Zohran Mamdani’s win isn’t just New York’s loss — it’s a wake-up call for America

On Zohran Mamdani’s anointment as New York City mayor, we gather in sorrow to mark the passing of a once-great metropolis.

This temple of the American Dream and home to the largest Jewish community in the United States has exhaled its last breath.

To understand the magnitude of this loss, one must first understand New York City is inexorably tied to the history of Jews in America.

The first 23 Jewish refugees landed in New Amsterdam in 1654. By the early 1900s, the pushcarts on Orchard and Rivington streets birthed the garment industry, Yiddish theaters created vaudeville and the ingenuity of the scrappy Jewish kids from the tenements transformed America into a financial superpower.

From this crucible of ambition rose Jewish New Yorkers who forged America’s greatness.

Irving Berlin wrote “God Bless America” in a Bronx apartment. Jonas Salk eradicated polio at NYU. Ralph Lauren and Estée Lauder defined the American look, and Sandy Koufax redefined baseball.

My personal New York story began when my parents, grandparents and I arrived Aug. 13, 1981, at JFK. (My sister was born three months later.)

Behind us: the antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the ghosts of the Holocaust. Ahead: a new life in the “Goldene medina” (“golden land” in Yiddish).

It was here the city’s pulse became my own. I dated my future wife, a Barnard student, on the Upper West Side. We got married and moved to Midwood. She took the F train to Maimonides Hospital for her medical school rotations, and I schlepped to Battery Park on the Q for my first real job. Our son was born at Mount Sinai.

My life became thoroughly interwoven with the fabric of Manhattan. I earned a master’s at the School of Visual Arts in Chelsea, worked at The New York Times around the corner from Times Square and chased my American dream as an ad man through the city’s neon arteries. My story, like New York’s, also carries scars: On Sept. 11, 2001, I lost a childhood friend when terrorists brought down the Twin Towers.

Despite triumphs and struggles, the New York Jewish community always managed to persevere. Then came Oct. 7, 2023.

Incredibly, Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 in Israel — the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust — did not elicit sympathy for the victims.

Instead, it unleashed a global tsunami of antisemitism that reached my beloved New York City.

At Columbia University, Jewish students were physically blocked from attending classes and barricaded behind “Zionists not welcome” signs.

In Times Square, pro-Palestinian protesters shouted “Globalize the intifada” — a call for violence against Jews — while across the city, gleeful haters tore down hostage posters of 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, the red-haired baby Hamas kidnapped and later murdered in captivity.

In Midtown, kosher restaurants were smashed, and in Brooklyn alone, 147 synagogues faced bomb threats in a single year.

This raging Jew-hatred found a convenient arsonist in Zohran Mamdani.

When asked about Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group, the socialist assemblyman “didn’t really have an opinion.”

When pressed on his supporters’ calls for an “intifada,” he refused to condemn it.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, said, “Zohran Mamdani has contributed to a mainstreaming of some of the most abhorrent antisemitism,” citing his shocking 2023 statement on the Israel Defense Forces: “When the NYPD boot is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” More than 1,000 rabbis, cantors and yeshiva students joined in her rebuke of the mayor-elect.

But Mamdani’s win isn’t just New York’s loss. It’s a five-alarm warning for America. Historically, the intellectual vacuum and moral rot that caused states to tolerate Jew-hatred signaled the beginning of those states’ end.

The Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, then fell. Oppression against Jews in ancient Greece broke the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties. Rome’s destruction of the Second Temple foreshadowed the Roman Empire’s fall. Spain experienced a golden age during the Maimonides era, which ended with the 1492 expulsion. The purge of Jews during the Holocaust resulted in Germany’s national suicide. In the Soviet Union, where I grew up — and before it, czarist Russia — state-sponsored pogroms and institutionalized antisemitism led to the mass exodus of Jews and helped sow the seeds of both regimes’ collapse.

But we don’t have to look much further than modern Europe, where antisemitic attacks have surged at an alarming rate, pushing the continent toward its breaking point.

Over and over, ​​societies that targeted their Jews invited their own decay and destruction.

America was supposed to be different, but the Jewish American community now finds itself targeted simultaneously by both the extreme left and right.

George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport, RI, laid out America’s core tenet of religious tolerance: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of the other inhabitants — while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Many Jewish New Yorkers no longer feel safe under their own vine and fig tree, and the Big Apple may no longer be saved. We are now left to ponder: Can America?

Len Khodorkovsky is a former deputy assistant secretary of state.