speaks to all Americans, and especially to the rising generation. It shows that identity is not fixed but fluid, that belonging is never simple, and that authenticity often comes through tension rather than resolution. These are lessons our fractured culture badly needs.

Great theatre does not just entertain; it enlarges our sympathies. It forces us to see ourselves in another’s story and to carry that recognition out of the theatre and back into the world. Stachel’s Other does exactly that. It challenges Jews to expand our sense of who belongs. It challenges Americans to reconsider the categories we use to define one another. And it challenges young people to resist the temptations of performance and to find their authentic voice in the midst of contradiction.

In Jewish tradition, we often return to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is a story of struggle without resolution, of wounds that endure, but also of blessings that come only through the fight. Stachel’s play is a modern wrestling. It is a man confronting his many “others,” refusing easy answers, and choosing to tell the truth of his fractured self. That is why it is Jewish. That is why it is universal. And that is why every young American should see it.

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