On June eighteenth, two thousand twenty-six, New York City Mayor Eric Adams stood at a podium and called AIPAC monsters. Not wrongheaded, not misguided, not even dangerous. A word with a specific, ugly history in antisemitic rhetoric, the kind that paints Jews as inhuman, as conspiratorial, as something to be feared and rooted out. And in that moment, a question that would have seemed unthinkable to generations of New York Jews suddenly became dinner-table conversation: is it time to leave?
It landed hard because it wasn't a gaffe. This is a man who's been using the language for years, dual loyalty, money controlling politics, and getting a pass for it. But monsters crosses a line even his defenders had trouble spinning. The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York put out a statement within hours. The ADL followed. The UJA-Federation weighed in. These organizations don't do joint condemnation lightly.
Here's the thing Daniel's getting at in his prompt. He's asking us to look at this moment not as one more news cycle, but as a potential turning point in the history of the largest Jewish community outside Israel. How long have Jews even been in New York, and how did it become what it is? Because you can't understand what's at stake right now unless you understand what was built, over centuries, brick by brick.
Three hundred and seventy years. That's the arc we're talking about. From twenty-three Sephardic refugees stepping off a boat in sixteen fifty-four to one point six million Jews living in the five boroughs today. No other diaspora community has that depth, that continuity, that sheer weight of institutional and cultural accumulation in one place.
The question underneath Daniel's question, the one Herman flagged when we were talking about this, is whether we're watching a genuine inflection point. Not just another rough patch, but the kind of moment historians will look back on and say: that's when the long goodbye began.
Which is why we need to trace the whole thing. From Peter Stuyvesant trying to expel those first twenty-three refugees, through the tenements of the Lower East Side, through the postwar peak of two point two million Jews, right up to a mayor using a word like monsters and Jewish families quietly Googling Nefesh B'Nefesh.
That's what we're going to do. Three hundred and seventy years of Jewish New York, and one very uncomfortable question about its future.
Before we go back to sixteen fifty-four, let's sit with what Adams actually said and why it landed the way it did. Because this wasn't a single slip. Back in March, at the St. Patrick's Day breakfast, he used the word genocide to describe Israel's actions in Gaza. That alone triggered a firestorm. But then he kept going. Over the past year he's made comments about Jewish money in politics, about dual loyalty, about a certain group that controls things behind the scenes. The classic architecture.
The thing about the St. Patrick's Day breakfast remark, it wasn't just the word genocide. It was the venue. That breakfast is a New York political institution, everyone's there, and he chose that setting to essentially endorse a legal and moral framework that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have been pushing. A framework that a lot of Jewish New Yorkers see as an existential delegitimization of the Jewish state. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Which is what makes the monsters comment in June different in degree but not in kind. Monsters isn't a policy disagreement. It's dehumanizing language aimed at the largest pro-Israel advocacy organization in America. And it was delivered at a public event, on the record, with no walk-back. His office issued a statement afterward that basically said he stands by his words.
The communal response was unusually sharp, and I want to be specific about this because it matters. The JCRC of New York, that's the Jewish Community Relations Council, they don't do hot takes. They're the establishment, the bridge-builders. They condemned it within hours. The ADL issued a statement calling the language deeply offensive and historically loaded. The UJA-Federation, which is the largest local philanthropy in the world, period, not just in the Jewish world, weighed in. These are organizations that have to work with City Hall. They don't burn bridges lightly.
The more telling signal, and I think this is what Daniel's really pointing at, is the behavioral shift. It's not just statements. Nefesh B'Nefesh, the organization that facilitates aliyah from North America, has seen a three hundred percent increase in inquiries and applications from New York since January twenty twenty-five. Three hundred percent.
The profile of the applicant has changed. It used to be the ideologically committed Zionist, the young person who grew up in a religious Zionist youth movement and always planned to go. Now it's secular professionals in their thirties and forties, dual-income families with young kids, people who never imagined leaving. They're not making aliyah because they're drawn to Israel. They're making aliyah because they're being pushed out of New York.
