From Salute to Celebrate to Am Yisrael: The Next Chapter of New York’s Israel Parade

Posted on June 8, 2026 by First.One.Through

The children who dominate New York’s Israel parade are no longer the children who dominate Jewish education.

Each spring, Fifth Avenue fills with students from Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist schools waving Israeli flags, singing Hebrew songs, and celebrating the Jewish state. Yet these students represent only a small fraction of Jewish children in the New York metropolitan area. The largest group of Jewish children attends public and secular private schools. The largest group attending Jewish schools is Chassidic and Yeshivish.

*Jewish yeshiva day school students and faculty march up Fifth Avenue in New York City’s Israel parade, May 31, 2026 (photo: First One Through)*

That reality raises an important question about the future of one of American Jewry’s most visible public events.

The parade’s own history reflects the evolution of American Jewish identity.

When it was founded in 1964, it was called the Youth Salute to Israel Parade. The name reflected its era. Israel was only sixteen years old. The Holocaust was still within living memory. American Jews were not merely celebrating Israel; they were standing with it.

In 2011, the event became the Celebrate Israel Parade. Israel was no longer a struggling young state. It was a global technology center, a military power, and home to millions of Jews. The emphasis shifted from solidarity to celebration.

After October 7, the parade adopted a third name: Israel Day on Fifth.

The parade’s three names trace the evolution of American Zionism itself. The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel.

Today, the challenge is different. Support for Israel can no longer be assumed, and Jewish unity can no longer be taken for granted. The question is whether Israel can continue to serve as a bridge connecting an increasingly diverse Jewish community.

The challenge is particularly visible when looking at Jewish children in the greater NYC area.

The best available estimates suggest that roughly 450,000 to 500,000 Jewish school-age children live in the greater New York metropolitan area. About 170,000 attend Jewish day schools and yeshivot.

Of those, roughly 130,000 to 140,000 attend Chassidic and Yeshivish schools, compared with only 20,000 to 25,000 in Modern Orthodox schools. Outside the day-school world are another 280,000 to 330,000 Jewish children attending public schools, secular private schools, Catholic schools, and other educational settings.

Yet anyone watching the parade could be forgiven for drawing the opposite conclusion.

The schools most visible on Fifth Avenue are overwhelmingly Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist institutions. They are among the most committed supporters of Israel in American Jewish life. But they represent only a small share of Jewish youth. The fastest-growing segment of Jewish education is Chassidic and Yeshivish. The largest segment of Jewish children overall attends public and secular private schools.

The parade therefore showcases some of the most engaged Jewish children in America, but not necessarily the full spectrum of Jewish youth.

That matters because Israel remains one of the few ideas capable of connecting Jews across denominational, ideological, and educational lines. At a moment when Jewish attachment to Israel is increasingly challenged on college campuses, contested on social media, and questioned in parts of American public life, institutions that connect young Jews to Israel have become more important, not less.

If the goal is Jewish unity in the decades ahead, the parade may need to ask a different question.

Rather than “How do we celebrate Israel?” the question may be “How do we bring the Jewish people together around Israel?”

A future parade organized around Am Yisrael rather than a particular expression of Zionism could create room for every community to participate in its own way.

Charedi schools could march under banners celebrating Torah in the Land of Israel.
Public-school students could march through camps, youth groups, synagogue programs, and community organizations.
Modern Orthodox schools could continue expressing their Religious Zionist vision.
Israeli cultural groups, charities, universities, first responders, and innovation organizations would all still have their place.

This would be Am Yisrael Day on Fifth Avenue.

The original parade was created to demonstrate solidarity with a young Jewish state. The next challenge is ensuring that future generations of American Jews remain connected both to Israel and to one another.

Should the future of the parade remain with the niche schools that already fill Fifth Avenue, it will become a symbol of the fragmentation of Israel support even within the Jewish community, let around the broader world. That would not bode well for Jewish New Yorkers or Israel.

The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel. The challenge for the third generation is to ensure that Israel remains a force capable of uniting the Jewish people.

When the Children Climbed Onto the Float

Posted on May 31, 2026 by First.One.Through

Two years ago at New York City’s Celebrate Israel Parade, Holocaust survivors climbed down from their float and danced with the children marching beside them. This year the children climbed up onto the float and sat beside the survivors.

The change captured something unmistakable: distance in years sometimes requires an inverse relationship in physical space.

As the float moved down Fifth Avenue, Holocaust survivors waved Israeli flags toward the crowd. Around them stood students, children, grandchildren, and thousands of New Yorkers carrying American and Israeli flags. Some of those cheering were the children and grandchildren of Survivors who are no longer here.

