Will Mamdani’s election spur a mass aliyah from NYC? Don’t count on it

In the hours after Zohran Mamdani, a far-left, anti-Israel candidate, won the race to be New York City’s next mayor, a fake flier circulated on social media honoring him as Nefesh B’Nefesh’s “employee of the month.”

The joke: Mamdani’s victory is a boon to the aliyah organization, which will now see a mass exodus of Jews fleeing antisemitism in Mamdani’s New York.

Some Israeli politicians have urged just that. Yisrael Beytenu chair Avigdor Liberman called Mamdani’s win a “wake-up call for New York Jews who want to immigrate to where they belong – the Land of Israel.”

Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli posted an invitation for New York Jews to “positively consider making the Land of Israel their new place.”

So should Ben Gurion Airport prepare for a wave of Jewish New Yorkers saddled with suitcases come January 1, when Mamdani takes office?

Not so fast.

It has been well documented that antisemitism and anti-Israel activism surged in New York City after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Anti-Jewish incidents regularly make up the majority of hate crimes in the NYPD’s monthly reports, while anti-Israel street rallies have become a regular feature in the two years since October 7, in addition to vandalism, assaults, bomb threats and more.

THREAD
Meet Zorhan Mamdani, the Employee of the Month for Nefesh B’Nefesh, the organization that helps Jews immigrate to Israel.

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Why?
Because every time Jews are pushed out, from Spain, Iraq, Poland, or now maybe New York, they go home.

History has a pattern.
And Mamdani is… pic.twitter.com/7RRrN4QPWM

— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) November 5, 2025

The mayor-elect has pledged repeatedly to fight antisemitism and increase funding to counter it. About a third of Jews voted for him, according to an exit poll. Still, hundreds of Jewish leaders and groups warned during the campaign that anti-Jewish and anti-Israel activism could spike under Mamdani.

The incoming mayor shares many of the core sentiments of the anti-Israel protesters who have taken to New York’s streets, from denying Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state to blaming the IDF for local police violence. Those street protests have at times included or spilled over into antisemitic incidents.

If the warnings bear out, and if Mamdani’s pledges to fight antisemitism ring hollow, New York City will become a less comfortable and more dangerous place for its one million Jews. But that doesn’t mean that droves of them will leave the city, much less make aliyah.

Antisemitism has been rising in the United States for more than a decade, far before October 7. Nearly every year, the Anti-Defamation League’s audit of antisemitic incidents sets a new record. The worst antisemitic attack in American history happened in 2018.

But during all that time, aliyah numbers from the United States didn’t change much. Dating back to before the current increase in antisemitism, annual aliyah figures from the US have hovered roughly between 2,000 and 4,000.

The truth is that for most American Jews, uprooting one’s life and moving across the world— a demanding effort even in the best of times — isn’t really on the radar as a response to rising hate. A 2024 study by the American Jewish Committee found that most Jews thought antisemitism had increased “a lot” since October 7, though only seven percent had even considered leaving the US because of it.

And for all of the hate in New York City, Jewish life is still thriving there.

The city is freckled with Jewish schools, community centers and synagogues, a vibrant Jewish and Israeli culinary scene, and tight-knit Jewish neighborhoods across the five boroughs. It’s still the city with the most Jews in the world, with the language, food and history of the Jewish community woven deep into its tapestry.

And even if the roughly two-thirds of Jews who voted against Mamdani decide to flee the city’s borders, they may not go as far as Israel. The pandemic, for example, saw a wave of relocation to the suburbs. Many Orthodox Jews moved to another center of Jewish life with a tropical climate: Florida.

Israel, meanwhile, with its tenuous ceasefire and perpetual political crisis, may not be the most inviting destination. On Wednesday night, the Israeli satire show Eretz Nehederet posted a sketch in which a Jew making aliyah from New York and an Israeli moving to the Big Apple bump into each other at Ben Gurion Airport. Each is in disbelief about the other’s decision.

Of course,  history is replete with prosperous Jewish communities that have since all but disappeared. Warsaw used to be around a third Jewish. The same was once true of Odessa and Baghdad. On a smaller scale, in 2015, France saw a spike in immigration to Israel following antisemitic attacks. Just because Jews are thriving in New York now does not mean they will forever.

Nor are New York’s Jewish leaders acting sanguine about Mamdani’s win. In a relatively rare joint statement, several of the city’s largest Jewish groups issued continued caution about the incoming mayor.

They also vowed to stay put, “pledging to live proud and public Jewish lives and make vital contributions to the future of our beloved city.”