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Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-898380
What New York's Israel Day Parade Says about the Future of American Jewry
(Jerusalem Post) Jeffrey Kahn - Last Sunday, New York's Fifth Avenue was engulfed in a sea of blue and white, surrounded by one of the largest displays of police security in recent memory. Since 1964, the annual Israel Day Parade has served as a day of celebration, joy, and public display of Jewish pride and Zionist solidarity. Yet the 2026 parade was a stark manifestation of a new reality that the Jewish community of New York is quietly being subjected to and slowly realizing. Other cultural parades are policed as high-density public celebrations. The Israel Day Parade has effectively transitioned into being policed as a high-threat tactical defense operation. The necessity of deploying the city's entire municipal counterterrorism apparatus, just to allow families to walk down a public street, underscores a very painful reality. A reported record-breaking crowd of over 50,000 proud marchers and spectators filled the streets. But they moved behind an unprecedented ring of security against an imminent threat. NYPD snipers perched on Upper East Side rooftops, tactical special units in heavy body armor were visible, as were low-flying helicopters, surveillance drones hovering overhead, and thousands of uniformed and undercover police officers lining every block. The Jews of New York were standing behind a physical wall of police security in their own home, explicitly to protect them from a rising, volatile undercurrent of anti-Israel extremism. When a minority group requires an army just to walk down a public avenue, they are no longer equal citizens. The writer is a strategic adviser at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.