New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani,
has aligned himself with a 74-page report from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice proposing to combat antisemitic violence in New York — without policing, without armed guards, and without the law enforcement coordination that security professionals say is essential. Instead, JFREJ proposes community building: intergroup collaborative projects, playground renovations, soup kitchens, street fairs. Bonds of connection. Root causes.
The plan claims to be evidence-based. It is not. Examined carefully, it is a political document masquerading as social science, built on three fundamental analytical errors, contradicted by the actual history of antisemitic violence in New York and America, and — most damning of all — produced by an organization whose political framework actively excludes the majority of Jews from its definition of community. This plan does not protect Jews from antisemitic violence. At its logical conclusion, it increases the risk.
The Plan and Its Claims
JFREJ executive director Audrey Sasson told assembled reporters that “our traditional responses — policing, and prosecution and arrest — have not reversed the trend of rising hate violence, because they can’t.” She and the report argue that the Jewish community “has never been offered real prevention options at scale” and that what’s needed is to “bring communities together around shared goals” so that “bonds of connection” are already in place when crises arise.
The Secure Community Network, which actually advises Jewish institutions on security, lists coordination with law enforcement first among its eight security recommendations. In the wake of the March 2026 attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan — where a Lebanese-born American drove his vehicle into a synagogue containing a preschool, drove inside the building, and opened fire — SCN specifically credited the institution’s prior investments in security and law enforcement coordination with limiting casualties. JFREJ’s report calls this approach “security theater.”
We are going to take JFREJ’s evidence seriously — more seriously, it turns out, than JFREJ itself did.
The “Evidence-Based” Claim
The report’s introduction contains a remarkable sentence that should have disqualified its central claim before the document got off the ground:
“There is almost no research into what actually works to prevent violence, leaving practitioners with little guidance on how to design programs that stand to make an impact.”
They wrote this themselves. Several paragraphs later, the same document declares: “We now have the research — we know what actually works.”
An honest reading of the report’s own citations will show that it has assembled evidence about the causes and demographics of hate violence — useful descriptive work — and then asserted, without demonstrating, that its proposed interventions address those causes. The leap from description to prescription is never justified. It is simply assumed.
The report’s primary descriptive framework for hate crime perpetrators comes from a 2002 paper by criminologists Jack McDevitt, Jack Levin, and Susan Bennett, using Boston police data. They categorized hate crime offenders into four types: thrill-seekers (the majority), defensive offenders, retaliatory offenders, and mission-driven offenders. The report leans heavily on the finding that thrill-seekers dominate — young men committing impulsive, low-planning bias violence for the excitement of peer dynamics. Community-based social norm interventions are plausibly relevant to this population.
But there is a devastating problem with how JFREJ applies this data, and it runs in three dimensions.
Error One: Conflating All Hate Incidents With Violent Ones
The ADL recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023 and 9,354 in 2024. The overwhelming majority of these were vandalism and harassment — swastikas spray-painted on synagogue walls, threatening letters, slurs shouted on the street, social media harassment. Physical assaults were a fraction of that total, and mass-casualty attacks were a fraction of that fraction.
The McDevitt typology’s finding that thrill-seekers dominate the hate crime offender population is a finding about all hate incidents across all target groups — including, critically, the large base of graffiti, chalking, and low-level harassment that makes up most of the aggregate count. Thrill-seeking is exactly what drives a teenager to spray-paint a swastika on a wall at 2 a.m. It is social, situational, impulsive, and plausibly amenable to community norm intervention.
JFREJ then uses this population-level finding to discredit security measures designed for the attacker-with-a-gun population. Armed guards at synagogues are “security theater,” the report argues. Hate crime sentencing has no deterrent effect, it notes correctly. But sentencing deterrence and physical protection are different mechanisms — and the report conflates them without acknowledgment. The teenager with a spray can and the man who drives a vehicle into a building containing a preschool are not the same phenomenon requiring the same response.
If JFREJ’s community programs were maximally effective and reduced thrill-seeking incidents by half, that would produce exactly zero effect on the threat facing Jewish institutions from mission-driven actors. The two populations do not overlap.
