If He Doesn’t Want to Come, Let Him Stay Home

This Sunday, Zohran Mamdani will become the  first New York City mayor in more than six decades  not to march in the Israel Day Parade. For many Jewish New Yorkers, the decision feels insulting. It is insulting. The parade is not a campaign rally, and it is not an endorsement of any Israeli government. It is a celebration of a community that helped build New York into what it is. For generations, mayors of every persuasion understood that. They marched because civic leadership requires recognizing the people who make a city thrive, even amid disagreement. Mamdani says his absence is a matter of principle: a campaign pledge kept, consistent with his  view that Israel is committing genocide . Take him at his word. The trouble is that he makes the opposite distinction everywhere else. He turned out for the city’s Lunar New Year celebration earlier this year and has  marched in the India Day and Pakistan Independence Day parades , honoring those communities without auditing their governments. Only here does heritage collapse into foreign policy. The objection writes itself: this year’s parade marches under the banner  “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists,”  and Zionism, the critics say, is politics, not ethnicity. But that is exactly the point. A mayor recognizes a community as it understands itself, not as he would prefer to recast it. The job is to honor the people in front of you, not to grade their identities for ideological acceptability. So the snub deserves criticism. But after the criticism comes a harder, more clarifying question. Why would anyone want him there? Here the community should resist its own worst instinct. The wounded response—petitioning harder, demanding the appearance, treating his attendance as the thing that confers legitimacy—is precisely backwards. Dignity does not come from proximity to power. A parade does not derive its meaning from the mayor. It derives its meaning from the tens of thousands who fill Fifth Avenue: the families with strollers, the synagogue groups, the schoolchildren with banners, the Holocaust survivors, the veterans, the immigrants. Their presence is what matters. And the city is showing up regardless. Mamdani’s own police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, will march as grand marshal and declared in  Hebrew , “I’m so excited to march with you.” The institutions of the city are doing their work whether or not the man at the top lends his face to it. And the stakes this year are not abstract. Tisch is overseeing what the NYPD calls its most extensive security operation in the parade’s history, because  antisemitic incidents now make up the majority of hate crimes  reported in the city. In that climate the parade has become something more than a celebration—a few hours in which Jewish New Yorkers can gather openly and feel safe being seen. A mayor’s presence at such a moment is not protocol; it is a signal that the city stands with a community when it feels exposed. Mamdani has declined to send it. That is a real loss, but it is not the community’s to carry as shame, and safety that hangs on a politician’s goodwill was never safety at all. New York is home to the  largest Jewish population outside Israel , a community that has built schools, hospitals, charities, and neighborhoods that strengthened the city for generations. It did not need a mayor’s permission to build them, and it does not need his attendance to validate them. In that light, his absence may be preferable to a performative appearance. Symbolic solidarity from someone who does not feel it is worth little; civic ritual that expresses no shared commitment is just theater. Confidence is not retreat, and the answer cannot only be to defend what already exists. The more demanding charge is to keep building: new institutions, new alliances, new civic spaces that outlast any one administration. This is the older American habit Tocqueville admired—citizens who, denied recognition from above, simply built the congregations, schools, and associations from which recognition could not be withheld. I will be on Fifth Avenue this Sunday with my children. We will carry flags. We will march because this is who we are, because a family teaches its children what it loves by showing up for it. Our community’s legacy in this city is ours to be proud of and ours to carry forward, and it depends on the approval of no mayor. The mayor has chosen to stay home. Let him. The parade will go on without him. The good news is that who is given a voice and can celebrate their history that won’t change based on the occupant in Gracie Mansion. New York has always understood that citizenship is earned through contribution, not conferred by those in power. The post If He Doesn’t Want to Come, Let Him Stay Home appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .