Ep 605: Influential Origins with Alan Mindel and guest Jake Blumencranz P2 on hmTv

Influential Origins with Alan Mindel
Guest: Jake Blumencranz — Part 2
hmTv at HMTC

In Part 2 of Influential Origins, host Alan Mindel continues his conversation with Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz, focusing on the growing challenges facing New York, the future of families and businesses in the state, and the alarming rise of antisemitism in public life, education, and civic spaces.

Alan and Jake discuss whether the next generation will be able to build a future in New York, as families confront rising costs, population stagnation, political dysfunction, and questions about safety and belonging. Jake reflects on his belief that New York remains one of the greatest places to live, but warns that poor policy decisions are weakening the state’s promise.

The conversation turns deeply toward the Jewish community’s experience in New York today, including hate crimes, campus antisemitism, the Columbia University protests, and the failure of institutions and prosecutors to enforce laws equally. Jake explains the difference between “the streets” and “the dinner table” — the need to address public intimidation and violence through law enforcement while also confronting the deeper narratives being shaped in schools, online spaces, and community conversations.

Alan and Jake also explore Holocaust education, the misuse of language such as “genocide,” the blurring of moral clarity, and the growing attempts to distort Jewish history by recasting Jews as oppressors rather than as a historically targeted minority. They discuss why accurate Holocaust education remains essential, especially as younger generations are increasingly exposed to misinformation and dangerous ideological framing.

This episode is a frank and urgent conversation about antisemitism, public safety, education, leadership, and the responsibility of elected officials and community leaders to protect truth, law, and the future of New York.

Transcript

Ep. 605 — Influential Origins with Alan Mindel
Guest: Jake Blumencranz — Part 2
hmTv at HMTC

Alan Mindel:
And we’re back here. This is Alan Mindel with Influential Origins, and again I have Assemblyman Jake Blumencranz with me.

Jake Blumencranz:
Alan, good to be here.

Alan Mindel:
Jake, I know you’re running for higher office today.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes, sir.

Alan Mindel:
We can talk about that a little, but more important to me is to talk about the challenges we have here in New York, because it is a real question right now whether our children will be able to live here.

Jake Blumencranz:
Yes.

Alan Mindel:
At the end of the day, we can go through all the individual policies, and we will, but that is the real question. It has always been part of the American idea that each generation believes the next generation will be better off than they were. We don’t know if that is going to be the case here for the next generation. And if it is, we certainly have statistical reason to be concerned that that better life may not be here in New York.

Jake Blumencranz:
And the numbers are scary.

Alan Mindel:
They are scary. Every census, we lose a congressman, whether our population actually declines or whether it stays stagnant while populations everywhere else grow. Our influence is reduced, our power is reduced, and our financial power, in terms of where businesses are located, is reduced.

Speaking as a proud New Yorker who is Jewish and who grew up with Holocaust survivor parents here in New York, there is a real question. My father loved this country immensely. He loved New York immensely. I grew up loving it too. But I don’t know if my kids are going to end up living here.

Jake Blumencranz:
It’s a sad question that so many families have been forced to ask themselves. Is this the best place to raise a family? Is this the best place to start a business? Is this the best place, like it used to be?

Unfortunately, sometimes the answer is not the obvious yes that it used to be.

If you hear frustration in my voice, it’s because it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make the case for New York and win every single day. This is the greatest state in America. This is one of the greatest places to live on earth.

To watch it slip out of our fingers because of poor decision after poor decision being made on a policy level speaks to changes in the fabric of our state, and those are changes we need to address.

Alan Mindel:
And to be clear, what has made New York great is that America was the great melting pot. But if America was the great melting pot, it was stirred first here.

We have always been a proud place that brought every culture and religion together with the idea that you will be accepted here, you will be able to live free here, you will be able to practice your religion here, and you will be welcome here.

Jews have been here for hundreds of years in New York. For the first time ever, it is incredibly difficult for a Jew to feel welcome in this state.

Jake Blumencranz:
I think we actually feel incredibly unwelcome in many atmospheres.

Alan Mindel:
We are not welcome. It is one thing for me to say that, and someone could say, “That’s an audacious statement.” But statistically, well more than half the hate crimes that occur in New York State are against Jews.

Population-wise, we are a fraction here, a tiny fraction, yet we represent most of the hate crimes that occur. And if you look at the media, particularly social media, but even traditional media, if something happens to a Jew, it is not news. If a country does something outrageous, it is not news. Anything Israel does is judged differently than anywhere else.

Then our relationship with Israel is questioned. We are questioned as having dual loyalty, even if my family has a proud military history here in this country. Our entire loyalty is questioned. What we do is questioned. How we interact in business is questioned. You are simply not safe, and you are not welcome.