That's the shift. That's what makes this different from previous moments of tension. New York Jews have dealt with antisemitism from the outside, from street violence, from fringe movements, from the occasional public figure. But the mayor of New York City has never been the source of the threat before.
It's not just the words. It's the pattern of what he doesn't say. Since October seventh, twenty twenty-three, there have been protests in New York that explicitly target synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, kosher restaurants, using Zionist as a stand-in for Jew. The NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force reports antisemitic incidents up one hundred and forty percent. And Adams has consistently declined to characterize these as antisemitic. He frames them as legitimate political speech.
Which is the blind eye Herman mentioned. When a Molotov cocktail gets thrown at a Boro Park yeshiva at two in the morning, and the mayor's office issues a statement but doesn't visit the scene, people notice. When Columbia University sets up encampments that literally bar Zionists from entering certain spaces, and the administration equivocates, and the mayor doesn't push back, people notice.
The word monsters has a specific history. It's not random. It's the language of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, of Nazi propaganda, of Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns that painted Jews as a conspiratorial force manipulating world events. You don't accidentally reach for that word. It sits in a specific rhetorical tradition, and Adams is too canny a politician not to know that.
The question becomes: is this a turning point? And I think you can't answer that without understanding what it would mean to actually leave. Which is where the history matters. Because Jewish New York isn't just a population statistic. It's three hundred and seventy years of institutions, cemeteries, synagogues, businesses, philanthropic networks, cultural memory. Leaving isn't like switching cell phone plans. It's severing roots that go deeper than anywhere else in the diaspora.
That's exactly what we need to trace. Because when you understand what was built, and how, and at what cost, the stakes of this moment become visceral. It's not just about Eric Adams. It's about whether the social contract that made Jewish New York possible is still intact.
Sixteen fifty-four. Twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrive in New Amsterdam, which is what New York was called before the British took it. They're fleeing Recife, Brazil, where they'd built a community under Dutch rule. Portugal had just recaptured the territory and the Inquisition was coming with it. So they got on a boat.
Twenty-three people. That's a minyan plus change, and they show up exhausted in a muddy Dutch trading post at the edge of the known world. And the first thing that happens is Peter Stuyvesant, the governor, writes to his bosses at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam and says, essentially, get these people out of my colony. He called them a deceitful race and said they'd infect the place.
Stuyvesant was a piece of work. He was a Dutch Reformed Calvinist, one leg, famously ornery, and he had a particular animus toward Jews, Catholics, Quakers, basically anyone who wasn't Dutch Reformed. But here's the twist that matters: the Dutch West India Company overruled him. Not because they were enlightened pluralists. Because Jewish shareholders in Amsterdam had put serious money into the company, and the company needed settlers. Tolerance was a business decision.
The first Jewish New Yorkers got to stay because some guys in Amsterdam looked at a balance sheet. That's the origin story. It's not inspiring, but it's honest. And it sets a pattern that runs through the whole history: Jewish acceptance in New York has almost never been about principle. It's been conditional, transactional, negotiated.
It worked, barely. By seventeen thirty, there was a synagogue, Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, which still exists today. It's on West Seventieth Street now, but its congregation is the oldest in continuous operation in the United States. Those twenty-three refugees and their descendants built the first Jewish institution in North America.
The next big inflection point is the German Jewish wave, roughly eighteen twenty to eighteen eighty. These were different people. The Sephardim had been merchants and traders. The German Jews came from a different world, more educated, more acculturated, and they arrived with ambition. Families like the Strauses, who bought Macy's, the Guggenheims, who built a mining and then an art empire, the Lehmans, who founded one of the most powerful investment banks in American history.
They built the institutional skeleton of Jewish New York. B'nai B'rith was founded in eighteen forty-three, on the Lower East Side. Mount Sinai Hospital opened in eighteen fifty-two, explicitly because Jewish doctors couldn't get admitting privileges at the existing hospitals. The Jewish Theological Seminary, which would become the intellectual center of Conservative Judaism, was chartered in eighteen eighty-six. These weren't just community organizations. They were infrastructure.
