Mayor Zohran Mamdani, like his predecessors, would like us all to pay close attention to numbers that show him to be successful and maybe spend less time on data suggesting things aren’t going so well. “Filling in 200,000 potholes, delivering universal child care for 2-year-olds, winning more than $130 million in money for delivery workers,” he ticked off when we met recently. On street crime, “we’re talking about the lowest number of murders in recorded history, the same when it comes to shooting incidents as well as shooting victims,” he said. “That is work to be celebrated. That is the work that has brought our city to a very different place than where it was about 30, 35 years ago.”

Mamdani has even added another metric, vowing to drive down the number of antisemitic hate crimes. “We know that Jewish New Yorkers make up anywhere from 10 to 12 percent of our city’s population, yet they continue to constitute a majority of victims of all hate crimes, and that’s unacceptable,” he told me in an interview aboard the Staten Island Ferry. “How do we start to drive those numbers down and never be satisfied until the number of hate crimes across the city is zero?”

Mamdani stumbled badly a day after our interview, which happened to be the anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel by Hamas terrorists. The mayor issued a statement that opened with a perfunctory........

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