Chicago is one of the great centers of Jewish life in the United States—or used to be, in any case. Several recent events, taking place in brutally quick succession, have raised the question of whether the city’s 300,000 Jewish residents are as safe as they should be. Will city officials do more than the bare minimum to protect them? Will the media cover their travails with the moral clarity victimhood purportedly deserves?
This month, two openly Jewish students were assaulted on the DePaul University campus; protesters were charged with vandalism after entering the Chicago Loop Synagogue and damaging property there; two Jews were attacked outside a performance by the unabashedly pro-Israel actor and comedian Michael Rapaport. The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, the just-appointed education-board president, had to step down after The Jewish Insider unearthed his anti-Ssemitic social-media musings. “People have an absolute right to attack their oppressors by any means necessary,” went a characteristic post-Oct. 7 missive. There were also posts hinting at 9/11 denialism and misogyny, which seem to have done more to seal his fate than mere Jew-hating.
“I feel so helpless,” a Jewish woman wrote on Reddit this year. The Midwestern branch of the Anti-Defamation League pointed out that the number of attacks against Jews had tripled in the past year. “We can’t help but to ask: Is this the new normal for Jews in Chicago? We hope not,” the head of the organization said.
“This is the new normal for everyone in Chicago.”
An even darker thought is that this is the new normal for everyone in Chicago. As city government under progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson retreats from exercising the moral authority that should undergird the practice of politics, it is only inevitable that one group or another will bear the blows. Jews tend to get it earlier, and sometimes harder, than others—but from the pathologies we face, few ultimately escape.
Those pathologies have been on ugly display since Oct. 7, which the local Black Lives Matter affiliate seemed to celebrate with a social-media post. The offending post was deleted, and the group apologized, but a tone had been set from which Chicago has, to its own detriment, declined to deviate.
That is largely due to Johnson, who was elected last year. He began 2024, his first full year in office, by expending significant political capital to pass a Gaza ceasefire resolution—a vote for which he assiduously lobbied city aldermen and in which he served as a tiebreaker. To his credit, Johnson had also presided over a resolution condemning the initial Hamas attacks the previous October. So what does he really believe? Nobody knows—not on Israel, policing, taxes, or much of anything.
Having followed his career closely, I doubt the charge that he bears some deep animus toward Jews. But having promised Chicago progressive governance, he has delivered little governance of any kind. At this point, I suspected that not a few Chicagoans would be happy to have Donald Trump on the fifth floor, as the mayor’s City Hall office is known, which may explain why Trump nearly doubled his vote share here to 21.4 in 2024, up from 12.4 percent in 2016.
Trump even had the chutzpah to campaign in the Windy City, showing up the day before the presidential election to denounce the recent spate of anti-Semitism. Trump’s own commitment to racial and religious comity is questionable, but his nose for conflict is unerring. A true tabloid man, he knows that when it bleeds, it leads—and the Jews of Chicago had been bleeding.
In the heavily Jewish neighborhood of West Rogers Park—think a less remote Bensonhurst, or a leafier Williamsburg—a 39-year-old Orthodox Jewish man was shot on his way to synagogue. The suspect, Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi, aged 22, was an undocumented immigrant from Mauritania. Abdallah shouted “Allahu Akbar” as officers confronted him, firing on them also. Both victim and suspect survived the incident.
This was the most serious of the recent ant-Semitic incidents—and the response the most telling. The Chicago Tribune, from whose pages the legendary columnist Mike Royko launched daily assaults at bastions of cultural and political power, played keepaway: “Police: Man, 22, Critically Injured in Far North Side Shootout With Officers,” its viral headline said, as if Abdallahi were the true victim in all this; the headline went instantly viral, and not in a good way.
“This should be a national scandal,” said Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It wasn’t. Perhaps feeling no real pressure from the media, Johnson, the mayor, took several days to issue a statement. When he finally did, it made no mention of the religious factor that had obviously been at play.