Jake Blumencranz:
I think it comes down to two conversations, and it is important to separate the two at times, because we often get lost in the sauce when it comes to this topic.

You have the dinner table, and you have the streets. We are losing on both, but how we fix both are two very different conversations that both need to happen.

When I say we are losing on the streets, I mean something like the buffer bill. We just passed it in New York State within our budget. I am happy we passed the buffer bill. I am sad that it needs to exist.

A buffer bill creating that kind of space is only necessary because of failed policies in places like New York. And I do not mean that for shock value. I want to put on the record what that really means.

In a place like Florida, you did not see what we saw at Columbia. In a place like Florida, you did not see rampant antisemitism go unchecked. You did not see people blocking off streets, and you did not see people making communities feel less safe.

It is not because Florida has strict laws in place that stop what is happening. They have virtually the same exact statutes we have. The difference is that when the situation happened at Columbia, they arrested many people and gave them summonses when they were trespassing, holding down buildings, and holding them hostage.

Virtually none of them avoided entering a diversion program. They were left unprosecuted and deferred. They were unprosecuted.

Alan Mindel:
For the most absurd reason I have ever heard. We as an institution spoke out about this loudly.

You had individuals who were arrested for trespass in the location of their trespass. They were arrested in Hamilton Hall. They were on video in Hamilton Hall. There were tons of social media posts of their own, showing them on video in Hamilton Hall. Their phones identified their location as being in Hamilton Hall.

And yet, the New York City District Attorney dropped all charges on almost everyone, even those who committed physical violence and did millions of dollars in damages, because they said they did not have enough evidence that they were engaged in an act of trespass.

It is reminiscent of Jim Crow. People may think it is spectacular to say that, but someone has to explain to me the difference when law enforcement or prosecutors have the evidence sitting in front of them.

Jake Blumencranz:
Alvin Bragg and his colleagues are no longer there to follow the letter of the law. They decide what the law should and should not be. They think because trespassing prosecutions should not exist, they simply will not do what they need to do. They will not do their job.

The reason I say this conversation exists in two spaces is because fixing that part is really simple. The governor, with the stroke of a pen, could stop the madness tomorrow.

When it comes to things like this, she could make sure that individuals in office, like Ron DeSantis did in Florida, who took an oath and duty to the people of Florida — and here, those who took an oath and duty to the people of New York — simply follow the law. If they do not, they can be removed. Period.

If they are not protecting and defending the people of their communities, they should be gone.

When you set that standard and tone with leadership, you can change the narrative. What we have seen is a tacit approval and acceptance. The same people who entered and received no form of punishment for what they did re-entered the streets.

You saw many of the same individuals blocking roads and using scare tactics and intimidation on the streets of Brooklyn. It is not the whole city attacking. It is individuals who feel like they have the unfettered ability to do what they want because policymakers are not saying what they need to say, especially in the city.

Alan Mindel:
Because the law is not being applied equally.

Jake Blumencranz:
No. Imagine if those were pro-ICE protesters inside that building at Columbia that day. Do you think a single one of them would go unprosecuted for trespassing? I do not think so.

Alan Mindel:
It is insanity. And it is political.

But what we have to understand is that I do not care about the political nature of it, frankly. Whoever the elected person is, whatever party they belong to, I can understand the motivations very much.

I grew up very much as a liberal Democrat in a lot of ways. But I think you were right to focus on Columbia, because Columbia changed everything.

We showed a film here called Columbia Unbecoming, which was filmed in the early 2000s, and it showed an onslaught of professors from one department who, again and again, were prejudiced and racist against Jewish students.

Teaching from a particular viewpoint is beyond fine. It is what you want. That is the whole idea. Of course there are different views on Israel, Palestine, and the rights of each people, and that is an incredibly worthy conversation with many different points each party could make.

But it was not like that. If you were a Jew in certain classes, you were singled out and probably thrown out.

Jake Blumencranz:
That comes down to that point again: two spaces.

On the streets, I think it comes down to trespassing, intimidation, and having the real definition of antisemitism that we have wanted for a long time adopted in New York State.

Alan Mindel:
Which has been adopted by 36 states through IHRA, and New York is one of the only states that has not.

Jake Blumencranz:
And we should wonder and ask why.

I have laid out in a letter to the governor a multi-point plan that, if followed to the letter of the law, would essentially end the discomfort we feel in the streets every day, because we can enact and follow the rules already in place here in New York.

When it comes to what has happened in the classroom at Columbia, it is not exclusive to Columbia. What Columbia has done is expose a systematic effort by groups that hate the Jewish community, hate Israel, and hate Zionism. They have been seeding this for decades.

There is a blurring of the lines when it comes to moral clarity on this topic, and that has become a dangerous conversation.

There is a spectrum of what is socially acceptable in politics and in social spaces. That spectrum goes from policy, to popular, to acceptable, to unacceptable, to horrific. Where something sits on that spectrum can move.

