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In the days since a disturbed man disrupted services at one of the most prominent Reform congregations in the US, the American Jewish discourse has turned rank and accusatory, with leaders blaming the anti-Zionists, the New York City mayor, and the congregants themselves. Rosh Hashanah, when synagogues will be full, is just a few weeks away, and Jews are anxious. But in the face of that real fear, establishment leaders are seeking political advantage, offering explanations of last week’s incident that bear little relation to what happened.
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Andy Kahn was having other thoughts. Kahn, a rabbi and the executive director of the American Council for Judaism, wrote on Instagram that Montes’s social media history suggested he was “in the grip of some kind of psychological crisis, including the belief that he is Jesus, or the Messiah.” He said that the incident was further evidence in support of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s anti-hate crime proposal, NYC Against Hate. That proposal favors a combination of violence interruption, anti-bias education, and other policies to address antisemitism and other forms of hate violence in New York. The Mamdani administration has committed $29 million to a program modeled on the JFREJ proposal.
“This got turned into a political cudgel that has no bearing on the reality of what played out,” Kahn told me Monday. Kahn said that the instinct to wield the incident against Mamdani only serves to spread fear within the Jewish community. “What they’re doing is trying to construct this image of a world in which anti-Zionism and antisemitism are totally conflated, and both are on the rise in such a way that individual Jews are at greater risk just living as Jews, and that the local city government of New York City is contributing to that in a meaningful and perhaps purposeful way,” he said. “And none of that is true. The effect of this is to shut down people’s capacity for critical thinking, to shut down people’s ability to stop and consider what would lead to something like this.”
The details of the Mamdani administration’s $29 million hate crime effort, which won approval through the city’s budgeting process earlier this summer, remain unclear. But it will dramatically increase the capacity of the mayor’s existing Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. “While we do not yet know the motive of this attacker, we do know that antisemitism and many other forms of hate violence have surged since the 2016 election brought the far right into the mainstream,” JFREJ wrote in a press release on Monday. “We demand real policy solutions that bring New Yorkers together in safety and solidarity.”