Hundreds of New Yorkers flooded the typically quiet, tree-lined Upper East Side street beside Gracie Mansion — the official residence of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — on Tuesday evening, chanting “Hey, hey, no, no, Mayor Mamdani’s got to go” and “stop Mamdani.”
Lilly Icikson stood among the demonstrators — a crowd made up mostly of Jews, along with a handful of Muslims and Christians — distributing stickers she prints at home and pastes on light poles and other surfaces outside Gracie Mansion and across other neighborhoods every day.
She showed up to the protest because “anti-Zionism is a sad excuse for Jew-hate,” she told JNS.
“The city has been overrun with people openly calling for ‘intifada,’ which is Jew-hate,” she said. “The city should be safe for everyone.”
End Jew Hatred, a project of the Lawfare Project, organized the protest, which also brought together a coalition of other groups.
In an interview a few hours before the protest kicked off, Brooke Goldstein, founder and executive director of the Lawfare Project, told JNS that the goal was to pressure New York Gov. Kathy Hochul into removing the mayor from office — a move the governor, a Democrat, holds the legal authority to make.
Governors have rarely exercised that authority. Hochul reportedly weighed doing so in February 2025, after then-Mayor Eric Adams faced federal corruption charges. After appeals to U.S. President Donald Trump, those charges were dropped, and the governor did not pursue his removal before his term ended that December.
Shortly after Mamdani took office, he revoked many of the executive orders Adams had put in place, including those designed to protect Jews and Israelis.
Now, as anti-Jewish hate crimes surge across New York City and anti-Israel protesters intimidate and harass Jews throughout the five boroughs, Goldstein — a Miami resident — told JNS that the governor must act and remove the mayor.
“We are demanding the removal of Mamdani for his neglect of duty and his refusal to carry out his legal responsibilities,” Goldstein said. “Jews, Christians, Muslims, people of all faiths are coming together, because they are sick and tired of the extremism that has taken over our streets.”
New Yorkers are also “tired of the Islamists and woke radicals committing assault, his failure to enforce the rule of law and to launch investigations into these so-called protests which are violent pro-terror mobs,” Goldstein added.
The open-air demonstration’s acoustics made it nearly impossible for speakers to be heard beyond the front rows — but that hardly seemed to bother attendees, many of whom showed up carrying signs.
A clear sense of solidarity and shared purpose ran through the crowd, where several Chabad rabbis moved through the gathering, stopping to ask men whether they had already put on tefillin that day.
Hillary Barr, a New York real estate company owner who also promotes investment in Israeli properties, arrived at Tuesday night’s protest with an armful of blue and white whistles and a bag packed with small Israeli and American flags, which she handed out to people at the peaceful demonstration.
“The fact that Zohran Mamdani doesn’t protect the Jewish citizens is criminal,” she told JNS. “He makes his opinion very clear. He doesn’t believe that Israel has a right to exist, and he celebrates the day when he thinks Israel should have been destroyed, which it wasn’t, thank God.”
The mayor has also stated that he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York, and he released a video for “Nakba” day — the day some use to mark what they consider the “catastrophe” of the founding of the modern Israeli state.
“I am here as a tax-paying New Yorker to say we will not tolerate that,” Barr told JNS. “Nothing that this TikTok mayor can do is ever going to intimidate the Jews of New York.”
As she passed a whistle to a woman nearby, Barr offered some pointed advice: “When confronted by the ‘free, free Palestine’ morons, blow it in their face and it makes them crazy, because you’re drowning out their ridiculous statements.”
Goldstein of End Jew Hatred plans to keep organizing demonstrations, as she did recently outside the New York Times building.
“This is the beginning of something big,” she told JNS. “This is going to be sustained protest.”
“There’s going to be a huge show of support for saying ‘enough is enough,'” she added. “The public is not behind this man anymore even he got elected.”
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