More than half of Jewish NYers fear for their safety after Oct. 7
The Honan Strategy Group’s new survey comes three years after the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel and amid soaring antisemitism in the Big Apple.
Three years after Oct. 7, the scariest number isn’t coming out of Gaza. It’s from a survey of Jewish New Yorkers, and it says a majority of them are afraid to walk around their own city.
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More than half of Jewish voters in the city fear for their safety, while an eye-popping 42% say they’ve been verbally harassed, according to a stunning new poll. The Honan Strategy Group’s new survey comes three years after the Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attacks in Israel and amid soaring antisemitism in the Big Apple.
“Fifty one percent of Jewish voters say Jewish New Yorkers are unsafe today, compared with 38% of non-Jewish voters,” Honan CEO Bradley Hona said. “Fifty five percent of Jewish voters say it has gotten worse since October 7th.” Just 47% of Jewish voters polled said they felt safe, with the remaining 2% giving no answer, according to the findings. “Half of Jews saying they feel unsafe is an alarming figure. The Jewish people are intertwined with the culture and history of New York City,” Honan said.
Similarly, 42% of respondents said they’ve been verbally harassed because they were Jewish, compared to 58% who said they had not been, the new poll found. Jewish New Yorkers said they’re changing their daily routines in the years since the terror attacks as anti-Israel sentiment soars in backlash to the Jewish State’s military action in Gaza. A startling 59% of Jewish voters say it is unsafe for them at public protests — double the percentage of non-Jewish voters, the poll found.
Half of those polled also saig it is unsafe to wear a kippah or Star of David. The survey found that 40% of Jewish voters believe college campuses are unsafe for Jews, while 57% said they were safe. Shockingly, one in four Jews said they hid their Jewish identity online or at work, while 36% have stopped wearing Jewish symbols, according to the findings. One in three Jewish voters said they witnessed or personally experienced an antisemitic incident in the five boroughs in the past year, nearly triple the 12% rate of non-Jewish voters, according to Honan.
The Honan Strategy Group 5 Borough Barometer surveyed 1,167 likely city voters via text from Oct. 2-6. The overall poll has a margin of error of 2.97 percentage points. It included an oversample of 503 Jewish voters, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.36 percentage points.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Three years after Oct. 7, the scariest number isn’t coming out of Gaza. It’s from a survey of Jewish New Yorkers, and it says a majority of them are afraid to walk around their own city. The Honan Strategy Group poll found more than half fear for their safety. That’s not a statistic. That’s a verdict on how badly things have gone wrong.
And what’s the response from the people running New York? Mostly silence, or worse, they focus-group their statements so carefully that nobody can tell whose side they’re on. Meanwhile, the same crowd that chanted for Hamas on October 8 is still out there, still emboldened, still treating Jewish neighborhoods as a backdrop for their rage. We’ve seen this movie before, and it never ends well. A city that can’t protect its own Jewish residents has a moral problem, not a public relations problem. No slogan changes that.
The broader picture matters too. This isn’t just one city’s failure. It’s what happens when leaders refuse to name the enemy, when prosecutors look the other way at hate crimes, and when institutions decided that “context” matters more than the safety of Jewish students and families. Oct. 7 should have been a wake-up call. Instead, three years later, we have a whole generation of Americans learning that antisemitism is negotiable. It isn’t. And the bill for that cowardice is coming due in every borough of New York.
We say this as Americans who believe this country should be different. There’s no excuse for a Jew in the United States to feel safer in Tel Aviv than in midtown Manhattan. The people who hold power can fix this tomorrow if they wanted to. The fact that they won’t says everything we need to know about their priorities. For the rest of us, the lesson is simple: you either stand with Jewish New Yorkers, or you’re part of the problem. This city better choose soon, because the fear isn’t going away on its own.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.