The German Jews also created something uncomfortable that we don't talk about enough. They looked at the next wave coming from Eastern Europe and they winced. Too many, too poor, too visibly Jewish, too Yiddish, too religious in the wrong way. The German Jews had worked hard to assimilate, to become respectable New Yorkers, and here came two million people who seemed determined to undo all of it.
The Great Migration, eighteen eighty-one to nineteen twenty-four. Two million Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms, the Pale of Settlement, the Tsar's draft. They poured into the Lower East Side until it became the most densely populated place on the planet, three hundred and fifty thousand people per square mile. To put that in perspective, Manhattan today is about seventy thousand per square mile. The Lower East Side was five times as dense.
Out of that compression came an explosion. Yiddish theater on Second Avenue, the Forward newspaper with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands, the garment district unions, the whole texture of what people think of when they think of old Jewish New York. By nineteen ten, Jews were twenty-five percent of the city's population. One in four New Yorkers.
The nineteen-oh-nine shirtwaist strike is the moment that crystallizes this. Twenty thousand garment workers, mostly Jewish women, some as young as sixteen, walked out. Clara Lemlich was twenty-three years old, she'd been beaten by thugs hired by the factory owners, and at a union meeting she stood up and said, in Yiddish, I am tired of listening to speakers. I move we go on a general strike. And they did. Biggest strike by women in American history to that point.
That's the Jewish New York that gets romanticized. The tenements, the pushcarts, the fire escapes, the socialist politics. But it's also the Jewish New York that scared the establishment. The German Jews set up charities to Americanize the newcomers, to get them out of the Lower East Side, to teach them English, to make them less embarrassing. It was a community at war with itself, even as it was building something unprecedented.
By nineteen fifty, two million Jews in New York. The peak came a few years later, around two point two million. And this is when the geography shifts. The move to the outer boroughs, the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and then out to Long Island, Westchester, Rockland County. The creation of what gets called the second city of Jewish life in the suburbs, with its own synagogues and JCCs and delicatessens, a replica of the urban Jewish world but with lawns and driveways.
Then the slow decline. Today it's about one point six million Jews in the city. Still the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel, but older, smaller, more Orthodox as a proportion because the Orthodox have higher birth rates and are less likely to leave. The secular and liberal Jewish New York that dominated the twentieth century is shrinking.
The nineteen sixty-eight teachers' strike in Ocean Hill-Brownsville is worth marking here because it reshaped New York politics for a generation. The Black community wanted community control of schools. The mostly Jewish teachers' union, the UFT, saw it as a threat to due process and professional standards. The strike dragged on for months, the rhetoric got vicious, and by the end there was a rupture between Black and Jewish communities that had been allies through the civil rights movement. It never fully healed.
That's the thing about Jewish New York's history. It's not a straight line of progress. It's waves of arrival and waves of tension, institutions built and institutions tested, a constant negotiation over whether Jews belong here and on what terms. Stuyvesant tried to expel them. The German Jews tried to reform them. The garment unions radicalized them. The suburbs dispersed them. And now a mayor is calling them monsters.
The question is what makes this moment different from the crises that came before. And I think there are two answers. The first is what you just said: the mayor is the source. That's genuinely new. But the second is the way the language has shifted. When Father Coughlin's Christian Front was beating Jews in the streets in the nineteen thirties, nobody pretended it was about policy. It was Jew-hatred, full stop. Now you have protests targeting synagogues and the mayor calls it legitimate political speech.
And I think it's worth being precise about what that actually looks like on the ground. It's not abstract. In June of this year, Columbia University had encampments that literally barred Zionists from entering certain spaces. Not people with opinions about the two-state solution. Which in practice meant any visibly Jewish student.
The administration's response was to negotiate with the protesters. To treat a demand that certain students be excluded from parts of their own campus based on their identity as a legitimate bargaining position. The mayor's office didn't push back. The city didn't push back. That's the blind eye.
The yeshiva firebombing in Boro Park, that was twenty twenty-five. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at a yeshiva at two in the morning. Nobody was hurt, but that's luck, not design. And the mayor's office issued a statement. He didn't go to Boro Park. He didn't stand in front of the yeshiva with the community. He issued a statement and moved on.