Error Two: Conflating Antisemitic Violence With Other Hate Crimes
The McDevitt data was collected across all hate crime categories in Boston. Anti-Black hate crimes are by far the most numerous nationally, followed by anti-gay, anti-Hispanic, and others. These categories have very different perpetrator profiles. Anti-Black hate crimes, particularly in the “defensive” category — white residents of changing neighborhoods trying to intimidate new arrivals — are responsive to the contact hypothesis and intergroup relationship-building in ways that antisemitic violence is not.
The contact hypothesis, the backbone of JFREJ’s intergroup projects recommendation, predicts that sustained positive contact between groups reduces prejudice. This has been validated for attitude change in contexts of situational bias — the discomfort of unfamiliarity, the generalized stereotyping born of social distance. It performs poorly against ideological bias, and it fails almost entirely against conspiracy-theory-based belief systems.
Contemporary antisemitic violence — from white supremacists to Islamist extremists to Black Hebrew Israelite theology — is not born of unfamiliarity with Jews. It is driven by positive, elaborated belief systems that assign Jews a specific role in a cosmic or political narrative: Jews as civilization-destroyers, Jews as agents of white genocide, Jews as fraudulent impostors of the true Israelites. These frameworks do not waver when confronted with pleasant Jewish neighbors. They accommodate the pleasant neighbor as the exception — the “good Jew” — while maintaining the categorical threat. Centuries of European Jews having cordial individual relationships with Christian neighbors did not prevent pogroms. The pogromists had Jewish acquaintances. This did not matter when the ideology reached a boiling point.
JFREJ applies research about attitude change in situational bias to the population driving antisemitic violence, where the bias is structural and ideological. This is a category error that invalidates the core recommendation.
Error Three: The Geography of the Threat
The thrill-seeking and defensive typologies, and the community-building interventions designed for them, are implicitly local. The theory assumes that hostile neighbors who don’t know each other develop prejudice that community contact can reduce.
But examine where the perpetrators of major antisemitic attacks actually came from. Robert Bowers was radicalized in online white supremacist ecosystems — the global fever swamp of Gab and 8chan. John Earnest was a California college student who wrote a manifesto consciously imitating a New Zealand mass murderer who attacked mosques. Malik Faisal Akram flew from Manchester, England, to take hostages at a Texas synagogue. Ayman Ghazali drove to West Bloomfield. Naveed Haq typed “something Jewish” into a search engine and drove to wherever the results pointed.
The radicalization is online and transnational. The targeting is of Jews as a category, not of specific individuals known from a shared neighborhood. Building intergroup relationships in Crown Heights does not reach the man in a Kansas City suburb being radicalized on Telegram, or the man in Lebanon who is already planning his trip. JFREJ proposes hyper-local solutions to an extra-local threat. Even if every program worked perfectly for the population it could theoretically reach, it would not touch the class of perpetrators responsible for the worst attacks.
The Actual Record: Who Attacks Jews, and What Stops Them
Let’s test the JFREJ framework against the actual perpetrators of violent antisemitic attacks in America since 2001.
Of eleven major violent incidents since 2001, every single one was mission-driven. Zero were thrill-seeking. The mechanism that stopped or limited each attack — in every case — was armed intervention, law enforcement response, or both.
Nowhere in this table is there a slot for “intergroup soup kitchen.” Nowhere does “bonds of connection” appear. These attacks were not the product of social distance between communities that could be bridged by collaborative projects. They were carried out by people whose ideological commitments were, by design, impervious to personal experience of Jewish individuals.
New York’s own record of foiled plots confirms the picture with even greater clarity.
The 2009 Bronx plot to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale — stopped by an FBI informant operation.
The 2011 Manhattan plot to bomb a synagogue, with one suspect planning to disguise himself as a Jewish worshipper to gain entry — stopped by months of NYPD intelligence surveillance.
The 1993 World Trade Center network, which also plotted to attack New York’s diamond district because, as one co-conspirator said, it would be like “hitting Israel itself” — stopped by FBI penetration.
The 2004 Herald Square subway plotters, whose recordings revealed deep antisemitic conspiracy beliefs about Jewish world domination — stopped by an NYPD undercover officer.