*Children of Holocaust Survivors march alongside float carrying Survivors (photo: First One Through)*

They felt what we saw: how much smaller the group of survivors had become.

An elderly woman sat quietly beneath a blue hat, an Israeli flag resting beside her. Nearby, several other survivors smiled and waved to the crowd. Looking across the float, one could not help noticing who was missing.

*Holocaust Survivor at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)*

The men are disappearing.

Every year there are fewer survivors able to spend a day riding through Manhattan. Husbands, brothers, and friends who once shared these memories are no longer there. Increasingly, the survivors are women carrying stories that were once held by entire families and communities.

The Holocaust is passing from lived experience into history.

*Holocaust Survivors at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)*

The banner on the float read simply: “Holocaust Survivors Support Israel.”

For many aboard, Israel is not a political issue. They remember something most Jews today know only from books: a world in which there was no Jewish state. A world in which the doors of country after country remained closed while European Jewry was destroyed.

That reality gave the float a weight extending far beyond the parade itself.

*Claims Conference float at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)*

Yet the most moving scenes took place between the survivors and the young people gathered around them.

Some students and families from the Heschel School spent part of the afternoon alongside the survivors. Conversations unfolded between people separated by seventy or eighty years, yet connected by a common story. One survivor leaned over the railing to hand a parent a reference to a book he had written. Others stopped to speak with children standing beside the float.

The survivors can no longer carry these memories alone.

*Holocaust Survivor at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 talking to people from the Heschel School (photo: First One Through)*

Others must carry them forward.

Perhaps that is why they continue to come.

Waving for hours on a hot day is not easy at ninety years old. Yet year after year they return because memory survives only when it enters public life and passes from one generation to the next.

Around them, the parade moved forward. Families lined the route waving American and Israeli flags. Children danced in the streets. Chabad volunteers helped Jewish men put on tefillin along the sidewalks. The crowd cheered as marchers passed.

Young men put tefillin on Jewish men
at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The city itself felt different than it had a few years ago.

The parade was peaceful, but the precautions were impossible to miss. Police officers lined the route. Barricades stood farther from the crowd than in years past – perhaps twelve feet this year up from eight in years past.

*NY Police watching over the Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)*

*Enormous twelve foot-plus separation along the Celebrate Israel Parade route on Fifth Avenue (photo: First One Through)*

There was another difference as well.

Two years ago New York City’s mayor proudly marched in the parade. This year the mayor made a big show of not showing up because of his anti-Israel opinions. Support for Israel, once treated as an easy civic consensus, now feels more contested amid the ongoing Iranian proxy war on Israel.

The survivors understood such realities better than anyone. They have seen societies become less welcoming before.

Yet as the float rolled down Fifth Avenue, those tensions faded into the background. What remained was something older and more enduring.

Young people sat beside Holocaust survivors. They waved Israeli flags.

The scene compressed centuries of Jewish history. Survivors who remembered Europe before the Holocaust sat beside children growing up in America after the creation of Israel. The last witnesses shared space with those who will soon become witnesses for them.

Soon there will be no Holocaust survivors left to ride down Fifth Avenue.

The children waving beside them will inherit stories they never experienced themselves. They will become the custodians of memories that once belonged to the people sitting beside them.

Two years ago the survivors climbed down from the float and danced with the children. This year the children climbed onto the float and sat beside the survivors.

The time distance between those moments is only two years. The physical distance between those generations has shrunk by necessity.

Mamdani Is Coming For Yeshivas

Posted on May 7, 2026 by First.One.Through

When New Yorkers hear “private schools,” many still picture the old stereotype: elite Manhattan prep schools, hedge-fund families, sprawling campuses, and tuition bills that rival college.

That image is politically useful for progressives. It makes any fight over “private school funding” sound like a fight over privilege.

But in New York City, that is no longer the reality.

The largest private-school system in the city is not Dalton, Horace Mann, or Trinity School. It is the yeshiva system.

More than 100,000 students in New York City attend Jewish day schools and yeshivas (45% of the total in private schools), making them the largest single bloc in the city’s private education sector. Catholic schools, once the backbone of private education in the city, now rank second with 29% of the total. The political image of private education has not caught up with the demographic reality.

*Buses in front of yeshivas in Brooklyn*

And that reality matters.

Because when politicians like Zohran Mamdani talk about cutting back the flow of public money into private education, yeshivas are not a side issue. They are the center of the story.

