Linda Argalgi Sadacka
New York has spent years building an extensive language around diversity, inclusion, discrimination, harassment, stereotyping, and bias. The principle behind that effort is a worthy one: all people should be treated with dignity. Words matter, assumptions matter, and the atmosphere we create around other people matters.
No one should be humiliated because of race, religion, background, or disability. No one should be made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with who he is. No one should have to calculate whether revealing a part of his identity will make him less welcome in the room.
But there is a question New York needs to confront honestly. Where do Jews fit into the conversation?
It is an especially urgent question now because anti-Semitism in New York is no longer something abstract.
A Look at the Numbers and Beyond
In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 anti-Semitic incidents across the United States – more than 17 every day. New York recorded more incidents than any other state. Anti-Semitic assaults here reached a record high, with the overwhelming majority occurring in New York City. Visibly Orthodox Jews, recognizable simply by walking down the street, have been particularly exposed.
But numbers can become strangely easy to absorb. Six thousand becomes a statistic. Ninety assaults becomes a line in a report. What gets lost is the human beings underneath the numbers.
A Jewish man should be able to ride the subway without wondering whether the kippah on his head makes him a target. A mother should be able to walk her children to shul without scanning the street first. A family walking home from synagogue down Kings Highway on Shabbat should be thinking about Shabbat lunch, not about whether being visibly Jewish makes them vulnerable. An elderly Jew should be able to enter a synagogue without passing protesters who have decided that a house of worship is an acceptable place to protest objections to the government of Israel. A parent should be able to send a child to yeshivah without thinking about armed guards and security doors simply because the building houses Jewish students. And a Jewish child should not become less worthy of compassion because somebody associates that child with Zionism.
Conditional Compassion
After October 7th, one of the most haunting examples of what had changed was exhibited with the tearing down of hostage posters. After Israelis were kidnapped from their homes and from the Nova Festival, posters bearing the faces of hostages appeared across American cities and campuses. They were not political manifestos – they were photographs asking people to remember that real people had been taken captive.
And people tore them down…
Think about what that requires emotionally. Before someone can rip the photograph of a hostage, especially of aa child, from a wall, that child has somehow stopped being merely a child. The face has been transformed into a political statement. The suffering has been assigned an ideology. Compassion has become conditional.
That is troubling. Anti-Semitism does not become acceptable overnight. It becomes acceptable when Jewish pain is repeatedly qualified, when Jewish fear is treated as political, when Jewish victims are asked what they believe about Israel before anyone decides whether they deserve sympathy. By the time someone is screamed at on a subway or blocked from entering a synagogue, the moral groundwork has often already been laid.
An Atmosphere of Hatred
Hatred does not begin only with the person who raises a fist. It begins with the atmosphere that makes the fist easier to excuse – when one group’s fear immediately produces sympathy while another group’s fear is questioned or justified away, and when we stop seeing individuals and start seeing symbols.
Increasingly, Jews are being treated not simply as Jews, but as representatives of something larger. A Jewish student becomes responsible for Israel. An Orthodox man becomes a symbol of Zionism because he is wearing a kippah. A synagogue becomes a political target. A child wearing a Star of David can find himself carrying the weight of an international conflict he did not create and could not control.
Once that atmosphere takes hold, harassment becomes easier to dismiss, intimidation becomes easier to rationalize, and even physical violence risks becoming part of the background noise.
State Involvement
State leaders, including NY Governor Kathy Hochul, have acknowledged the seriousness of anti-Semitism and have directed resources toward protecting Jewish institutions. Those measures matter – security grants, law enforcement, protection for synagogues and schools all matter enormously. But physical security addresses hatred after it has already become dangerous. A police officer can protect the entrance to a synagogue. A security grant can reinforce a school door. Neither can, by itself, change the atmosphere that made that protection necessary.
That work begins earlier – in classrooms, workplaces, universities, and government institutions; in the language we use about Jews and the assumptions we allow to go unchallenged; and in the education state agencies use to teach people what prejudice looks like in the first place.
This is not a critique of the people working in state government, many of whom I have had the privilege of working alongside, and whose commitment to this work I don’t doubt for a moment. It is a critique of a curriculum – one I encountered firsthand.
Discrimination and Harassment Training
Like many people who work in and around state government and its affiliated organizations, I completed the state’s discrimination and harassment training as part of my onboarding [onboarding is the structured process of integrating a new employee into an organization], and I found it deeply troubling. But not because of the people around me. What troubled me was the training itself.
Real care had clearly gone into making other groups feel seen: there were scenarios built around new and breastfeeding mothers, around employees with progressive political views, around someone being bullied for simply being different. That effort is worth acknowledging. But nowhere, not once, was there a scenario built around a Jewish employee, an Orthodox co-worker, or anti-Semitic harassment of any kind – despite the fact that, by the numbers, Jews are experiencing far more hate-motivated targeting in this state than any other group.
If the training could take the time to build out those other scenarios with such specificity, the absence of one for the community bearing the sharpest brunt of hate crime in New York is not an oversight that is easy to explain away.
The Department of Labor and Division of Human Rights are responsible for this training. Much of it is genuinely valuable: it teaches people to recognize prejudice, to understand how stereotypes shape treatment, to notice that someone in the room may be experiencing an interaction very differently than everyone else.
