A Day in the Life of a New York City Jew
I think a lot of people genuinely do not understand what days like yesterday feel like inside Jewish neighborhoods in New York City, so I want to try to walk you through it.
You wake up in the morning and see a message in the community WhatsApp chat. Maybe it’s from the local Jewish council. Maybe it’s from your congresswoman. It’s a warning that there’s going to be a protest in your neighborhood that night.
You open the flyer and see men in keffiyehs holding rifles, militant imagery plastered across something the media will later describe as a “demonstration.” The address is around the corner from your house. The flyer never explicitly calls for violence, but you’ve seen the videos from the last one and the one before that, and you already know there is a very real chance this is going to turn ugly.
Your first thought is your family.
A few months ago, you bought a firearm and locked it in a safe in your bedroom, away from the children. You know that if the day ever comes where you actually need to use it to defend your family, then something has already gone catastrophically wrong, and even if you survive that encounter, there is a very good chance the legal system in a city like New York will spend years trying to destroy your life afterward.
There is not much you can do, so you put your phone away and go to work, spending the entire day trying to keep your mind off what is waiting for you back home.
On the drive home, traffic suddenly stops. Streets are blocked off and police cars are everywhere. Sirens are flashing on every corner. And you remember that your neighborhood is about to be flooded with hundreds of people screaming about intifada and resistance while politicians and reporters insist this is all perfectly normal political expression.
You get home before the kids.
One by one they walk through the door while you keep checking the window to make sure they made it back safely. Your oldest tells you the principal made an announcement warning students not to walk or bike through a certain area after school, but refused to explain why, probably because nobody wants to be to explain to a group of Jewish children that there will be a mob outside their neighborhood later that night chanting slogans that openly glorify violence against Jews.
Then the videos start coming in through WhatsApp, Instagram, X, local status groups, people forwarding clips from every angle as the crowd grows larger and louder.
Suddenly you can hear it outside too. Drums, screaming and chanting echoing through the streets.
You tell yourself they are supposed to stay near the synagogue and that they probably will not come near your block, but before long the shouting is right outside your house and the first thing you see when you step outside is a Hezbollah flag waving down the street while a man with a megaphone walks past screaming “globalize the intifada” and “death to the IDF.”
Your father’s cousin was murdered during the Second Intifada.
Twenty five years ago, he stepped onto a bus in Jerusalem and a Palestinian suicide bomber blew it apart, killing innocent people packed into their seats on an ordinary commute.
Your nephew is serving in the IDF right now. He is young, decent, and brave, and you know personally that he would never intentionally harm innocent people, but the crowd outside your house does not care who he is as a person because to them he is simply another Jew they have been taught to hate.
Your three year old wakes up crying because of the screaming outside and asks what’s happening, and you suddenly realize there is no normal or sane way to explain any of this to a child.
Then your mother calls.
She lives a few blocks away and hears the noise from inside her apartment. She asks whether it is safe outside. She is a Holocaust survivor. She does not remember every detail from her childhood, but she remembers enough to recognize the atmosphere, the fear, the hatred in the streets, the feeling that the people around you have stopped seeing Jews as human beings deserving of safety or dignity.
And without saying it directly, you know what she is really asking.
Is this how it starts again?
You wait for somebody in power to say clearly and without qualification that surrounding Jewish neighborhoods with mobs chanting support for terrorist organizations and violent uprisings is unacceptable, but instead elected officials rationalize it, activists celebrate it, and journalists sanitize it until the people being terrorized are expected to quietly accept this as the new normal.
For the first time in your life, you seriously begin wondering whether you still have a future here, whether your family would be safer in Israel despite the hardships and sacrifice that would come with uprooting your entire life, and whether the people constantly promising they will protect the Jewish community would actually be there if things became even worse.
Eventually the house becomes quiet again.
Your wife asks whether everything is going to be okay, and you tell her yes because there is nothing else you can say before lying awake in bed staring at the ceiling and hoping tomorrow feels different.
That’s a day in the life of a New York City Jew.