Look at gay marriage. It was once considered completely unacceptable and abhorrent. Now it sits in the policy space as completely acceptable.

Alan Mindel:
And I was a big part of that fight to make it socially acceptable, so I believe in that tremendously.

Jake Blumencranz:
Me too. But you have to sit back, take the Jewish component away, and look at how that idea came to be. It was not just a referendum and then people voted.

It became more acceptable at the dinner table, in communities, and within ecosystems. People spoke, had conversations, shared ideas, passed different laws, and found different ways of easing that conversation into the zeitgeist.

Alan Mindel:
It is about stories.

Jake Blumencranz:
Exactly. And the inverse is true as well.

Piece by piece, they dismantled our ability to command the conversation and lay the groundwork for what the facts are. A lie travels around the world twice before the truth ever gets out of bed.

Alan Mindel:
Goebbels said it: if you tell a lie often enough to enough people and repeat it, eventually they will believe it.

Jake Blumencranz:
They will. Or it will become a mantra. It will become dogma.

To many of these communities, they have associated this tribalistic nature of oppressor and oppressed. That is the duality narrative they have created on college campuses, where oppressor and oppressed are presented in black-and-white terms: colonizer and colonized.

They cannot even begin to see the inverse: that Israel is one of the greatest decolonization efforts ever undertaken.

Alan Mindel:
It is an incredible perversion.

Jake Blumencranz:
Because it makes no sense within the context they are taught in these institutions.

Alan Mindel:
Right. The thing about it is that people are redefining words, much like with the Holocaust. Genocide.

Jake Blumencranz:
The word genocide does not mean what it meant. And if it does, then everyone who keeps chanting it like a campaign slogan does not understand what they are saying.

Alan Mindel:
Ninety percent of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust were murdered because they were Jewish. Because they were Jews.

In Gaza, you had a five or six percent overall population mortality rate, of which a large portion was military-aged males. If you compare that casualty rate to Afghanistan, Iraq, or other conflicts in the last century, especially in areas of urban combat, it is among the lowest casualty rates of urban combat this century in the Middle East.

So the facts become irrelevant.

Jake Blumencranz:
They are irrelevant to the conversation because we are losing the online ecosystem.

I have been seeing videos show up over and over again on my social media over the past few weeks on a topic I find extremely scary. This is where the rot enters the core.

They are making an argument asking, “Why are Jews so special that the Holocaust is a statewide, necessary curricular topic that must be taught in schools?”

They say what happened to the Black community speaks to their community, or that this Holocaust or that genocide is what we should really be teaching, and that we should look at this more holistically instead of focusing on one specific instance.

It speaks to the way the Jewish community has been able to approach policy by dictating the narrative in schools. They are flipping the script on us, saying, “How dare we teach the Holocaust in schools?”

Alan Mindel:
Which is incredible, because Holocaust education over the last 20 years, up until very recently, was universalized.

Here at this institution, we have survivors of the Rwandan genocide, because there was a real genocide in Rwanda, and they help lead our Holocaust education.

Jake Blumencranz:
In the middle of all this crazy conversation about Israel, South Sudan has committed a complete definitional genocide.

Alan Mindel:
Millions upon millions of people are killed through today in Sudan because they are Christian. And the groups we worry about, whether in Israel or here, including offshoots of Iranian proxies, are responsible for that genocide, and it is never spoken about.

Jake Blumencranz:
That is why, in our communities, it is so important that we take local steps to make sure we can protect and defend how we teach about the Holocaust and what it means to our community correctly.

After October 7th, I put together a group of students from every school to discuss how this topic is being taught.

Some of the statistics coming out of New York City and other areas showed that school-age students were graduating with virtually no understanding of the Holocaust and no understanding of what the Holocaust means in our context. I have to say “our context” because it is not being taught universally in the way it once was.

We wanted to conduct a full audit within our school districts to see how this was going. What is happening? They fought us tooth and nail. They said it was being taught perfectly.

Yet if 40 or 50 percent of students leaving school have no idea that the Holocaust happened, how perfectly is it being taught? You have to ask those questions.

If I am sitting here and multiple Long Island school districts have students telling me radically different stories about how the unit is being taught, that raises concern.

One student told me the Holocaust was interpreted simply as genocide, with the two being treated as interchangeable. So they learned about what happened in Rwanda, but not about the Holocaust of the Jews.

Another student said the teacher felt very uncomfortable with the topic and just did a roundtable that talked about Israel and what is happening today, bringing it into modern times.

None of that made sense to me.

I am not one to say the state should dictate what happens in our local schools, and I never will be. But we, as local and community leaders, need to be cautious, considerate, and aware of when we need to go to our school boards and say, “This needs to change.”

