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To mark the return of Israeli hostages and the truce in Gaza this week, Charly Jaffe gathered with friends in Brooklyn for hummus, labneh and fried halloumi from a neighborhood Israeli restaurant. They toasted “l’chaim” — “to life” — with a shot of arak, a liquor from the Middle East, to honor the lives saved and memorialize those lost, both Israelis and Palestinians.
“It feels like a very Jewish thing,” Ms. Jaffe, 35, said, “to have celebration and grief all at once.”
It has been a week of complex emotions for Jews across New York — a city with the largest Jewish population outside the Middle East, and where cultural, religious and familial ties to Israel run deep.
Many Jewish New Yorkers have spent the past two years consumed by a war more than 5,000 miles away and in various ways have been altered by it. For some, it has deepened their relationship to their religious traditions and their emotional and spiritual connection to Israel. Others have found themselves horrified by Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas. Many have become newly politicized — in multiple directions.
Across the city, Jews have also been unnerved by a rise in antisemitism and by rifts among longtime friends who disagree over the war. Within some families, divides have rarely felt more pronounced.
Audrey Sasson, who runs the New York-based Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, said she has found refuge in the leftist Jewish community she has helped build and has been heartened by seeing more Jews speaking out against what she calls “a genocide” in Gaza.
“It was incredibly painful to watch our history, our symbols, our traditions be exploited for the atrocities that the Jewish state, that Israel was committing,” said Ms. Sasson, 49.
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“I really do think there’s a shift happening in our community,” she said. “I think people who were uncomfortable speaking out a few years ago are organizing today in a way they didn’t before and willing to say things out loud that they weren’t willing to say before.”
The war in Gaza began with a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the bloodiest day in the country’s history, in which about 1,200 people were killed and another 250 were kidnapped, according to authorities there. Israel’s military retaliated and an estimated 67,000 people, including civilians and combatants, have been killed in Gaza, according to authorities there. Parts of Gaza experienced famine, according to monitors.
David Kleinhandler, 48, found himself determined to make his support for Israel more public in the days since Oct. 7. “I want to show something to create a bond with Jewish people,” he said.
Mr. Kleinhandler, a real estate executive who lives in Manhattan, often wears a Yankees baseball cap embellished with the Israeli flag. Until Monday, when the last remaining living hostages were released, he wore either a yellow pin to honor the hostages or a hostage dog-tag necklace. Just on Sunday, the chain snapped.
On several occasions, he said, passers-by have stopped him and thanked him for displaying his support and asserting his Zionism. “I have had these wonderful moments of Jewish peoplehood,” he said.
For other Jews in New York, the past two years have brought a dispiriting sense of being misunderstood.
Before Oct. 7, said Ms. Jaffe, a creative director, she could not have imagined that so many of her politically progressive peers in New York would fail to grasp that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is no more representative of all Israelis than President Trump is of all Americans.
She would not have believed that her connection to Israel, where she once lived, would be seen by some as irreconcilable with her support for Palestinian rights. Or that her mourning for friends killed by Hamas — she has close childhood ties to kibbutzim that were attacked — would be construed as a lack of empathy for Palestinian suffering.
“My life is definitely one where I feel a ‘before and after Oct. 7’ division,” she said.
For some New Yorkers, that demarcation has been most notable for a surge of antisemitism since the start of the war.
Leon Goldenberg, a Brooklyn-based real estate executive, was in Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks and returned this year to celebrate the Jewish holidays with family there.
Despite the relief he felt when the hostages were released, he said, “the war coming to an end is not going to end what’s going on in New York, and the antisemitism that is felt.”
Mr. Goldenberg, who is 73, said New York has felt less safe for him and his Orthodox family, adding that Jews who wear yarmulkes feel under a constant threat. His teenage nephew was recently pushed to the ground by a group of men, Mr. Goldenberg said.
“It’s not anti-Zionism — it’s antisemitism,” he said. “That’s how we feel, and that’s how it is.”
Monica Jacobson and Arnold Bressler, a married couple who have lived in New York for about 50 years, also believe that the war has brought antisemitism, both overt and subtle.