Compare that to how mayors have responded to attacks on other communities in this city. When a mosque is vandalized, the mayor shows up. When a Black church is threatened, the mayor shows up. The visit itself is a signal: this matters, this community is part of the city's fabric, an attack on you is an attack on all of us. Adams withheld that signal.
Which brings us to the aliyah numbers. Because people aren't just angry, they're making plans. Nefesh B'Nefesh says applications from New York are up three hundred percent since January twenty twenty-five. And the applicant profile tells you everything. It's not the kids from the Zionist youth movements. It's secular professionals, thirties and forties, dual incomes, young children. People who say, I don't want my kid to be the only Jew in the classroom when the teacher puts on a map that doesn't include Israel and the class discussion turns into a trial.
These aren't people who were looking for an excuse to leave. They're people who had lives here. They own apartments, they have careers, their kids are in schools they chose carefully. Aliyah for them is a disruption, a financial hit, a professional downgrade in many cases. You don't make that calculation unless the push factors have become overwhelming.
The question is whether this is a real trend or just noise. Three hundred percent sounds dramatic, but three hundred percent of what? If the baseline was a hundred applications a year, we're talking three hundred. If it was a thousand, we're talking three thousand. That matters for understanding the scale.
Nefesh B'Nefesh hasn't released the absolute numbers, so we're working with percentages. But anecdotally, the people doing the intake say they've never seen anything like this from New York. And it's not just aliyah. There's a quieter trend of families moving to Florida, to Texas, to places where they feel the political environment is less hostile. That's harder to track, but the real estate agents in Boca Raton and Dallas know what's happening.
The economic dimension is the part nobody in City Hall seems to be thinking about. Jewish philanthropy in New York is not a rounding error. The UJA-Federation alone moves hundreds of millions of dollars a year into social services, not just for Jews, for the whole city. Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, these institutions exist because of Jewish philanthropic foundations that were built over generations. If even a fraction of the community leaves, those donor bases shrink.
It's not just the big names. It's the small donors, the synagogue building funds, the local JCCs, the kosher restaurants, the Jewish day schools that employ thousands of people. Jewish New York is an economic ecosystem. You can't lose a chunk of it without ripple effects through real estate, employment, the nonprofit sector, all of it.
The flip side, and I think we have to be honest about this, is that leaving is not easy. It's not just selling an apartment. It's abandoning cemeteries where your grandparents are buried. It's walking away from a synagogue your family helped build. It's telling your kids they're never going to see the Lower East Side the way you did. That's not a financial calculation, it's an amputation.
Which is what makes the Adams moment so strange, strategically. This is a mayor who has Jewish staffers, who's been to Israel, who's spoken at Jewish events. He's not David Duke. He knows the community. And that means the monsters comment wasn't ignorance. It was a bet.
Say more about that.
Adams is looking at the Democratic Party and seeing that anti-Israel sentiment has become a litmus test for the progressive left. AIPAC is the symbol of pro-Israel political engagement. Calling them monsters is a way of signaling to that flank: I'm with you. And he's betting that Jewish voters have nowhere else to go. That they'll hold their noses and vote for him anyway because the alternative is someone further left who might be worse.
It's the old political calculus: make your base feel taken for granted and see if they flinch. The problem is that for the first time in living memory, they might actually flinch. Not by voting Republican, necessarily, but by leaving. By taking their families and their tax dollars and their philanthropy and their institutional knowledge and going somewhere that doesn't make them feel like strangers in their own city.
That's the irony at the heart of this. Adams thinks he's playing coalition politics. But he may be accelerating the dissolution of a community that has been one of the most stable, productive, deeply rooted populations in New York's history. You don't get to take three hundred and seventy years of presence for granted indefinitely. At some point, the social contract breaks.
The question is whether we're watching it break in real time. And I don't think we know the answer yet. But the fact that Jewish families are sitting around their dinner tables in Brooklyn and Riverdale and the Upper West Side and actually asking the question, should we leave, that's already a historic shift. That hasn't happened since the nineteen thirties.