This, too, went viral—unintentionally, again. “The victim was a Jewish man, who was wearing traditional Jewish garb, walking to a Jewish place of worship on the Jewish day of rest,” wrote an outraged Alderwoman, Debra Silverstein, the only Jew on the City Council, which has 50 members. Months before, she had been heckled for speaking out against the Gaza ceasefire resolution. Back then, Johnson had seemed indifferent to her plight; little appears to have changed.
To add insult to injury, the Chicago Police Department declined to file hate charges, citing a supposed lack of evidence. Police chief Larry Snelling did finally relent, adding counts of terrorism and hate crime, which he announced at a news conference. Johnson also spoke at the event. “Anti-Semitism in Chicago does not reflect the soul of Chicago,” he said.
Johnson is fond of invoking “the soul of Chicago,” which he did more than a dozen times in his inaugural address in the spring of 2023. Today, that soul is roiling, and the anger is mostly directed Johnson’s way. His approval rating is an almost unbelievable 14 percent, making him the least popular mayor in Chi-town history—and as Royko would have happily told you over a beer at the Billy Goat Tavern, this town has had some pretty lousy mayors.
Johnson was an unlikely victor in 2023’s mayoral runoff. An organizer with the radical Chicago Teachers Union who later served as a backbencher on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, he played on voters’ exasperation with Lori Lightfoot, the smart but abrasive incumbent. Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, the promising young progressive was the top vote-getter in the first round of voting; the runoff pitted him against Paul Vallas, an uncharismatic school reformer. The race seemed close. The smart money was on Vallas. In the end, it was not that close at all.
Exactly 18 months since the day he took office, Chicagoans are pissed—at the mayor, at each other, at this city of broad shoulders, and rats the size of Abrams tanks. The dismal White Sox season—possibly the worst by a professional baseball team—is symbolic of a great city that has struggled more than others to get its post-pandemic bearings.
Many black Chicagoans are upset because Johnson initially embraced the migrants who were being sent to the city from Texas. One woman from the historic Bronzeville neighborhood—where Louis Armstrong and Richard Wright once lived—called the migrants “roaches,” echoing language Donald Trump frequently used. Representation didn’t matter much to her. She missed the old Daley machine, with all its corruption. At least it worked, she told me bluntly.
Johnson has also terminated the city’s contract with Shotspotter, the gun-detection technology disliked by progressives who see it as a means of excessive surveillance, in black and Latino neighborhoods in particular. The move was overwhelmingly opposed by black aldermen, who pointed out that Shotspotter made their neighborhoods safer. Johnson scotched the deal anyway.
Latinos are furious at Johnson because while he has been welcoming to migrants, his hospitality is limited by budgetary concerns. When he began to evict migrants from shelters, Latino lawmakers cried foul. Wealthier, more liberal whites have grown weary of property crime (carjackings, smash-and-grabs), which continues to be a problem—even as it seems to have subsided in other cities.
Even leftists are tired of him. “We should not be on the fifth floor,” Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor—a South Side progressive who had been seen as a Johnson ally—said in an interview. “We were not ready because we haven’t been in government long enough to know how government really works.” And that was last December, before the latest morass.
Earlier this fall, Johnson tried to take out a high-interest $300 million loan in order to pay for teacher raises sought by the CTU, the union that is largely responsible for his electoral victory. Heckled for imperiling city finances to meet union demands, Johnson responded by comparing his critics to the Confederacy. “This is not a guy charting a course, but someone reacting to the chaos going on around him, much of his own making,” Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg recently observed.
“A great country must have great cities.”
All this has been dispiriting to watch. A great country must have great cities. Right now, progressives like Johnson are in charge of many of the biggest cities in the United States. Many of them are struggling with crime, homelessness, an influx of migrants, fentanyl—and, yes, attacks on Jews. These are not easy challenges to resolve, but it is what they signed up for. As the social-justice slogan goes, it’s time to do the work.