The latest battleground is special education reimbursement.

These are not subsidies for luxury education. They are legal remedies for families of children with disabilities whose needs the public-school system failed to meet. Under federal law, when the city cannot provide an appropriate education, parents can seek private placement and reimbursement.

That system has grown dramatically in cost. Critics argue it disproportionately benefits families with the resources to hire lawyers, navigate hearings, and front tuition costs. And White families in particular.

The rising cost is a legitimate policy concern.

But the answer cannot be to jump to the conclusion that yeshiva kids are taking too much; it must be to evaluate the various needs of children and figure out how to provide for them.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time and with a mayor in New York City who prefers class and racial warfare and is portraying this as a matter of “equity” and confronting “private-school privilege.” It is not. It would primarily target students with special needs at Jewish and Catholic schools.

The charts are misleading because the demographics of public and private schools are dramatically different; There are 940,000 children in public school of which 43% are Hispanic and 23% are Black – generally in line with the disability figures above

It would hit communities that already shoulder the cost of religious education while also paying taxes into a public system they largely do not use.

It would hit families with children who need specialized services.

And it would hit institutions that serve as the backbone of Jewish continuity in New York.

Because yeshivas are not just schools. They are where tradition is transmitted, where Hebrew is spoken, where Torah is learned, where identity is formed, and where Jewish continuity is secured across generations. It is civilizational infrastructure.

And once government begins treating private educational alternatives as a fiscal problem rather than a parental right, the pressure rarely stops with one category. First special education reimbursements. Then transportation. Then security funding. Then textbooks. The pattern is familiar: reduce the supports, increase the burden, narrow the choice.

Zohran Mamdani built his politics around redistribution and expanding public provision. His next target seems to be thousands of Jewish children with special educational needs.

The Golem of New York City

Posted on December 29, 2025 by First.One.Through

In the legends of Prague, the Golem came into being when civic order failed Jews in predictable ways. Blood libels circulated, crowds gathered, and authorities hesitated at the decisive moment. Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal (c.1512-1609), recognized the pattern. He shaped a human form from the mud of the Vltava River—from the city itself—and animated it with sacred words. The choice of material mattered. The defender of Jews was made from the ground beneath their feet. Even if the city’s leaders would not protect Jews, the city itself would.

The Golem patrolled the Jewish quarter, broke the rhythm of violence, and restored deterrence. When the danger passed, it was deactivated and laid to rest in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, the Altneuschul. The legend recorded a hard truth: when the state falters, protection is improvised; when the state recovers, emergency power sleeps.

*Altneuschul in Prague (photo: First One Through)*

That memory traveled.

The melody of Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish State of Israel, traces back through the musical world of that same Prague river Vltava, famously shaped by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Exile and return share a river. The Golem embodies survival within exile; Zionism embodies the resolve to end exile. One guards a community where it stands, the other builds sovereignty so guarding becomes policy.

Yet the Golem never disappears. It waits for the moment when trust in authority thins again.

New York, Upper East Side

New York City holds one of the world’s largest and most visible Jewish populations. Jewish life here is open and proud. Synagogues, schools, and community institutions operate in public view, anchored by the assumption that their protection is a foundational duty of government.

That assumption has been tested.

On the Upper East Side in November 2025, an anti-Israel crowd swarmed a synagogue hosting a pro–Land of Israel event. The scene echoed an old shape: shouting at the doors of a Jewish house of worship, intimidation in a public park, the expectation that Jews would need to justify gathering openly as Jews. Instead of drawing a clear perimeter around the synagogue and condemning the mob, Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, scolded the shul for holding a Zionist event, shifting the burden of restraint onto the Jewish institution.

For Jews who carry history close, the signal was unmistakable. Cities fail their minorities first through language, then through hesitation, and only later through force. When the synagogue itself surrounded by an angry crowd is framed as the problem, safety has become conditional.

Conditional safety never endures.

How the Modern Golem Forms

The Golem of New York does not rise from clay. It forms from memory.

Private guards appear where confidence once lived. Volunteer patrols lengthen into the evening. Parents coordinate entrances and exits. Institutions harden quietly, without ceremony.

These are the incremental steps of adaptation. Communities organize when clarity blurs. Parallel systems take shape when weak reassurance yields to experience.

Other minority groups get municipal funding and public declarations of support while Jews are only lumped into a general “other” category, as in White Plains, the capital of Westchester County just north of New York City. Jews learn that they must fend for themselves, because their basic protection offends many. Frighteningly, even for local politicians.

