The subjects of New York magazine's current cover package, and their beloved Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are actively working to make life for the Big Apple's 900,000 Jews intolerable. James Keivom for NY Post See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google New York Magazine this week dubbed our town “Habibi City” to mark the rising prominence of Middle Easterners and Muslim immigrants united by fun, frolic — and a consuming hatred of Israel and Jews.
It’s a familiar formulation, harking back to 1966, when newly elected Mayor John Lindsay declared New York to be “Fun City.”
Yes, such fun! Lindsay’s two terms drove NYC into civil and budgetary collapse.
A crime tsunami rotted neighborhoods across the five boroughs, and feckless budgetary policies emptied the city’s coffers.
And the population of Lindsay’s “Fun City” declined by half a million people.
Facing a government that didn’t seem to care what happened to them, much of the middle class voted with their feet.
Something similar may happen in Habibi City, but this time the effort to make life unbearable for some New Yorkers is entirely intentional — and aimed at a specific minority.
Lindsay was incompetent, but he certainly didn’t want respectable taxpayers to leave.
Not so the subjects of New York Magazine’s current cover package, and their beloved Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
New York Magazine’s “Habibi City” cover. New York Magazine Through their actions and their rhetoric, they’re actively working to bring about depopulation by making life for the Big Apple’s 900,000 Jews intolerable.
And this series of articles is part of a larger campaign whose purpose is to let Jews know they’re no longer welcome in New York.
The lead piece, by Zaina Arafat, describes how she and her fellow Habibis reacted in 2023 to the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
“In the months after Oct. 7,” she writes, New York’s Habibis were “increasingly spilling into view, desperate to be close” to “people who looked like you and spoke like you . . . living under the threat of annihilation. So we protested, we boycotted, we wrote op-eds.”
Um . . . who was living under the threat of annihilation again?
The Habibi actions began on Oct. 8, with campus celebrations of Hamas and denunciations of Israel — and then erupted all over New York, with the ritualistic shredding of posters mourning the 240 hostages taken into Gaza by terrorists.
And those protests! One of them, on Oct. 28, shut down the Brooklyn Bridge when Israel was exactly 12 hours into its invasion of Gaza — that is, when the “genocide” that never actually happened really hadn’t happened yet.
It was the day of my son’s bar mitzvah, and it took guests three hours to get to our celebration at a kosher restaurant on Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue.
The Habibis intended that citywide disruption as a sign: They would use Hamas’ Oct. 7 monstrousness as a ladder to climb toward political power in the United States.
The New York Magazine propaganda package — written entirely inside the worldview of those who believe Hamas is in the right and Israel and the Jews who support it are genocidaires — demonstrates that this effort continues.
In so doing, its articles lay bare the degree to which anti-Zionism and antisemitism are indistinguishable.
Restaurants run by Jews deserve to be boycotted, and Jews who make and sell hummus are colonial oppressors stealing non-Jewish recipes.
The 79-year-old country that’s home to 7 million Jews is referred to without irony as “the land mass currently called Israel,” effectively endorsing the idea that it should be wiped off the map.
Those who believe such things are now the cultural and political vanguard of New York City, and they want to harness their power to close Jewish businesses — and weaken the law enforcement institutions necessary to protect Jews.
Oh, some Jews are to be tolerated — so long as they’re willing to serve as ideological bodyguards for New York’s antisemitic mayor.
Consider the radical rabbis who begged Mamdani this week at Gracie Mansion to be nicer to Jews, or at least to talk more gently about them.
These ordained Quislings want him to provide them cover for betraying their own people, the same way they’ve helped shield him from accusations of Jew-hatred.
I don’t think Mamdani is going to make it that easy for them.
After all, it’s Habibi City now, where official maps showing the diversity of our metropolis make not a single mention of the areas where Jews predominate, like Borough Park in Brooklyn.
But those neighborhoods are frequently noted elsewhere in city documents — like the lists of victims of hate crimes.
They’re up 74% over last year, and the entirety of the growth comes from a 60% increase in anti-Jewish hate crimes.
New York magazine may choose to turn a blind eye, but such grim statistics indicate that what began ironically as Fun City and is now Habibi City may soon turn into Pogrom City.
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary Magazine.