Post-October 7th
But it raises a larger question. In post-October-7 New York, is that training teaching people to recognize what anti-Semitism actually looks like now?
A closer look at the Department of Labor’s own model training confirms the gap. Every one of its six illustrative case studies concerns gender-based conduct – none touch religion, ethnicity, or national origin, though all three sit alongside gender on the training’s own list of protected characteristics. That is not a matter of law; the law already protects religious New Yorkers. It is a matter of what people are actually trained to notice. And when the state’s data shows New York recording more anti-Semitic incidents than any other state in the country, a curriculum that never once asks an employee to recognize religious hostility in practice is not neutral. It has simply not caught up to what is happening on the ground.
The training video makes a visible effort at representation – the employees depicted include a range of ethnicities and backgrounds, including someone who appears Muslim. But no one in a kippah appears. No modestly-dressed or visibly religious woman appears. Religious New Yorkers are not represented at all. For a workforce being trained on what vulnerability and prejudice look like, the curriculum designers chose to make several communities visible and left the community currently absorbing the sharpest rise in hate-motivated incidents in the state unseen.
The Commission of Omission
Contemporary anti-Semitism does not always arrive announcing itself as hatred of Jews. Sometimes it calls the Jew a Zionist instead. Sometimes it assigns collective responsibility to Jews for Israel. Sometimes it treats a synagogue as though it were an embassy. And sometimes it operates through something far quieter: omission. The state has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for identifying which people might feel marginalized – but Jews can still seem strangely absent from that framework even while they are being harassed and physically attacked at alarming rates.
That absence matters. Not because Jews should be placed above anyone else, and certainly not because Muslims, people with disabilities, or other minorities deserve less attention. They do not. The point is the opposite: if inclusion is a universal principle, Jews should not require an exception.
Jews – Successful but Still Vulnerable
Jewish communities also complicate simplistic ideas about what vulnerability looks like. A Jewish family can own a successful business and still fear anti-Semitism. A community can build schools, synagogues, and institutions and still require guards outside those buildings. Success does not cancel vulnerability. Achievement does not erase prejudice. Yet, too often Jewish success becomes part of the reason Jewish suffering is discounted – Jews are perceived as powerful, so hatred towards them gets treated as punching up [punching up means to criticize, joke about, or target someone who has more power, authority, or higher social status than you do]. Hatred is associated with Israel, so hostility toward individual Jews gets rationalized as political expression.
But the human being does not disappear because somebody has attached a political theory to him. A Jewish child on a hostage poster is still a child. A Jewish woman screamed at on the street is still a woman deserving to be treated with dignity. An elderly man trying to get into shul is still an elderly man trying to pray. None of that becomes less serious because someone has decided Jews are powerful.
Inclusion Training Needs an Upgrade
The Department of Labor and Division of Human Rights should take a serious look at whether this training reflects the world New Yorkers are actually living in after October 7. Where religious discrimination is taught, anti-Semitism should certainly be included. Show a rabbi. Show an Orthodox employee. Include a Jewish student. Build a scenario involving anti-Semitic harassment. Explain that an individual Jew should not be presumed responsible for Israel merely because he is Jewish – that opposition to Israeli policy does not give anyone permission to target Jewish classmates, coworkers, synagogues, or neighborhoods. Explain that a kippah, a sheitel, tzitzit, or a Star of David does not turn a human being into a political symbol. And explain that anti-Semitism can appear in language that does not initially sound like the anti-Semitism people learned about in history class.
This is not asking for special treatment. It is asking for relevance. State law already requires this training to be reviewed and revised every four years. That review is a built-in opportunity, not a new demand – a chance for the Department of Labor and Division of Human Rights to update the conversation the next time this training comes up for its scheduled revision, at a moment when one of the state’s largest and most visible minority communities is experiencing a dramatic rise in hostility.
The Goal
The goal is not to police every word anyone says. We do not want a society in which people are afraid to debate Israel, criticize politicians, or express strong opinions – political disagreement is necessary in a free country. The goal is simpler: teach the distinction between political disagreement and collective blame. Teach people to recognize when criticism of a government has crossed into hostility toward a people. Teach that Jewish identity does not erase individuality, and that Jewish suffering does not require a political litmus test before it deserves compassion.
Because that is ultimately what this is about. Humanity.
The mother walking her children to shul is not a geopolitical argument. The boy wearing a kippah on the subway is not the Israeli government. The elderly man entering a synagogue is not a military policy. They are people. And perhaps the most dangerous thing anti-Semitism does is to persuade society to forget that before it does anything else.
The real test of inclusion is not how carefully we protect the dignity of people everyone has already agreed are vulnerable. The test comes when the victim complicates our categories – when the minority is successful, when the person targeted is associated with a country or cause someone dislikes, when the individual standing before us does not fit neatly into our preferred understanding of oppressed and privileged. That is when universal principles either remain universal or reveal themselves to be selective.
New York already knows how to speak the language of inclusion. Now that language has to catch up with the reality Jewish New Yorkers are living. Update the training. Include Jews. Teach people to recognize the anti-Semitism that exists now, not only the anti-Semitism of the past – not because Jews deserve more empathy than anyone else, but because they should not have to prove they deserve empathy at all.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any organization, employer, or entity with which she is affiliated.