The record is unambiguous: the lack of successful Islamist terror attacks against Jewish targets in New York is not the product of good community relations. It is the product of effective, aggressive law enforcement. The perpetrators were not dissuaded. They were caught. JFREJ’s proposal, at its logical conclusion, dismantles the apparatus that has produced that record.
The “Good Jew” Problem
JFREJ’s community-building framework rests on an assumption: that personal positive contact with Jews erodes antisemitic hostility. The evidence suggests this assumption is wrong for the perpetrator population that matters most.
The phenomenon has a name in research and history: the “exceptional Jew” effect. It has been documented across centuries. The mechanism is straightforward: a person holds a conspiratorial or theological belief that Jews as a category are threatening, malevolent, or illegitimate. They then encounter a Jewish individual who is warm, honest, and admirable. Rather than falsifying the categorical belief, the positive experience gets accommodated into it. The individual becomes the exception that proves the rule — “my Jew,” the one who isn’t like the others.
Heinrich Himmler complained about this explicitly in his 1943 Posen speech, expressing frustration that every German seemed to have “his decent Jew” whom he wanted to exempt from persecution while supporting the destruction of Jews as a class.
Conspiracy theory beliefs are, by structure, self-sealing. They are not held tentatively, waiting for disconfirming evidence. They contain, built into the framework, an explanation for why the evidence looks the way it does. If Jews are conspiring to control the media, and a Jewish person tells you that’s false, the conspiracy framework already predicts that response. If a Jewish person seems trustworthy and kind, the framework accommodates this: Jews are especially skilled at deception. Personal contact cannot provide falsifying evidence because the framework doesn’t treat personal experience as relevant evidence about the category.
For the attacker who drove into Temple Israel, or the men who plotted to bomb synagogues in Riverdale, or the man who flew from Manchester to take hostages in Colleyville, intergroup collaborative projects are not just insufficient. They are addressed to a different human being entirely.
The Zionist Question JFREJ Cannot Answer
There is a foundational question that the JFREJ report evades entirely, and which exposes the deepest flaw in the plan: would Zionist Jews be welcome in the communities it proposes to build?
The answer is plainly no — and this is not a hypothetical. It is the lived reality of the progressive coalitions in which JFREJ operates.
JFREJ is explicitly anti-Zionist. Its 2017 publication “Understanding Antisemitism,” co-authored by the lead author of this report, drew a sharp distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism and argued forcefully that they should not be conflated. The organization has consistently allied itself with political movements that treat Zionist identity as disqualifying for progressive coalition membership.
The organizations that consulted on and co-launched this report — the Arab American Association of NY, Muslim Community Network, Emgage, MPower Change — are organizations that, in the post-October 7 environment, have been participants in and organizers of protests whose explicit demands include the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Several operate in spaces where Zionist Jews are not simply unwelcome but are treated as adversaries.
The pattern is well-documented. Women’s March leadership was fractured and eventually collapsed partly over the refusal to distance from explicitly antisemitic figures and frameworks. The 2017 Chicago Dyke March expelled Jewish participants for carrying a Star of David flag deemed “too closely associated with Zionism.” Black Lives Matter chapters published statements in 2020 expressing solidarity with Palestinian “resistance,” framing Israel’s existence in conspiratorial terms. These are the coalitions JFREJ inhabits and, in some cases, helped to construct.
Meanwhile, surveys consistently find that 80 to 90 percent of American Jews consider themselves Zionist in some meaningful sense — that they support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. The American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Electoral Institute, and multiple academic surveys confirm this year after year.
JFREJ’s proposed “community” is therefore not the Jewish community. It is a self-selected fragment of Jewish life — secular, progressive, politically aligned with anti-Zionist frameworks — that has already agreed, as a condition of coalition membership, to subordinate or suppress its Zionist identity. The 80-plus percent of Jews who hold mainstream attachment to Israel are, by the logic of JFREJ’s political world, not full members of the community being built.
