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Last week a notorious group of pro-Palestine activists set its sights on Riverdale in The Bronx, as it publicized plans to march on a Saturday-night meeting for Jewish families considering buying a home in Israel.
The group, Pal-Awda, didn’t post an address for its action, and it didn’t need to; its people have gotten very good at finding Jews.
The incident brought home two chilling facts: Jewish families in NYC can’t sit in a neighbor’s house and talk about real estate without being hunted — and Gov. Kathy Hochul doesn’t seem to care.
Pal-Awda is the same group that massed a crowd outside Park East Synagogue last November to chant “globalize the intifada” and urge the “resistance” to “take another settler out.”
Ever since, it’s waged a campaign of targeted harassment against Jews who want to learn about making a move to Israel.
It’s effective: Late Friday, Pal-Awda claimed “Victory!” in a post on X, bragging that the Riverdale session had been cancelled due to its scare tactics.
“We will keep shutting down these events and making them untenable in the City,” the group vowed
Organizers of the real-estate event confirmed to me that the session was first set for a private home, and that the threats had indeed spurred them to cancel the in-person gathering and move it to Zoom instead.
Earlier in the week, a group of Bronx Democrats including Rep. Ritchie Torres, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz and Borough President Vanessa Gibson had jointly denounced Pal-Awda for its plans.
“Organizing a campaign to hunt down these gatherings and drive them out of our neighborhoods is an attack on Jewish New Yorkers,” they declared.
They were right.
Yet Hochul continued doing what she does best: ignoring threats to Jews and their communities.
Last week she made a campaign swing through Riverdale for coffee with Dinowitz and Gibson — and on Saturday night, while Pal-Awda gloated, she tweeted about that friendly outing without a word about the targeting of Bronx Jews.
Not even an election campaign can rouse her interest, it seems.
Riverdale was Pal-Awda’s second “victory” this month, after it pushed a Nefesh B’Nefesh aliyah fair out of Queens hours before it was to open on Oct. 11.
Funny how a fight over “stolen land” keeps landing outside synagogues, and now outside Jewish homes.
The real-estate talk is thin cover for the true motive: antisemitic hate.
New York law protects Jews wherever they gather.
Synagogues and public venues are covered by laws that guarantee access to houses of worship and bar places open to the public from turning people away over religion or ancestry.
A gathering in a private home falls under laws aimed squarely at anyone who threatens or intimidates Jews for who they are.
The local law against discriminatory harassment lets the city go to court to stop such incidents, with fines of up to $100,000 for each threat of force; the state’s civil-rights law lets victims sue anyone who carries out or incites that kind of harassment, and menacing or coercion aimed at Jews is a hate crime.
And yes, Zionist Jews are a protected group.
A Riverdale family looking at apartments in Israel is acting on an ancestral, cultural and often religious bond with that land and its people, and the law protects that bond.
What’s left unprotected is political support for the state of Israel — and nobody talking with neighbors about mortgages in Jerusalem is there to lobby for political action.
Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric has invited all of this: Pal-Awda is jumping on his dog whistles.
Its Friday post tagged the mayor and told him he “can take tangible steps to put an end to this illegal activity once and for all” — meaning Jewish real-estate gatherings.
The mayor has made no public comment about Pal-Awda’s bullying this month in Riverdale and Queens.
His silence tells every Jewish family in the city that it’s on its own.
These shameful threats hit home for me: One of Pal-Awda’s staunchest allies is CUNY for Palestine, a group of anti-Israel faculty and staff at my own workplace.
Yet again, both Mamdani and Hochul have failed: by refusing to tell Pal-Awda that no synagogue, school or institution in this city will pay a price for welcoming Jews, and now by refusing to protect Jewish New Yorkers in their own homes.
Pal-Awda and its cheerleaders on CUNY’s faculty think Jewish neighborhoods, and now Jewish living rooms, are fair game.
And why not? Our governor and our mayor couldn’t care less.
Jeffrey Lax is a CUNY professor of law and co-founder of Students and Faculty for Equality at CUNY.