“I have felt tremendous shock at the explosion of Jew hatred in the country and particularly in our city,” said Mr. Bressler, 76, who, like his wife, is a retired lawyer. “We live near Columbia University and have always felt that the Upper West Side is Tel Aviv on the Hudson. To have this outpouring of antisemitism was totally shocking.”
Ms. Jacobson, 73, said she struggles with a sense that people do not understand the role that Israel has played in providing refuge for Jews since the Holocaust.
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“If you stand with the state of Israel, even if you do not support Netanyahu’s government, you are treated as if you are complicit in his policies,” added Ms. Jacobson, who expressed disappointment and disagreement with the current Israeli government. “You are not allowed to have a nuanced position.”
Others have bristled at what can seem like an excessive focus by some in the Jewish community in New York on what is happening in America amid a devastating war.
“The emergency is in Gaza, it is not in New York,” said Margo Hughes-Robinson, 32, an ordained rabbi who runs the advocacy group Partners for Progressive Israel.
And yet, the issues surrounding the war in Gaza have been infused into New York politics, particularly as the mayor’s race reaches its final stretch.
“The personal is political, and the political is very personal,” said Marcy Drogin, 60, who has lived in the city her whole life.
Ms. Drogin, who owns a literary scouting agency, said that she has always voted for Democratic candidates, but that she could not support Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and a state assemblyman from Queens, because of his political inexperience and rhetoric about Israel.
Mr. Mamdani, a longtime supporter of Palestinian rights, has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and has said he does not support Israel as an explicitly Jewish state.
Ms. Drogin was frustrated that Mr. Mamdani did not post about the hostage release until late in the afternoon, hours after other elected officials. “This is a city with two million Jews,” she said.
Sarah Perlmeter, 34, believes the most Jewish thing she can do in the voting booth will be to cast her support for Mr. Mamdani. It is a core Jewish value, she said, to repair the world, by “making sure people have enough to eat, a place to sleep and justice for all. To me Zohran represents all this.”
Ms. Perlmeter, a social worker, said rejecting Zionism and advocating Palestinian liberation is an assertion of Judaism’s principles.
“I am an American Jewish New Yorker and the No. 1 reason that I love this city is because it asks us on a daily basis to confront differences and recommit to work in solidarity with each other,” she said.
Ellen Lippmann, a rabbi who founded Kolot Chayeinu, one of Brooklyn’s most progressive congregations, has twice welcomed Mr. Mamdani to services.
Even as she feels increasingly alienated from Israel, she said she has felt closer to her local Jewish community.
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“What has gained strength in this time is probably a new appreciation for Judaism, for the prayers and the teachings and the rituals, and the wisdom accumulated over thousands of years,” said Ms. Lippmann, 74. “The flowering here of all of that is gorgeous.”
Shira Kramer is a 21-year-old senior at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, where she leads tours for prospective students. She said she has met several people who said they were gravitating toward Yeshiva — and away from Ivy League schools — to find a Jewish community amid rising antisemitism.
It’s a feeling she understands deeply. Ms. Kramer said she was walking in Midtown Manhattan recently when someone said “Heil Hitler” as they brushed past her. She laughed in shock.
Ms. Kramer said she was both relieved and wary about the likely end of the war in Gaza.
“I think we want an end, desperately, desperately, but it’s not just because a deal is made, and just because the hostages are released,” she said. “That’s not the end. I don’t know what the end looks like, but I’m not sure it’s coming anytime soon.”
Lyel Resner, 40, is trying to focus on a path forward, one which he believes will require that Americans move beyond their “binary” view of the conflict.
“The conversation here in New York, about being ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘pro-Palestinian’, seems to miss the point,” said Mr. Resner, visiting faculty at M.I.T. “The last two years have demonstrated to me how deeply intertwined everyone’s well-being truly is.”
Mr. Resner volunteers in Jerusalem for the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow, an organization that brings Israeli and Palestinian teenagers together for an immersion in technology, leadership and honest conversation.
“Our students and our staff who have experienced the full spectrum of loss hold each other’s grief and insist on each other’s humanity,” he said. “When I see 17-year-olds do it, well, I just wish everyone else had their moral imagination.”
Katherine Rosman covers newsmakers, power players and individuals making an imprint on New York City.
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
