New York’s first Jewish city council speaker and its first Muslim mayor may not be seeing eye to eye when it comes to ways to combat antisemitism in the Big Apple.
As part of a plan to combat Jewish hate, City Council Speaker Julie Menin has introduced legislation to create a 100-foot buffer zone for protests outside synagogues and other places of worship, according to a report Thursday by the New York Post.
However, the Mayor’s office raised concern that the measure may not be legal.
The law would allow the New York Police Department (NYPD) to establish a 100-foot security barrier around religious institutions to be determined on a “case-by-case” basis.
“Jewish New Yorkers make up roughly 10 percent of our city’s population yet last year they were the victims of more than half of all reported hate crimes,” Menin said. “That’s a reality we cannot normalize and we cannot ignore.”
The Manhattan Democrat is the the city’s first Jewish speaker, according to the Post.
According to the tabloid:
The bill is one of several points in the speaker’s recently announced five-point plan to address antisemitism, which also includes reimbursement programs for security cameras at private schools, security training for religious organizations, and kicking in $1.25 million in new funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
The legislation comes after anti-Israel protestors targeting synagogues from Queens to the Upper East Side have spewed vile and antisemitic language, going so far as to say “we support Hamas.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has previously suggested state legislation creating a 25-foot protest buffer zone.
However, the Post reported, Mayor Zohran Mamdani notably did not clap along with other attendees when Hochul made the announcement during her “State of the State” address in Albany earlier this month.
A spokesperson in the mayor’s office previously told the Post that Mamdani, a Muslim and Democratic Socialist, was waiting on a review from the city Law Department to determine the “legality of such proposals.”
Critics, including Menin, have questioned the new mayor’s commitment to fight antisemitism after he rescinded several executive orders by previous Mayor Eric Adams.
They included orders amending the definition of antisemitism and banning city employees from protesting the Boycott, Dives, Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel.
Critics of buffer zone bills have claimed that they could encroach on protesters’ First Amendment rights.
“The right to peacefully protest is sacrosanct, it’s what our country was built on,” Menin countered at a press conference before the council meeting. “None of these bills penalize protests. That is not what we’re doing.”
She concluded, “What we are doing is really creating the safe perimeters that allow people to really move into their respective house of worship and schools.”
Lowell Cauffiel is the recipient of Columbia University’s prestigious Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award for his series on racial conflict in Detroit in the 1980s. He is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.