On the Upper East Side, a growing and proudly Zionist congregation bears a name heavy with inheritance: Altneu Synagogue. Old–New. It is a spin-off of the Park East Synagogue where the anti-Israel mob harassed and intimidated Jews. The echo of Prague’s Altneuschul may also prove prescient. Old dangers return wearing contemporary language. Rivers change. Cities change. But the logic persists.

Natan Sharansky, a famous Russian “refusenik” who was jailed for years before being allowed to leave to Israel, knows the dangers of antisemitic regimes. He came to Washington, D.C. in November 2023 to address 300,000 people about the need to fight back: “We, together, will fight against those who try to give legitimacy to Hamas. We will fight for Israel. We will fight for every Jew. We will fight against antisemitism. We will fight for the values and against corruption of those values which are at the center of our Jewish identity and American identity.”

Sharansky is coming to New York in January, soon after Mamdani takes office. He should come to the Altneu Synagogue and help shape and awaken a modern Golem as Jewish security appears vulnerable, and the current leaders of Jewish institutions appear unable to rise to the moment. New, unconventional defenders need to assume roles.

For the moment, things may be OK. Mamdani appointed Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a role she has had for several years. She is Jewish and no-nonsense leader, widely supported by the city’s Jewish community. If she can do her job without anti-Zionist and antisemitic politicians limiting her mandate, Jews will be fine. Otherwise, a new golem will rise in the New World, hundreds of years after the Golem of Prague went to sleep in the attic of the Altneuschul.

From Bloomberg to Mamdani

Posted on November 5, 2025 by First.One.Through

It took New York City barely a decade to move from Michael Bloomberg (mayor 2002-2014) to Zohran Mamdani — from a billionaire moderate who built a global business to an anti-capitalist socialist who’s never built anything.

*Mike Bloomberg winning third term as NYC mayor*

Bloomberg personified competence, merit, and modernity. He was a technocrat with a work ethic forged in markets — the quintessential New Yorker who believed that numbers mattered, that data and pragmatism could solve problems, and that capitalism, however imperfect, was the engine that kept the city alive.

Mamdani is the inversion of that story. He’s the smiling avatar of grievance politics — a man who’s never signed a paycheck, raised capital, or met a payroll, yet rails against the very system that feeds the city’s workers. He doesn’t want to grow the pie; he wants to break the plate.

So what happened to New York? How did a city that once celebrated builders and innovators — from bankers to artists, from garment manufacturers to tech founders — turn to someone who blames success itself for society’s ills?

Did New Yorkers Change — or Did the World?

Some say it was Donald Trump — the Queens developer turned president — who poisoned the well. For many New Yorkers, capitalism’s swagger became indistinguishable from his brashness. “Moderate” began to sound like “complicit.” Every problem was blamed on “the system,” and every system was condemned as oppressive.

Others blame social media, the great amplifier of outrage. The algorithms rewarded passion over proof, hashtags over homework. The loudest became the leaders, and anger became authenticity. The more you despised the system, the more followers you gained.

Still others point to federal polarization — a country at war with itself. Washington became tribal, and so did New York. To be anti-Republican meant embracing anything that wasn’t Republican, even if it was radical.

The Fall of the Striver Ideal

Bloomberg embodied a uniquely American, and particularly Jewish, story — the son of immigrants who rose by grinding harder, thinking smarter, and building bigger. For generations, that was the city’s moral code: earn it.

Mamdani represents something new — or perhaps something lost. He is not the striver, but the symbol. The story isn’t one of building, but belonging. It’s politics as identity and resentment rather than responsibility and results.

When a city stops admiring those who build and starts rewarding those who only protest, decline is not far behind.

A Mirror, Not a Moment

New York’s journey from Bloomberg to Mamdani isn’t just a change in politics — it’s a cultural inversion. The Jewish billionaire who built an empire has been replaced by a Ugandan Muslim who campaigns against empires. The technocrat gave way to the ideologue. The achiever to the accuser.

The city once responded to horrible radical Islamic terrorism in downtown Manhattan by electing a proven builder to remake the city. Now the city has responded to that vile terrorism in southern Israel by rallying behind a novice who vilified the victims.

It’s tempting to say the city changed. But perhaps it merely revealed what it had become: a place where envy now outshouts excellence, and where tearing down is easier than building up.

New York once measured people by what they created. Now it measures them by what they condemn.

Frank Sinatra sang the city’s theme song “New York, New York,” that “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” The city was a mark of excellence and competence. To win in New York City was the proving ground to anywhere and everywhere.

