A Jewish woman visiting Manhattan had her car’s tires slashed and found an antisemitic note on her windshield Monday, according to The Algemeiner. In New York City, antisemitic hate crimes account for 60 percent of all confirmed hate crimes, despite Jews making up roughly 10 percent of the population.
The woman was in Manhattan to visit her brother, Yaron, when an unidentified suspect slashed her tires and left a handwritten note in all caps reading “Zionist rats aren’t welcome anywhere but Antartica [sic] or Hell,” The Algemeiner reported. The suspect remains at large. Hours before the vandalism, according to The Algemeiner, someone had shouted “Free Palestine” at the siblings.
The New York Police Department recorded 41 confirmed antisemitic hate crimes in May 2026, up from 24 in May 2025, even as overall major crime fell to historic lows, The Algemeiner reported. Among reported but unconfirmed incidents that month, Jews were targeted 60 times, accounting for 61 percent of the total.
For all of 2026 to date, New York City has recorded 152 confirmed antisemitic hate crimes, a six percent increase from the same period last year, according to The Algemeiner. Over the same stretch, the city confirmed 17 hate crimes targeting Muslims, 18 targeting Black people, and nine targeting Asians.
The trend has accelerated since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. Orthodox Jews have faced a disproportionate share of incidents. Over eight days in late October and early November 2024, three Hasidic residents of Brooklyn’s Crown Heights were assaulted, including a 13-year-old boy struck while riding his bike to school, The Algemeiner reported. In March, an attacker knocked the kippah off Jeremy Garrett, a Jewish subway rider. “I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett told a local ABC affiliate, as quoted by The Algemeiner. “It’s horrible because it happened on Purim, right before the holiday,” he said.
Some members of the city’s Jewish community criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani for moves he made on his first day in office: rescinding the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, lifting a ban on city contracts with companies that boycott Israel, and narrowing an executive order directing police to monitor anti-Israel protests near synagogues, according to The Algemeiner. Rabbi Mark Wildes, director and founder of the Manhattan Jewish Experience, told The Algemeiner earlier this month: “From swastikas appearing on homes and in parks, to increased anti-Israeli demonstrations, [Mayor Zohran Mamdani] has created a climate in which bigotry is allowed to flourish. His irresponsible rhetoric calling Israel an ‘apartheid’ state committing ‘genocide’ only emboldens antisemites to target Jews across the city.”
As of The Algemeiner’s reporting, the suspect in Monday’s vandalism had not been arrested.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily image