Where does this leave us? If you're a Jewish New Yorker listening to this, or someone who cares about the future of the city, here's what I think you need to be paying attention to. The decision to stay or leave isn't really about whether antisemitism exists in New York. It always has. Stuyvesant tried to expel the first twenty-three. Coughlin's Christian Front beat Jews in the streets. Crown Heights happened. The question is whether the city's leadership takes it seriously.
That's the social contract question. Jewish New York has always been a negotiation, right? We traced that whole history. Acceptance was conditional, transactional, never fully secure. But the deal was: you build here, you contribute here, you're part of the city's fabric, and when someone comes for you, the city has your back. Adams broke that. Not by failing to stop antisemitism, by refusing to name it.
For non-Jewish New Yorkers listening to this, I think it's worth understanding that a Jewish exodus wouldn't be a victimless event. We're not just talking about population statistics. Jewish philanthropy in this city moves billions. Mount Sinai, NYU Langone, the UJA-Federation's social services that serve everyone, not just Jews. Those donor bases don't automatically replenish if the community contracts.
It's the less visible stuff too. Jewish New Yorkers are disproportionately represented in the city's teachers, its civil servants, its small business owners. They're a stabilizing force in civic life. You lose a chunk of that, you don't just lose the people. You lose the institutional memory, the philanthropic infrastructure, the cultural institutions that took generations to build.
For the broader American Jewish community, New York has always been the bellwether. If Jewish life becomes untenable here, it sends a signal to every other American city. The Adams moment may be remembered as the beginning of a realignment of American Jews away from the Democratic coalition, or as the wake-up call that forces the coalition to correct itself. Either way, it's a hinge.
Practically, for people who are concerned, there are things you can do. The UJA-Federation runs a community security initiative that provides grants to synagogues, day schools, JCCs. The ADL puts out monthly antisemitism incident reports so you can track what's actually happening, not just what makes headlines. If you're seriously considering aliyah, Nefesh B'Nefesh offers free consultations. But the most important action is political. Making clear to your elected officials that antisemitism is a red line, not a negotiating point.
The Orthodox communities in Brooklyn are responding differently from secular Jews on the Upper West Side, and younger Jews are more likely to consider leaving than their parents. That's not a monolith. But the direction of travel is the same across the board: people are asking the question. And that question itself is the story.
Let me leave you with one final thought, and it's not a comfortable one. We've spent this episode tracing three hundred and seventy years of Jewish New York. Stuyvesant's expulsion order, the Lower East Side tenements, the shirtwaist strike, the postwar peak, Crown Heights, the pandemic. The community survived all of it. It may survive Eric Adams too. But survival isn't the same thing as continuity. Something can endure and still be fundamentally changed.
The fact that the question is even being asked, that the mayor of New York City has made Jewish New Yorkers feel like strangers in their own city, that's itself a historic shift. You don't have to know how the story ends to recognize that the ground has moved. When your grandparents' grandparents' grandparents built a synagogue in seventeen thirty and their descendants are now Googling how to get an Israeli passport, something has broken.
I keep coming back to those twenty-three refugees in sixteen fifty-four. They didn't know they were starting something that would last nearly four centuries. They were just trying to survive. They got off a boat in a place that didn't want them, and they built anyway. That's the through-line of this whole history: Jewish New Yorkers have always built anyway. The question now is whether the city still deserves what they're building.
Will the Adams era be remembered as a turning point, the moment the long goodbye began? Or as a stress test that the city's pluralism ultimately passed? We don't know. The story isn't over. But you're living through the chapter that future historians will argue about. That's worth sitting with.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the early medieval period, sailors off the coast of Djibouti reported a species of cuttlefish capable of mimicking not just color and texture but the precise flickering light patterns of bioluminescent plankton. The species was never formally catalogued and was presumed extinct until a French marine expedition in nineteen ninety-eight captured forty-seven seconds of footage matching the medieval descriptions exactly. No specimen has ever been recovered.
Forty-seven seconds of footage and then it vanished again. That's the most on-brand thing I've ever heard for a cuttlefish.
If this episode made you think differently about the city you live in or the history you thought you knew, leave us a review. It helps other listeners find the show. This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. We'll be back next week.