The implications for antisemitism are serious. The fastest-growing and most dangerous form of antisemitism in America today is the anti-Zionist variety — the framework that treats Jewish nationalism as uniquely illegitimate, Israel’s existence as a moral crime, and Zionist Jews as appropriate targets of hostility. This is the antisemitism that drove the man who attacked Temple Israel. It is the antisemitism that motivated the Colleyville hostage-taker, who flew from Britain to demand the release of a Pakistani terrorist while holding American Jews responsible for Israeli policy. It is the antisemitism expressed in the “from the river to the sea” chant that has become standard at protests where JFREJ’s coalition partners are present.
JFREJ’s community-building plan does not address anti-Zionist antisemitism. Its political commitments make it structurally incapable of addressing it. By excluding Zionist Jews from meaningful participation in its community framework, and by treating the organizations that propagate anti-Zionist antisemitism as coalition partners rather than as part of the problem, JFREJ’s plan does not reduce the most prevalent form of violent antisemitism Jews face. It legitimizes it.
Worse: by supplanting the law enforcement apparatus that has actually kept New York’s Jews safe — the FBI informants, the NYPD intelligence units, the armed guards — with programming that cannot reach, let alone deter, mission-driven ideological actors, this plan leaves the majority of New York’s Jews more exposed than they were before.
What Actually Saves Lives
On March 12, 2026, Ayman Ghazali drove his vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The synagogue has a preschool. He drove into the building, opened fire, and was killed by security personnel on the scene. The Secure Community Network later cited the institution’s prior investment in security and law enforcement coordination as the reason the casualties were not worse.
Imagine Temple Israel had instead invested in intergroup collaborative projects. Imagine its leadership had attended soup kitchens and street fairs with Muslim community organizations in the Detroit suburbs. Would Ayman Ghazali, a Lebanese-born man whose worldview treated Jewish institutions as legitimate military targets, have been reached by those soup kitchens? Would the bonds of connection have given him pause at the moment he turned his steering wheel toward a building full of children?
The question answers itself.
The armed security guard at the door did not prevent the ramming — the vehicle moved too fast. But the security presence, the trained response, the prior coordination with law enforcement, limited what could have been a massacre of children to one injured security guard and a dead attacker. This is what saved those children.
JFREJ’s report calls this approach unsustainable and counterproductive. Audrey Sasson told reporters this represents “security theater.” The children who went home from that preschool on March 12th may disagree.
Conclusion: A Plan That Serves Its Authors, Not Its Supposed Beneficiaries
JFREJ is an anti-Zionist organization proposing to protect a Jewish community of which it represents a small, ideologically self-selected fraction. Its evidence base, examined carefully, does not support its primary recommendations. Its framework systematically excludes the forms of antisemitism most dangerous to New York’s Jews. Its coalition partners include organizations that propagate the anti-Zionist antisemitism that motivates many of the most serious attacks. And its prescriptions — if implemented — would defund and delegitimize the law enforcement infrastructure that has, demonstrably, prevented multiple mass casualty attacks on New York’s Jewish institutions.
Mayor Mamdani has signaled alignment with this framework and budgeted $260 million for a community safety office partly inspired by it. New York City’s Jewish institutions are operating in what the Secure Community Network calls “the most elevated and complex threat environment in recent history.” In this environment, the city’s mayor is moving toward a model that experienced security professionals consider dangerously inadequate, under the intellectual sponsorship of an organization that considers Zionism immoral and counts anti-Zionist organizations among its trusted partners.
The historical record of foiled plots in New York is a record of law enforcement working. FBI informants, NYPD intelligence surveillance, undercover officers, armed security — this apparatus has kept the Riverdale Temple standing and the Bronx synagogues intact. Its opposite is not playgrounds and soup kitchens. Its opposite is an unguarded building and an unlocked door.
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker of Colleyville, Texas, opened that door in January 2022 because a man said he was cold and homeless and wanted shelter. The rabbi made him a cup of tea. This is the instinct toward community openness and human connection that JFREJ celebrates. It resulted in eleven hours of hostage crisis that ended with an FBI tactical team killing Malik Faisal Akram.
The rabbi survived because of law enforcement. He nearly didn’t because of hospitality.
JFREJ wants to fund the hospitality and defund the FBI team. New York’s Jews deserve better than that.
Thursday, March 26, 2026
Elder of Ziyon
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