New NYPD data shows hate crimes climbed nearly 10% in New York City even as every major crime category fell, and Jewish New Yorkers, roughly a tenth of the population, were targeted in more than half the incidents.
The numbers landed Monday and drew immediate fire from Jewish leaders, elected officials, and at least one foreign government, all pointing at Mayor Zohran Mamdani's record on antisemitism. NYPD statistics show 360 confirmed hate crimes citywide year-to-date, up 9.4% from 329 over the same stretch last year. Of those, 205 targeted Jewish New Yorkers, 56.9% of the total, up 8.5% from 189 in the prior period, the New York Post reported.
The contrast with the rest of the city's crime picture makes the hate-crime spike harder to dismiss. Murder fell 22.8% through the first seven months of the year. Shootings dropped 7.5%. Burglary, auto theft, robbery, grand larceny, and felony assault all declined, between 0.4% and 25.3%. All seven major crime categories posted sharp drops across every borough. Yet hate crimes, and antisemitic hate crimes in particular, moved in the opposite direction.
Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism and a former state assemblyman from Brooklyn, placed the blame squarely on the mayor.
"People take their cue from the mayor. He's creating fear in the Jewish community."
Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, framed the data as a leadership failure rather than a statistical blip. Spern told reporters:
"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."
Spern added that Jewish New Yorkers "have every right to expect that their safety will be treated as a priority, not an afterthought," and called on the mayor to "stop the rhetoric that fuels hostility and start treating antisemitic violence with the urgency it demands."
Mamdani has built a public record that his critics cite chapter and verse. He has called Israel's war in Gaza a "genocide." He called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has refused to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada." He skipped the annual Israel Day Parade in May, instead touting his 2029 re-election bid and riding his bicycle. And his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, previously represented an al Qaeda tanker-bombing pilot.
Mamdani's approach to governance has drawn scrutiny well beyond the hate-crime numbers. His city-owned grocery proposal promised 30% discounts but left taxpayers guessing about the cost, a pattern of ambitious rhetoric paired with thin accountability.
On July 23, a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales allegedly stabbed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke and an Asian man in back-to-back attacks on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Witnesses reported that Morales screamed "Allahu Akbar" during the assaults. He was subsequently hit with hate crime charges. AP News reported that Mamdani called the attacks "hateful and despicable" on social media roughly two hours after they occurred.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch offered a different lens. In a statement released with the data, Tisch noted that mental health "may have been a factor" in the stabbings, a framing that Fox News highlighted as critics questioned whether the administration was downplaying the incident's antisemitic dimension.
Israel's government did not hold back. Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa'ar issued a statement tying the violence directly to City Hall, as Just The News reported:
"Months of incitement against the Jewish state from Mamdani have helped create a climate in which Jews are targeted. Words have consequences."
The timeline sharpened the criticism. The Washington Examiner reported that Mamdani released a video calling Netanyahu "a war criminal and architect of a horrific genocide" on July 21, a clip viewed more than 80 million times within a day. Forty-eight hours later, Morales allegedly attacked the Jewish man outside a synagogue on Tisha B'Av, one of Judaism's most solemn days of mourning.
The Examiner also noted that Mamdani rescinded his predecessor's executive orders combating antisemitism upon taking office, drawing condemnation from the UJA-Federation, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Orthodox Union.
Assemblyman Sam Berger, an Orthodox Jewish Democrat from Queens, offered one of the sharpest rebukes from within Mamdani's own party:
"In his first six months in office, antisemitism has only gotten worse. It's hard to claim progress when hate keeps setting new records."
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the Council's first Jewish speaker, released a statement calling the data "deeply concerning" but stopped short of naming Mamdani. Menin said she "will not waver in the fight to protect our communities from hatred" and pointed to her Five-Point Plan to Combat Antisemitism as her first initiative in office. The gap between her alarm and her silence on the mayor's role was notable.
Mamdani's growing political network has made direct confrontation riskier for fellow Democrats. His endorsed slate of socialist candidates swept recent New York primaries, giving him leverage that establishment figures cannot easily ignore.
Asked Monday about the hate-crime surge at an unrelated press conference in the Bronx, the mayor acknowledged the disproportion but offered no causal explanation. He said Jewish New Yorkers "comprise a minority of our population" yet "continue to comprise a majority of the victims of hate crimes," calling that "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."
His office cited an 800% budget increase for the Mayor's Office of Hate Crime Prevention, $26 million more, as evidence of commitment. But Mamdani's office did not respond to a separate request for comment on the data, and the mayor did not address whether his own public statements on Israel, Netanyahu, or the phrase "globalize the intifada" had contributed to the climate his critics describe.
That pattern, spending more money while declining to moderate the rhetoric, is familiar to New Yorkers who have watched Mamdani govern. He has backed candidates with incendiary records even as he asks voters to trust his judgment on public safety.
Commissioner Tisch, for her part, steered her statement toward the broader crime picture. She noted the NYPD managed "an unprecedented series of major and overlapping events" over the summer, the NBA Finals, the World Cup, Sail250, and the nation's largest Fourth of July celebration, while delivering "double-digit declines in major crime and record lows in violent crime." July shootings fell 21.3%, and murders dropped 32.3% for the month.
Those numbers are real. But they make the hate-crime trajectory harder to explain away, not easier. If the NYPD can drive shootings down 75% from July 2020 levels and push murder down nearly a quarter for the year, the department plainly has the capacity to move numbers. The question is whether City Hall's own conduct is working against the officers on the street.
Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple put it this way, as the Washington Examiner quoted him: "When a public figure witnesses rising hatred against any group, then chooses language that can reasonably be expected to inflame that hatred, whatever his stated intentions, his words both stoke division and can become a catalyst for violence."
Mamdani's management of New York has drawn fire on multiple fronts, from Jeff Bezos criticizing his school spending to Jewish leaders questioning his fitness to keep their community safe. The common thread is a mayor who governs by ideology and treats accountability as an inconvenience.
A city where every major crime drops but hate crimes keep climbing has a leadership problem, not a policing problem. The NYPD's own data makes that case more plainly than any critic could.