Does that now mean that grievance is the current marker of greatness in America? That radicalism and revolutionaries are the vanguard? Anti-capitalist socialism will come for cities around the United States?

The tragedy isn’t only that the city chose Mamdani. It’s that so many think it’s progress.

New Yorkers Must Register Democrat and Vote Republican

Posted on October 19, 2025 by First.One.Through

To watch a political novice backed by a far-left extremist group rise to the brink of becoming mayor of the largest city in America is frightening enough. To realize that he will have the full backing of a Democratic governor and a compliant state legislature to enact his radical agenda is terrifying. Zohran Mamdani, a darling of the antisemitic Democratic Socialists of America, has weaponized a friendly smile and promises of “free” everything into a populist movement ready to capture real power.

The race is effectively over. The weakness and fragmentation of his opponents make his November 4 election almost certain. But that does not mean New Yorkers are powerless. Far from it.

1. Register Democratic — and block the radicals.
While national elections generate headlines, your single vote barely registers on a national scale. Local elections, however, can be swung by a few hundred ballots. In a deep-blue state like New York, the real election is the Democratic primary. That’s where the socialists gain power — because moderates stay home or remain registered as independents. If you want to stop extremists from running your city, county and state, you must register as a Democrat and vote against the zealots in the primaries.

2. Vote Republican in the general election — everywhere.
Even outside New York City, every voter can help slow the DSA’s march. New York State operates under a blue-wall trifecta: a Democratic governor and supermajorities in both the State Senate and Assembly. Republicans have no effective voice. Governor Kathy Hochul’s open endorsement of Mamdani means his far-left policies will move through Albany unchecked unless the state’s Republican vote share grows.

*Far-left media Jacobin advances “to govern, the Left needs many Zohrans.”*

So yes — in this strange political moment — the smart play for moderates and centrists is tactical: register Democratic to stop radicals in primaries, and vote Republican to blunt their power in office.

If New Yorkers don’t act now, the most radical city government in America won’t just run New York — it will set the agenda for the entire country.

Sharia Britain, Canada and U.S.

Posted on October 16, 2025 by First.One.Through

When the heckler’s veto becomes public policy, liberty dies by degrees.

The world rallied in Paris when jihadi radicals murdered staff at Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Leaders raised banners for free speech and spoke of defending the liberties that make liberal democracies possible. The same chorus rose after other political murders like Charlie Kirk in 2025: condemnations, eulogies, brief outrage.

Yet the Global North has a quieter, more corrosive surrender under way — a surrender not to a foreign army but to the heckler’s veto. When threats of violence can shape who is allowed to speak, to march, to play, or to pray, freedom has already been bargained away.

*UK’s MP Ayoub Khan celebrating the banning of Tel Aviv fans from a game because their presence might bring out protestors. Other fans were welcomed to attend in October 2025.*

Too often now the mere presence of Jews is treated as a provocation that must be managed by erasure. In Britain, politicians warn that protests will make events “unsafe” and ask organizers to exclude Israeli athletes and fans, Jewish speakers, or symbols rather than arrest the thugs who threaten violence. In 1929, after brutal attacks in Hebron, British authorities removed all Jews from their homes to suppress further bloodshed — an act that punished the innocent to placate the violent. That precedent echoes when modern officials choose exclusion over enforcement.

Call it what it is: when a state lets intimidation determine who may appear in public, it substitutes coercion for law. When politicians cave to the loudest violent faction to avoid a headline, they have abandoned the first duty of government — to protect the rights of every citizen, not to negotiate them away.

*Canadian police ask Jewish family to leave the street since their “presence is deemed a sufficient provocation for removal,” in November 2024.*

This is not a critique of a religion; it is an indictment of extremism and of political cowardice. The problem is not Muslim faith but those within it who preach and practice violence — and the leaders who, for fear or for votes, let those violent actors set the rules.

A democracy that permits the heckler’s veto on principle is no longer democratic; it is ruled by fear. If we are to remain free, the test is simple: do we defend rights when it is inconvenient, or only when it is safe? If the answer is the latter, then we are well on the way to living under a very different law — one written by radical mobs and enforced by silence.

*US President Obama advisor Aaron Keyak tells Jews to “take off your kippah and hide your magen david” to avoid being targeted in May 2021.*

President Biden set this in motion in the U.S. in May 2021 when his own Jewish advisor, Aaron Keyak, told Jews to hide their Jewishness, presumably because they should not assume that the government would protect them showing their faith publicly. In September 2024, school officials at New York’s Baruch College said it explicitly, telling Jews that they could not “guarantee their security” if they held a celebration for Rosh Hashana.

