The numbers continue to get worse, New York City police confirmed, after months of anecdotally claiming as much by the Jewish community in the Big Apple. This week's NYPD data reveals that only about one out of every three confirmed hate crimes against Jews in New York City occurred against Jews, as roughly one-tenth of New Yorkers is Jewish. This is a 53% increase from 15 incidents were recorded in July of last year.

The July increase is not a one-off figure. The number of confirmed hate crimes across the city has risen by 9.4 percent since Zohran Mamdani became mayor on Jan. 1, from 329 to 360. Of these, 205 were directed at Jewish residents, an increase from 189 last year over the same period. In other words, nearly 57 percent of all hate offenses reported in America's largest city this year have been antisemitic, data released by a number of outlets cited by Jewish Insider, i24NEWS and Israel Hayom as part of their reporting on Mamdani's first seven months in office shows.

The backstory of the trend makes it so difficult to dismiss it as a whiff of noise. Major felonies including shootings, murders, robberies are generally declining this year in New York, and Mamdani has cited one of the safest openings on record for the city. Bias crimes against a few other groups have also declined bias crimes against Asian, Black and white NYers in 2026 are all down. But the antisemitic numbers are the outlier in this ongoing positive trend, not the norm.

Under the glossy surfaces, there's a messier layer. The city earlier this year announced a new way of counting hate crimes, which would differentiate between "confirmed" and "reported" cases, following a January anti-Jewish incident spree that sent officials on a perceived 182 percent uptick. Outlets such as JNS have pointed out that the change in methodology will make it difficult to compare to last year, because the 2025 baseline data was reported based on the previous methodology. The trendline for Jewish New Yorkers, aside from that caveat, has been only one way since Mamdani was elected.

The political overhang will not be avoided. In the past, however, Mamdani has been the subject of sharp criticism for his treatment of antisemitism, particularly for his absence from the annual Israel Day parade in the city, and for previously declining to disavow certain slogans used during pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The mayor said the city's efforts to eliminate antisemitism will continue until there are no more hate crimes at Monday's briefing. “Attacks against Jewish New Yorkers in particular are disturbing and I am deeply troubled by the increase in these attacks,” said City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the first Jewish person to hold the position. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration who has been carried over by Mamdani, went to a Manhattan synagogue last week to calm down its members after a stabbing attack near Central Park, demonstrating how the department is going all-out on the community response to the incidents as well as on the numbers.

That stabbing was the black cloud that hung over the July figures. One of the most direct attacks on a visibly Jewish New Yorker this year was by a 51-year-old man shouting a religious phrase before attacking a Jewish man in a synagogue's front yard, and later assaulting an Asian resident nearby, police say. The incident was cited as indicative of a new development in which Jewish targets on a street could be identified and physically attacked by people who harass and vandalize them online, both by i24NEWS and JNS.

It also has a dollar price to it that doesn't usually get the news coverage. Figures Jewish security officials shared with JTA show that Jewish communal organizations across the country are spending more than 760 million dollars annually on private security for synagogues, schools and Jewish community centers, at a level greater than any other American faith community at a comparable scale. The federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program has been expanded to $300 million for 2026 and a bi-partisan bill was introduced this year to increase that to a billion dollars a year. Demand is continuing to exceed the supply: During the last funding cycle, about 7,600 applicants applied for almost a billion dollars in funding only 43 percent received a grant. The federal shutdown early this year temporarily halted all reviews, leaving synagogues in limbo at the wrong time in the life of the community.

The numbers in New York are not an anomaly but part of a pattern, as viewed from outside New York. In recent years the Anti-Defamation League has reported on the record number of antisemitic incidents across the country, and its preliminary 2026 numbers are second only to what it saw in 2023, the year of the Hamas-led October 7 attacks. The biggest city outside Israel has Jews the most in any city and they are being watched closely in Washington, in Jewish federations throughout the country and in the minds of security planners when they consider how much of their budgets must now be spent on protecting Jewish houses of worship, as opposed to operating them. In a town that touts itself as the safest in decades, the July hate crime column is the one headed in the opposite direction.