Alan Mindel:
The cautionary tale of the Holocaust, and there are so many lessons from it, is that you can slowly change the way society operates and looks. People think this is a theoretical discussion, but it is not.

That is what Columbia proved.

I will never forget that spring when Jews evacuated Columbia. I got a phone call from someone who said the head of Jewish life at Columbia, someone we knew, needed to talk to someone. Could I talk to her?

I got on the phone with this woman, who was not someone you would necessarily think of as the most Zionistic or any of those things, and she could not stop crying.

As Jewish kids who were religious finished the Sabbath and walked out of temple, they were getting beaten. Physically beaten. College kids who were just praying, which should be allowed in this country as part of religious freedom, were being beaten simply because they were Jewish Columbia students.

Jewish girls were told that if they left their dorm rooms, and even if they did not, they were going to be raped to death and made an example of.

Those kids will never be the same. They literally escaped New York City and that campus to live. They had to close that campus because Jews were not safe in this city. No one has come to terms with what that really means.

Jake Blumencranz:
When I went to school in the United Kingdom, I saw what many see today in New York: a vitriolic antisemitic, pro-Palestinian movement that was actively violent on college campuses.

I was taking some classes at University College London while I was at LSE, and the venom being directed at me as a Jewish student just standing in the street did not feel like a safe space.

I said, “Thank God I live in New York, where nothing like this could ever happen.” How silly of me to think such a thing.

All it took was the worst and most catastrophic mass casualty incident against the Jewish community, the murder of Jews on October 7th, for October 8th to become the beginning of the end.

Alan Mindel:
As people were still being raped and killed, there were celebrations in New York City for the largest terrorist attack of our time.

Jake Blumencranz:
And now we sit here with individuals running primaries against candidates in the Democratic Party in New York City to represent Manhattan, some of the largest Jewish communities in the world, who actively hold and espouse antisemitic or anti-Israel views.

You have to sit back and ask, “How did we get here?”

Alan Mindel:
And they are repeating lies over and over again. Chants, slogans, one of which comes from a Jewish candidate. That makes me utterly sick.

Jake Blumencranz:
Daria Lisa, the individual running against Adriano Espaillat in the northern half of Manhattan, was at that rally on October 8th chanting antisemitic slogans. She is at the precipice, with the mayor’s endorsement and support, of taking out the incumbent.

That is the kind of conversation we are having right now: how we lose these communities and lose this narrative if we allow these individuals into places of power.

Alan Mindel:
I think it is important to point out that this is happening on both sides of the aisle.

Jake Blumencranz:
Of course.

Alan Mindel:
There are candidates in Florida who say the most despicable things about Jews just for being Jews.

This is the Holocaust perversion. Today, Jews are the white oppressor. During the Holocaust, we were the minority, the filthy animal, the not-white person who genetically did not deserve to live.

We are the same people no one would let into a country club. “Do not bring your golf clubs to Augusta.” There are deeds on Long Island, all over Long Island, that said Jews could not buy this house. That happened.

The idea of privilege is complicated. Long Island Jewish Hospital, which merged with North Shore Hospital to become Northwell, existed because Jews were not necessarily welcome, and Jewish doctors were not necessarily welcome, in non-Jewish hospitals.

Jake Blumencranz:
White spaces were not Jewish spaces. Now there is a narrative being painted that the Jewish community has always been in conjunction with the white oppressor, as you were saying, and therefore received every benefit and every privilege that comes with being a white Protestant Anglo-Saxon in American society.

That has categorically not been the case.

Alan Mindel:
And it is not the case today.

Today, Jews are less likely to be hired for certain better jobs, less likely to be accepted in certain universities, and we have always accepted some of that as fact. Today, we are blamed if there is any success, and we are also blamed if we do not have success.

So the facts become irrelevant. It is simply that we are who we are.

Jake Blumencranz:
In a world where facts are becoming increasingly irrelevant and the line of moral clarity is increasingly blurred, I think it comes back to why the first component I was talking about, how we win on the streets, is so important.

At the basis of our role in government, and I have taken this to heart, we can set the tone. We can set the tone that if you are committing crimes, if you are trespassing, intimidating, or committing acts of violence toward communities, you can go to jail and stay there. We can lock you up.

Alan Mindel:
If you are on Long Island and hiding your identity so you can get away with a crime while hiding your identity—

Jake Blumencranz:
Or so you can intimidate people.

Alan Mindel:
Right. That itself is the crime.

Jake Blumencranz:
Setting those narratives and setting that tone will influence what is acceptable in the dinner-table sphere and in the online sphere. That is an important thing we have to do as legislators.

Alan Mindel:
There is one more general area I want to cover with you, but I think we will take a quick break. In a couple of minutes, we will come back and talk about it.

Thank you very much, folks.

[End of Part 2]