We have set the stage for Democratic-Socialist Zohran Mamdani to become mayor of the city with the largest Jewish diaspora community in the world. Where police will not only suggest that Jews stay off the streets but may be directed by the mayor to arrest Jews because their very presence is deemed a provocation.

Cuomo, Jewish Champion, Aged Gladiator

Posted on July 21, 2025 by First.One.Through

Weekends in the Hamptons Synagogue are times to hear from politicians but infrequently a political war room. That changed on July 20. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, political veteran and bruised warrior of Albany, came down from the bleachers and into the pit—this time, to describe the battle with far-left ideologue who had somehow captured the heart of New York City’s radical alt-left: Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo stood before a predominantly older, anxious crowd—not in his home borough, but in the summer home of hundreds of Manhattan’s Jewish residents. Rabbi Marc Schneier introduced him warmly, a gesture that symbolized more than courtesy. It was a call for a lifeline from a community watching its city slip into madness.

From Apology to Attack

Cuomo opened with an apology for his lackluster primary campaign, acknowledging what everyone in the room already knew: Mamdani’s young, radical left had shown up to vote, and Cuomo hadn’t shown up at all. But that was going to change. Cuomo pledged to fight between now and November—and then made a pledge to follow the suggestion of former New Jersey Senator David Paterson, that if trailing Mayor Eric Adams in the fall polls, he would step aside in September to avoid splitting the anti-Mamdani vote. He implied Adams should do the same.

*Former Governor Andrew Cuomo addressed crowd at the Hamptons Synagogue in Westhampton Beach, on the dias with Rabbi Marc Schneier, on July 20, 2025 (photo: First One Through)*

“fueling antisemitism”

In responding to a direct question, Cuomo refused to label Mamdani an antisemite because “I cannot see into his heart,” but was clear that the 33-year old very much “fuels antisemitism,” and further “engages in hate speech.”

The crowd nodded, murmured. Some thought Cuomo was too polite. They’ve listened to Mamdani excuse phrases like “globalize the Intifada” to bring violence against the Jews everywhere. They saw the only legislation introduced by the radical socialist, a bill to strip the tax-exempt status of charities benefiting Israelis, like Hatzalah. They read his call to “defund the police.”

Mamdani’s platform is a direct threat to Jewish safety.

*Eli Beer, founder of Hatzalah in Israel, asking a question of Andrew Cuomo at the Hamptons Synagogue on July 20, 2025 (photo: First One Through)*

A Plan for the City

Cuomo laid out his blueprint:

Enforce the law and prosecute hate crimes.
Hire 5,000 new police officers.
Build housing in a supply-starved market.
Attract businesses and jobs to the city.

He didn’t let the crowd forget what they lost: 15,000 jobs from Amazon’s Long Island City project—killed, he reminded them, by Mamdani’s comrade-in-ideology, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cuomo said that he had worked hard to win that competition, only to be foiled by a Democratic-Socialist. When the city and state were not blocked by terrible ideologies, Cuomo was able to accomplish a lot, including the Second Avenue subway, a new Laguardia Airport and a replacement to the Tappan Zee Bridge.

He was a Democrat who accomplished tangible results, while the Democratic-Socialist wing of the party impeded any progress with “stupid ideas.”

Desperation and the Wounded Gladiator

When Cuomo finished, the crowd didn’t roar—it exhaled. One person whispered into the microphone that the speech needed to be given in every synagogue in the city. Cuomo responded that he will do what he can but you need to get and be messengers. If you don’t organize, Mamdani wins.

Cuomo offered data: Mamdani won the primary because the activist class under 30 turned out en masse. But the general electorate was different: 70% Democrats, 15% Independents, and 15% Republicans. With Adams or Sliwa out of the race, Cuomo insisted, the math would work and recent polls show he is correct. He could win. If the others dropped out.

The audience, mostly over 70, carried the unease of people who had seen this movie before. Socialist cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago—were crumbling under the weight of their ideology and policies. New York had put its toe in the water in the past with Bill de Blasio and the results were terrible. A Mamdani mayoralty, Cuomo warned, could bury the city for two decades.

They wanted to believe Cuomo could win. But they also saw the crowded field ahead and Cuomo’s primary loss behind. It was like watching a wounded gladiator try to rise as the coliseum gates opened and the lions approached.

They weren’t cheering.
They were praying.

For him. For themselves.

