Every July 20 our family celebrates our Americaversary, the day my mother and I arrived in America. My father, grandmother and great aunt had left us from the Soviet Union, so when we arrived on July 20, 1978, they waited for our arrival.
We were free, and we were so happy, but the reality of what was going on in America at that time could not be avoided. Jimmy Carter was a president and would soon give what would be known as his “malaise” speech. Our new home base from New York was in chaos. The crime got out of hand and the blackout of the previous summer, called “The Night of Terror” because of the crime outside control, had exposed some deep rotten over the city.
The times were disturbing, but our family loved freedom. My parents tell stories about being able to say what they wanted for the first time in their lives. My grandmother and her sister had never thought to practice our Jewish faith without fear.
Zohran Mamdani speaks briefly with reporters while he leaves the Dirksen Senate Office building on July 16, 2025, in Washington, DC (Michael M. Santiago/Getty images)
But the city and the country were in real crisis and even in our new American honeymoon phase it was difficult not to notice.
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Ronald Reagan would be chosen two years later and the country would start a steady climb. New York’s turning would take a little longer. When Rudy Giuliani became mayor in 1994, 1,561 were killed in NYC that year, on average more than four murders a day. The city was a cesspit.
That year I graduated from high school and remember a lawless city where nobody paid for the metro, drugs were everywhere and there were simply no rules.
Our family eventually left New York City in the Covid years because of the fall in the city again. We had to go, for our children, and the most important question we would get is how we did it as long as we did. The truth was, the eight Giuliani years were a miracle of good government in New York, and they were followed by 12 excellent years of the mayor of Michael Bloomberg.
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The NYC Blackout of 2003 was nothing like the one from 1977. This time the main story was a city that came together and helped each other. The city had changed for the better. Even after Bill Deblasio was chosen, it took a while to undo the good policy of those 20 years. In the first term of Deblasio, he usually spent the performance of those who had done the work for him. New York seemed unbreakable.
But policy is important and so many bad ideas have harmed New York in recent years. Not prosecuting criminals has led to widespread quality of life crimes. Legalization of marijuana means that the entire city always smells like weed and other drug use also happens. Some of the best public schools in the city were forced to remove their “screens” for admission, such as figures or presence, and to work on a lottery basis, with predictable results.
Now Zohran Mamdani, a self -described socialist, is in pole position to be the next mayor of New York. His policy ideas have been pushed poorly over the past decade, but on steroids. His handle on policy is weak, such as when he suggested that the government was running supermarkets, could lower prices by buying product in bulk. Only someone with an extremely limited knowledge of a company can imagine that all supermarkets are currently not doing this.
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But the idea of stores run by the government is bad. I come from a country that tried this and led to widespread food shortages. The Mamdanis of the world never fully know how to reach the utopia they strive for and the rest of our suffering through it.
His comments about taxing white people are also very familiar. The socialist cause is highly dependent on the idea that there is a class of people who hoard more than their ‘honest share’. The cause needs an enemy and Mamdani is ready to turn New Yorkers against each other, just as his socialist counterparts had done in places like the USSR.
Then there is the support of Mamdani for the message “Globalize the Intifada”. This is seen as the aiming of Jews, and of course it does, but globalizing the Intifada means destroying Western civilization. It specifically means to bring “the uprising” to our doors in America.
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In the four years of the second Intifada against Israel, thousands of people died in suicide attacks and shootings. They were not just Jews. Many Christians and Muslims were also killed.
A suicide bomber never stops asking the religion of the people he is about to kill. This is what Mamdani globalized.
Americans must fear socialism and socialists. The philosophy is at odds with our free country and the equality that pushes the push is never explained and has failed every time it has been tried. America is great because of the ideas that make America great.
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With the Donald Trump elections, we are in an optimistic era comparable to that of my family a few years after our arrival. But the lesson of the bad times should be that everything can be undone and broken if we leave it.
We have a miracle of a country here, but we have to appreciate and protect it against bad ideas and bad people who try to destroy it.
Click here to Van Karol Markowicz
