City data shows a sharp rise in hate crimes while most other major crime categories fall, and Jewish New Yorkers are bearing a disproportionate share of the attacks under Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s watch.

NYPD statistics show hate crimes in New York City climbed 9.4% this year, while Jewish residents, who make up roughly 10% of the population, were targeted in more than half of those incidents. The contrast is striking: violent crime trends are improving across the board, yet antisemitic incidents are increasing. That imbalance has sparked intense criticism of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s approach to public safety and rhetoric about Israel.

Year-to-date the city recorded 360 confirmed hate crimes, up from 329 during the same span last year. Of those 360 incidents, 205, or 56.9%, were antisemitic, an 8.5% rise over the 189 antisemitic hate crimes logged in the prior year. Put bluntly: a community that is one in ten New Yorkers absorbed nearly six in ten hate crimes.

At the same time, New York’s seven major crime categories mostly fell, some by double digits. Shootings and murders dropped sharply, while burglaries, auto thefts, robberies, grand larceny, and felony assaults all declined. That divergence makes the hate crime spike harder to write off as a random blip.

“People take their cue from the mayor. He’s creating fear in the Jewish community.”

That was the blunt assessment from Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism and a former state Assembly member. Critics point to the mayor’s public statements and behavior as feeding a climate where antisemitic violence can flourish. They say words from City Hall matter, and when a mayor signals indifference or hostility, it has consequences on the street.

Mamdani has been an outspoken critic of Israel and has accused Israel of committing a “genocide” during the war in Gaza while calling for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He skipped the annual Israel Day Parade in May and has refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” language many Jewish organizations view as incitement. Those actions and statements have widened the divide between his office and Jewish community leaders.

“When one community is being attacked at this disproportionate rate while the rest of the city gets safer, that is not random. It is a failure of leadership.”

Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, framed the trend as a leadership failure rather than a statistical anomaly. He urged the mayor to change course and focus on the safety of Jewish New Yorkers as a priority rather than an afterthought. His second statement underscored that community expectations extend beyond rhetoric.

“Jewish New Yorkers have every right to expect that their safety will be treated as a priority, not an afterthought. The mayor must stop the rhetoric that fuels hostility and start treating antisemitic violence with the urgency it demands.”

“In his first six months in office, antisemitism has only gotten worse. It’s hard to claim progress when hate keeps setting new records.”

Even elected Democrats have publicly broken with the mayor on this. Assemblyman Sam Berger offered a stark critique of Mamdani’s early tenure, arguing that rising antisemitism makes it difficult to claim progress. That kind of intra-party tension highlights how politically damaging the spike has become for city leadership.

“We know that while Jewish New Yorkers comprise a minority of our population, they continue to comprise a majority of the victims of hate crimes. And that is unacceptable. The work to uproot antisemitism out of this city is one that will continue until we see hate crimes come to an end in the city.”

Mamdani acknowledged the disproportionate toll on Jewish New Yorkers in a public statement, but critics called the response boilerplate. After a pair of stabbings on the Upper West Side, in which a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales allegedly stabbed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke and an Asian man in back-to-back assaults while allegedly screaming “Allahu Akbar,” the mayor reiterated the city’s “no tolerance for hatred of any kind.”

The administration did increase the Mayor’s Office of Hate Crime Prevention budget by 800%, adding $26 million, yet hate crime numbers continued to rise. That gap between added funding and results has prompted a simple question: what specifically has the money produced? Observers say the data so far suggests the answer is not enough. Mamdani’s chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, previously represented an al Qaeda tanker-bombing pilot, a detail that has intensified scrutiny of the mayor’s team.

“Through it all, even as the demands on this department reached historic levels, the men and women of the NYPD delivered double-digit declines in major crime and record lows in violent crime across the city.”

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch touted those citywide gains, noting the NYPD handled an “unprecedented series of major and overlapping events” over the summer. Shootings in July fell 21.3%, with 59 incidents compared to 243 in July 2020, a 75% drop, and year-to-date shootings fell 7.5% from 771 incidents to 381. Murders dropped 32.3% in July and 22.8% year-to-date, while other major crimes fell between 0.4% and 25.3%.

That broader improvement makes the antisemitic trend more conspicuous: when nearly every major crime category is improving and antisemitic violence rises, it points to a targeted problem. City leaders and residents are watching to see whether the mayor will pair rhetoric with concrete, effective steps to reverse that trajectory. Thirty-three hate crimes were recorded in July alone, and the violence is happening while the city’s leadership posture on related issues fuels concern among those most at risk.