From Vienna to Queens: Karl Lueger, Zohran Mamdani, and the Politics of Polite Antisemitism (June 2025)

Make New York Bankrupt Again: The Danger of Mamdani and 21st Century Socialism (June 2025)

DSA Goes Full Antisemite (July 2024)

Racism In The Old and Antisemitism In The Youth (February 2024)

Please Don’t Vote for a Democratic Socialist (November 2018)

New York Times and Jewish Democratic Leaders Reverse On Mamdani

Posted on June 29, 2025 by First.One.Through

Before the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, The New York Times editorial board wrote that Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani was “uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges” due to his complete lack of experience in running organizations, negotiating contracts and impractical solutions for the largest city in the country. After Mamdani won the primary, the paper quickly churned out articles casting him in a positive light.

First the Times posted puff pieces about “Zohran Mamdani’s Winning Style,” followed a few hours later by “The Parents Who Helped Shape Zohran Mamdani’s Politics.”

Just a few hours later there was an article on “The Age-Old Question Behind the New York Mayor’s Race,” followed ten minutes later by an opinion piece “Plenty of Jews Love Zohran Mamdani.”

The next day, the paper continued its posting frenzy. First it posted about unions switching to support Mamdani and the alt-left politician’s courting Black voters. Then it posted twice about the Mamdani’s social media campaign and success with young voters.

The paper seemed to have an artificial intelligence blogger on autopilot, trying to familiarize the world with this inexperienced 33-year old extremist, and cast him in a positive light.

Why the sudden flip? Why did the Times choose to ignore the millions of New Yorkers who loathe the politics and economic plan of the far-left socialist and fear his hatred for the Jewish State fighting a multifront war? Why pretend that the paper had never recommended that voters stay away from Mamdani?

It’s a terrifying reality of today’s world where party loyalty is paramount over anything else.

And it’s not just the Times. Jewish New York politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Jerry Nadler ran to support Mamdani after his win, abandoning the majority of the 1.4 million Jews in the city who think of Mamdani the way those two politicians think of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. #AnyoneButMamdani. #MadManny

In an embarassing – and more frequent – dynamic, non-Jewish New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand had no issue calling out Mamdani for his hateful rhetoric. While Schumer and Nadler have become the WOAT, “Worst Of All Time,” non-Jews are proving themselves better allies than fellow Jews.

While millions of New Yorkers are attempting to figure out how to keep a radical socialist out of Gracie Mansion, leaders of the Democratic party are rallying around the primary winner whom they know is unfit and dangerous, whom they had shunned. Such is politics today: an ugly circus in which loyalty is in the center ring and the ringmasters sacrifice innocent heads in the mouths of tigers.

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From the Hitler Youth to Woke Classrooms: State Indoctrination Then and Now

Posted on June 25, 2025 by First.One.Through

Zohran Mamdani, a radical socialist won the New York City Democratic primary for mayor. He did it on the strength of young voters who turned out to vote in Brooklyn and Queens. It was not solely about race or income level as commonly thought (Bronx is poorest and went +18 for Cuomo and Manhattan has the greatest percentage of Whites and went for Mamdani). The young people in liberal districts who came out in droves and secured his victory.

*Poor Hispanics generally preferred Cuomo; Asians preferred Mamdani. But the real divide was in age: both in candidate preference and coming out to vote*

America’s young people – especially in urban areas like New York City – are much more likely to be non-White than older Americans. They are more likely to get their news from social media influencers than credible news outlets, know little about the Holocaust, don’t remember the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and have been indoctrinated in a public school system that has advanced an “oppressor/oppressed” narrative in which “White privilege” has not only intentionally placed young non-White people at a disadvantage, but stolen their wealth and power in a racist generational kleptocracy.

Today’s youth have been indoctrinated by a socialist public school system which has compulsory attendance. Powerful teacher unions block alternatives like new charter schools and fight any monies going to private schools, thereby making them out-of-reach for many and frequently non-viable. Further, the teacher unions demand that they have total control of the education and block parental involvement.

This forced indoctrination of youth into a divisive ideology has a historic parallel: Nazi Germany.

When people think of black-and-white images of Hitler Youth, they instinctively recoil. The idea of a government-run school system indoctrinating children with a twisted dogma, demonizing whole groups of people, and eliminating parental rights is rightfully condemned. But the problem of the real world modern incarnation is ignored. Western democracies employ the same mechanisms, just with different terminology and new targets.

Germany’s National Socialist Party Educational System

In Nazi Germany, schools were not really about education—they were about indoctrination. From an early age, children were taught racial supremacy, loyalty to the Führer, and hatred of Jews, communists, and other so-called “enemies of the state.” Textbooks were rewritten to glorify White Aryans and dehumanize others. History was a fable of German victimhood and revenge. Biology became eugenics.

