One year since a strange hate crime marred the first hours of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new term, the NYPD is stonewalling FOIA requests about its investigation into the alleged antisemitic attack by a fedora-clad cyclist.
In the early hours of November 5, surveillance cameras captured a masked cyclist in a broad-brimmed black hat painting a swastika on the facade of the Magen David Yeshiva and Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn’s heavily Jewish Midwood neighborhood. After months of claims that the city’s first Muslim mayor would usher a new era of pogroms into the city so many Jews call home, the act was treated by Mamdani’s foes as immediate validation of those fears.
“This is what we woke up to THE MORNING AFTER @ZohranKMamdani was elected..” ultra-Zionist councilwoman Inna Vernikov declared on Twitter/X. “The antisemites are emboldened. This is not a game.”
Others raised suspicions that the graffiti incident was a false flag staged by a Zionist militant to escalate the sense of fear among local Jews, and put the new mayor on the spot for failing to protect them. They pointed to the fedora sported by the cycling vandal as evidence that he, in fact, hailed from the local ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. Arguments then ensued about whether the fedora was the same as those worn by local ultra-Orthodox men.
The day after the vandalism occurred, the synagogue placed an Israeli flag over the spray-painted swastika. A local ABC affiliate then took the opportunity to remind readers once again that “some New Yorkers” were “concerned” about the new mayor’s “position on Israel.”
The New York Police Department leapt into action, with its Hate Crimes Task force launching an investigation. New York Governor Kathy Hochul responded by granting another $20 million grant to “nonprofit security funding” to help protect local Jewish institutions and nonpublic schools.
And yet a full year later, the NYPD, with its multi-billion dollar budget, has not generated a conviction, produced a suspect, or even offered evidence of an actual investigation into a crime caught on camera in a city with millions of public and private surveillance devices.
A New York resident named Nathaniel Pearson shared evidence with the Grayzone of his efforts to learn what progress the NYPD had made in the case. Pearson filed a Freedom of Information Law request with the NYPD on March 25. He received an email on April 2 informing him to expect a response by August 12.
The deadline came and went with no response. Messages left with the officer in charge of the case went unreturned and the department was only willing to share what appears to be the original Crimestoppers release describing the suspect in the video.
The NYPD has provided no information about whether it spent time reviewing other cameras, interviewed possible witnesses or took other steps to solve the alleged hate crime.
“Between April and when I called the officer assigned to the case in October, I also filed multiple ‘Contact the Agency’ web messages to NYPD, seeking an update and noting to them that their expected reply date had passed). But those go into the ether,” Pearson told The Grayzone.
The NYPD officer assigned to Pearson’s freedom of information requests did not respond to The Grayzone’s requests for comment.
The Grayzone reached Detective Bernabe of the NYPD’s Press Information division by phone. While Bernabe was able to retrieve notes by the department’s 62nd Precinct on the vandalism of Magen David Yeshiva on November 5, 2025, he said he could offer no update on the investigation since that day, including on whether the NYPD had identified a suspect.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has described antisemitism as “the most persistent hate threat we face,” and lamented that the number of reported antisemitic incidents in the city is “far too high.” However, her department has gone silent on an alleged hate crime that could have perfectly illustrated the plague, and which attracted more media attention than any supposed antisemitic incident in the city since Mamdani’s election.
Exploiting fear, raking in public funds
For months during the New York City mayoral campaign, corporate media promoted a cynical campaign to paint Mamdani’s election as an existential threat to local Jews. A Democratic political strategist predicted “the end of Jewish New York as we know it,” and high-profile Democratic members of Congress suggested his election would be “dangerous” or lead to violence. The rabbi of the Park Avenue Synagogue, an influential Conservative congregation, said Mamdani was “a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community.”
In the years leading up to his election as Mayor, New York State allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to combatting hate crimes, and antisemitism in particular. Since taking office in 2021, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has steadily increased state funding for preventing hate crimes, especially those related to antisemitism. Since 2021, she has dedicated more than $200 million to supposedly help various racial and religious communities guard against hateful attacks. The money has been funneled into different programs, including those supporting “physical security” at facilities as well as increased police patrols and police liaisons. Federal funding adds tens of millions more to what amounts to a slush fund for the NYPD, private security companies, NGO’s and religious institutions.
Leading the hunt for “antisemitism” in the US is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which never met a peace rally it didn’t attempt to call a hate crime. Even children’s book signing events have been slapped with antisemitism accusations.
The ADL has now launched a ‘Mamdani Tracker,’ a situation-room style web page devoted to alerting New Yorkers when their mayor describes painter Marc Chagall as “Eastern European” and not Jewish, so they can take shelter. The NYPD, meanwhile, continues to receive training from collaborators with Israel that deem phrases like “Globalize the intifada” and actions to deface Israeli flags as “antisemitism.”
The massive windfall of public funding to combat antisemitism has hardly made a dent in New York City’s supposed crisis. In 2023, the city documented 324 antisemitic incidents and made 112 arrests. In 2024, it clocked 350 antisemitic incidents and 110 arrests. In 2025, the city recorded 324 antisemitic incidents and 100 arrests. By comparison, in 2025, the city documented 566 hate crime incidents in total and made 249 arrests. Antisemitic incidents appear to be holding steady, with a lower arrest rate than for hate crimes of other varieties.
Following his election, Mayor Mamdani pumped a new infusion of public money into the anti-antisemitism industry. This September, Mamdani announced a $26 million program to combat anti-Jewish attitudes, with some of the funding going to the Queens Holocaust Museum and a new Jewish cultural center.
Meanwhile, the Jews of New York City had not made the exodus their self-appointed leadership threatened if a pro-Palestine Muslim moved into Gracie Mansion. Instead, the avowedly Zionist Jessica Tisch is safe in her job as NYPD chief, and her department does not seem compelled to offer citizens even an update on its investigation into the hate crime that was initially branded as a harbinger of doom.