As mayoral decay rots NYC, Tisch and Menin are pillars of strength who hold the city on their shoulders

As Mayor Zohran Mamdani disrupts the city’s civil and economic norms, targeting Jewish New Yorkers for special abuse, two high-positioned Jewish women hold the city and its Jewish communities Atlas-like on their shoulders.

While comparing Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and City Council President Julie Menin to the biblical Queen Esther would be a stretch — their relationships with New York’s Achashverosh is not warm and fuzzy but transactional — Mamdani is compelled, at least for the moment, to hear them out: the politically astute Menin because she’s a gatekeeper to City Council action on his agenda; hyper-professional Tisch because she keeps the city safe despite the mayor’s anti-law-enforcement proclivities.

At the Met Council’s early morning Legislative Breakfast on Sunday, preceding the Israel on Fifth Parade, both women reaffirmed their Jewish pride and pledged anew to defend their community in its hour of need.

“I was raised to believe deeply in Am Israel,” Tisch told an estimated 500 people in attendance at the event, an annual magnet for political insiders. “That’s how my parents raised me and that is how I am raising my kids. My Jewish identity is not something that I put on and that I take off. It is who I am and who I will always be.”

Standing with the mayor at official functions, the police commissioner often wears a Jewish star.

Menin began her remarks directly.

“I am so proud to be the first Jewish speaker of the New York City Council,” she said.

“In this pivotal moment, we are fighting against a scourge of antisemitism the likes of which our city has not seen in a very long time,” Menin continued. “I don’t need to tell all of you the fight that we have on our hands.”

Referring to studies that report one-third of young people in New York believe the Holocaust was either a myth or exaggerated, Menin said that “as a daughter of a Holocaust survivor, this is shameful. It’s unconscionable. It’s unacceptable.”

“Today, we proudly march for Jewish culture, for Jewish heritage, and for the Jewish state,” she said.

Tisch offered an assurance to those preparing to march in Sunday’s parade, and for whom the prevalence of antisemitism in New York is palpable.

“I worry so that you shouldn’t have to, so that you can sleep easier at night,” she said.

“Today is a joyful day and I want you to feel that joy — because if you don’t, it means that I am not doing my job well,” Tisch said.

“I know how meaningful it is for so many of you, to have a Jewish police commissioner,” she added. “It is a responsibility that I feel deeply in my mind, in my bones, and in my heart.”

Both Tisch and Menin received awards at Sunday’s breakfast.

David Greenfield, Met Council CEO and executive director, said that Tisch has “protected our Jewish community with real focus and resolve.”

When he travels around the world, he encounters positive feedback over the fact “that our amazing police commissioner, everywhere she goes, she proudly wears the star of David,” he said.

Turning to Menin, Greenfield said that soon after she was chosen to lead the City Council, the speaker worked “to put together a package of bills to combat antiemitism, carrying her family’s history into her fight every single day.”

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There is no assurance that Menin and Tisch will be able, long-term, to restrain Mamdani’s generally destructive and specifically antisemitic tendencies. But they’re the best of what we’ve got right now, and they’re pretty darn good. They need our encouragement, our support — and our gratitude.