After the circus at Columbia University wound down with the end of the school year, it is impossible to ignore that New York City has become a spectacle.
New York, with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, is now a haven for Israel-haters and antisemites. On Oct. 8, Times Square saw some of the largest anti-Israel protests in the country. So many videos of hostage posters being torn down happened in New York. Then, Columbia University led the way on “encampments,” which may have been designed to show “solidarity” with Palestinians in Gaza but largely succeeded in exposing the anti-Jewish rot across the city.
Part of the reason for this is New York City is a city in trouble. A city in decline can move downward slowly, as New York is, but the trajectory ends in the same place.
It’s not that the politics of the place has changed, exactly. New York City was always left-leaning, but it wasn’t weird about it. It wasn’t San Francisco or Portland. This was a city that had elected Rudy Giuliani as mayor twice and followed up his reign with three terms of staid, steady Michael Bloomberg. It was a fun city, certainly, but a driven one, too. If you can make it there, and all of that, counted on the city being a hub for a seriousness of purpose and of ideas. There was no time to get sidetracked by crazy ideas and loony policies. There were big things to be done.
Leftist politics moved the liberalism of New York to its natural conclusion. If a Bloomberg-era Democrat believed bail was too high in some cases, now it would be zero. If police were too active in fighting crime, now they would lean inactive.
The trouble with the city can be traced back to 2013, when the people of New York City elected the most hard-left candidate in the mayoral race.
The conversation around the mayoral election of New York City always attracts big names. That year, Hillary Clinton, former congressman Harold Ford, and former congressman Anthony Weiner were tossed around as possibilities to get into the race. When none of them did, the most prominent Democrat of the bunch, then-City Councilman Bill de Blasio, was left standing.
De Blasio ran on a “tale of two cities,” on the idea that New York was actually two distinct cities, a rich one and a poor one. He would highlight the stark inequality, and the idea was that if he were elected, he would fix it. He did not. What did happen with his poor policies was New York’s long-running age of peace and security was upended. All those strivers who got to New York to make it were suddenly the problem when they did. Fairness did reign. Everyone was worse off.
De Blasio’s soft-on-crime policies collided with a spike in antisemitism in the city. In 2013, the year de Blasio was elected, the Anti-Defamation League’s yearly audit of antisemitic incidents in New York found 203 incidents across New York state. By the time he left office in 2021, that number was 416, with instances of assaults going from 22 to 51.
The latter number might also be lower than the real count. By 2021, people realized it was mostly pointless to report antisemitic incidents. Perpetrators were rarely arrested. Armin Rosen reported for Tablet in August 2022, “Of the hundreds of hate crimes committed against Jews in the city since 2018, many of them documented on camera, only a single perpetrator has served even one day in prison.” Calling the police because you’ve been hit in the head by someone screaming antisemitic epithets on the street seemed pointless.
Beyond that, the mayor seemed to imagine there was a shadowy cabal of white supremacists committing these attacks. As late as 2019, he called antisemitism “a right-wing movement,” adding, “I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the Right.” He was very clear and very wrong. As Rosen reported in July 2019, the “overwhelming majority of the alleged perpetrators in New York are either black or Hispanic.”
You can’t fix a societal problem if you can’t admit it’s happening, and antisemitism was allowed to fester in New York City while de Blasio sought out the real MAGA-hat-wearing culprits. Those alarmed by the post-Oct. 7 incidents of New Yorkers pulling down hostage posters or chanting for globalizing the intifada on the city’s most elite college campus had not been paying attention. It had all been percolating for a long time.
The coupling of open antisemitism and no consequences for bad behavior was evident on Columbia University’s campus for the weeks of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” The protest at Columbia began on April 17, when students first “occupied” the center of the campus. The date is relevant because it’s the day Columbia University President Nemat Shafik appeared before a congressional hearing to answer the charge that she had allowed Columbia to become a campus rife with antisemitism. The message from the students seemed to be: We’re in charge, and you haven’t seen anything yet.
Shafik proved them right. She didn’t fall into the trap that ex-Harvard University President Claudine Gay and ex-University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill had tripped into in December when they were unable to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would be a problem on their campuses. She didn’t dance around what would be acceptable Jew hatred. She unequivocally condemned antisemitism and said she would not stand for it on her campus. “I promise you, from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations will have consequences,” she said.
If the students got that message, it certainly wasn’t noticeable in their actions. Protest leader Khymani James had said in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that people should feel lucky he’s “not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He said all this during a disciplinary hearing he himself livestreamed. He was that proud of what he said and secure in his position at Columbia. He was only penalized after people found his recording in connection with the April protests. Shafik could claim the university wouldn’t stand for open antisemitism, but James was evidence it did just that.
On May 8, Columbia University Jewish students released a letter in which they noted, “We recoiled when people screamed ‘resist by any means necessary,’ telling us we are ‘all inbred’ and that we ‘have no culture.’”
Protesters at the encampment screamed, “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students and chanted to globalize the intifada. When Jewish students held an actually peaceful protest, Isabella Giusti, a student, held a sign in front of them that read, “Al Qasam’s [sic] next targets.” Al Qassam is the military wing of Hamas. No one seemed to fear any consequences.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The encampment ended on May 1 only after hundreds of students barricaded themselves into Hamilton Hall while continuing to make demands for Columbia University to divest from Israel in addition to what they called “basic humanitarian aid.” Shafik had contorted herself for two weeks to try to placate this mob. She moved the remainder of the year’s classes online, ostensibly to protect Jewish students, and she eventually canceled Columbia’s graduation. She negotiated with them at every turn. It just could never be enough.
New York had originally turned itself around by recognizing that there must be consequences for bad behavior. Once the consequences are removed, people are led to understand that anything goes. Columbia’s protesters got that same message loud and clear. The circus might be over for now, but it always comes back to the towns where it is welcome.
Karol Markowicz is a regular columnist at the New York Post and Fox News and co-author of the bestselling book Stolen Youth. She is host of the Karol Markowicz Show, a podcast on iHeartRadio. She was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Brooklyn. She now lives in South Florida with her husband and three children.