Parents were sidelined and teachers were party enforcers. Loyalty was not to truth or family, but to ideology.

America’s Democratic Socialist Party Indoctrination

Today, we do not see classrooms preaching eugenics or worshipping a dictator. But we do see a disturbing echo of the same approach: children are being indoctrinated to hate fellow classmates and members of society.

Public schools across the United States and other Western democracies increasingly push a worldview centered around oppressor and oppressed—not in terms of deeds or choices, but by skin color and gender. Critical Race Theory, once an obscure legal theory, has bled into K–12 education in the form of “equity-based learning,” and “antiracism,” approaches that specifically elevate non-White and low income students, and sideline Whites and Jews.

White children are taught they benefit from “privilege,” regardless of their life experience. Minority children are taught that their struggle is rooted in systemic bias. And the lesson is rarely a call for unity or shared values—it is a call for reordering society through grievance and power struggle.

New York Times bestseller to remake education in grades K-8 focused on “liberation”. As described by the publisher, “**Antiracist Reading Revolution** provides an actionable antiracist teaching framework and models how K-8 educators can create opportunities for transformative reading and discussions in classrooms.“

History is reframed as nothing more than a record of Western oppression. Heroes like Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill are minimized or vilified. Meanwhile, activists are lionized regardless of method or truth. There is no longer a shared civic narrative—only the mantra of “deconstructing power structures.” The language of “revolution” and “liberation” are instilled in America’s youth.

And the teachers – and only the teachers – are in charge. Parents and politicians who push back against the curricula are demonized under a banner of “disguised censorship” who are “trying to dictate what teachers say and block kids from learning about our shared history.”

But it’s not shared history; it’s divisive history.

Teachers as Activists

During the Nazi regime, teachers were required to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League and toe the ideological line. They encouraged teachers to intimidate and harass perceived enemies: Jews. Today, public school teachers are forced to join powerful teacher unions. It promotes teachers becoming open activists that feast on current enemies, such as attacking “Zionist” Jews.

Holocaust Museum review of education in Nazi Germany

These teacher unions aggressively fight against charter schools and school vouchers, keeping millions of students trapped in underperforming, politically biased and morally deformed systems. Parents who speak up at school board meetings could be tarred as “domestic terrorists” by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), as happened in September 2021.

In Nazi Germany, dissent was criminal. In the modern West, dissent is canceled.

Michael Mukasey reviewed attempt by NSBA to shut down parental involvement in classrooms, vilifying parents who “disrupt” school board meetings as engaged in “domestic terrorism.”

Compulsory Attendance, Controlled Curriculum

In both Nazi Germany and America today, attendance was (and is) compulsory. Children cannot simply walk away and parents are similarly held captive. And in most school districts, there is no alternative—no charter school, no voucher for private education, no support for homeschooling. The state dictates the curriculum. The unions staff the classrooms. And the ideology is enforced, not debated.

Then and Now

Feature	Nazi Germany	Modern Public Schools
Curriculum	Racial supremacy, hatred of Jews	Oppressor vs. oppressed, white guilt, DEI focus
Control	Total state monopoly	Union-dominated, resistance to school choice
Teachers	Nazi enforcers	Ideological activists protected by unions
Enemies	Jews, Slavs, Communists	“Whiteness,” traditional values, parents who dissent
Dissent	Criminalized	Canceled, ignored, or labeled extremist
Outcome	Fanatical loyalty to regime	Cultural division and civic unraveling

Indoctrination by Any Other Name

Today’s teachers are not training students to become SS officers but they are shaping how children see their country, their history, their families, themselves – and their neighbors. And when a government-backed education system insists that children adopt one political ideology, demonize dissent, and question parental authority, we are no longer talking about education—we are talking about indoctrination.

ACTION ITEM

Get involved in your local school board. There are elections every year and public fora held throughout the year.

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Anti-Israel Socialists Are Coming For Public Schools (May 2025)

Global South’s Beachhead On American Universities (March 2025)

Ignoring Columbia’s – And The Education Industry’s – Systemic Antisemitism (July 2024)

CNN And NY Times Call Congressional Hearing On Antisemitism in Public Schools A Fake Issue Concocted By Republicans (May 2024)

In San Francisco Schools, Anti-Zionism is Anti-Racism (February 2021)

Follow the Money: Democrats and the Education Industry (November 2020)

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