The mounting fight over “buffer zone” legislation reached a new phase in a contentious New York City Council hearing on Wednesday.
A number of Jewish leaders and constituents attended the public hearing in support of the bill, which was introduced by Council Speaker Julie Menin in response to pro-Palestinian protests outside synagogues. A handful of other bills, including one that would similarly establish buffer zones outside educational institutions, were discussed as well.
The reaction was strong on both sides.
The buffer zone proposal has drawn a split response since its introduction in January. Many pro-Israel Jews have lauded it as a way to curb intimidation in a tense climate, while opponents say it would inappropriately clamp down on constitutionally protected speech, including against pro-Israel events. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has not commented on whether he would sign the bill, instead saying he will wait until a legal review of the bill in its final form is completed.
That divide was evident during the hearing, both on the speakers’ podium and — even more intensely — outside City Hall and in the audience.
The main floor was filled mostly with proponents of the bills, some of whom wore Israeli flags on their clothing and had signs with messages like “Protect our houses of worship.”
The mezzanine, meanwhile, was packed with activists — including from the anti-Zionist groups Jewish Voice for Peace and Shoresh — who had protested on the steps of City Hall before the hearing, many of them clad in keffiyehs and watermelon kippahs demonstrating their solidarity with the Palestinians. They’d brought signs with messages like “Jews say stop land theft, not dissent” and “Protect our right to protest.”
“Nazis!” one person yelled up from the floor to the mezzanine. “Sit down, white supremacists!” another shouted.
The NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, Michael Gerber, said during his testimony that the department had “no objections” to Menin’s proposal — though that was not the case until recently.
The NYPD had “significant concerns” about language in the original bill, said Gerber. It was recently updated to remove any reference to distance after initially specifying that buffer zones would be up to 100 feet.
Gerber said that language would have “limited” the NYPD’s ability to assess each protest case by case, and would not have allowed for buffer zones larger than 100 feet if needed. “We certainly wouldn’t want to have our hands tied,” he said.
The bill as currently constructed does not create a blanket policy of buffer zones for protests, its cosponsors say, but rather requires the NYPD to create a transparent plan for preventing intimidation and obstruction of people attending a house of worship.
For some supporters of the legislation, the updates dampened their excitement.
“I think these are watered down, but I do think that there should be buffer zones,” said Ross Glick, a Jewish PR executive in attendance who was affiliated with the far-right pro-Israel group Betar US until 2025. (Betar’s New York chapter was recently dissolved following a settlement with the state attorney general, and Betar US has been labeled an “extremist group” by the Anti-Defamation League.)
But for many, the bill offered a sense of security from experiencing a repeat of the synagogue protest that sparked it.
“What happened at Park East Synagogue should not happen again,” Menin said.
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and a former City Council member, said in an interview that there would be tangible benefit from codifying internal NYPD guidelines into law. The police would be held to a greater degree of accountability, he said, helping avoid situations like NYPD’s lapse at Park East which Commissioner Jessica Tisch later apologized for.
“There’s a big difference between guidance and a law,” Treyger said.
Eric Dinowitz, chair of Council’s Jewish Caucus, introduced the bill on educational institution buffer zones, and spoke in favor of the legislation package. Five members of the State Assembly, which is working on its own buffer zone law, joined via Zoom to voice their support: Micah Lasher, Jeffrey Dinowitz (Eric Dinowitz’s father), David Weprin, Linda Rosenthal and Sam Berger.
City Council heard testimony from a number of Jewish institutional leaders, congregational rabbis, students and activists. (Joseph Strauss)
Opposition to the bills came from multiple angles.
Justin Harrison, senior policy counsel for the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the bills “an affront to the Constitution” because they would “strip away New Yorkers’ free speech rights,” and criticized the amount left up to police officers’ interpretation.
“Both [Menin’s and Dinowitz’s] proposals encourage viewpoint- and content-based enforcement against disfavored speakers and messages in that they offer the NYPD wide latitude to decide when and where, and under what conditions they should set up buffer zones,” Harrison said.
Nahiyan Taufiq, from the Muslim Community Network, similarly criticized the latitude given to police for interpreting what counts as intimidation.
Councilmember Inna Vernikov, who drew controversy when she brought a gun to a pro-Palestinian protest, questioned Taufiq as to whether pro-Hamas chants, like the ones chanted across from a Queens synagogue last month, should be considered intimidating. Nahiyan said she “doesn’t have an opinion on that.”
Multiple speakers criticized the lawmakers for what they said was cracking down on pro-Palestinian protesters who had a gripe with events promoting migration to Israel and the West Bank, which they argue violate international law. (Most of the world, though not Israel or the United States, considers Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegal under international law.)
“Instead of criminalizing protesters, the city should be targeting illegal events hosted by houses of worship,” said Jonathan Bloom, a Jewish labor organizer.
A testifier named Riley, who is part of the Crown Heights Tenants Union, said, “The sale of stolen Palestinian land is an explicitly political action. This bill would effectively ban meaningful protest against it.”
Progressive group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice has previously come out against the bill, and reaffirmed its stance following the updated language.
“We still object to the legislation even with the amendments,” JFREJ wrote in a statement. “At best, the bills change little about existing NYPD protocol. At worst, they contribute to a climate of government repression of protest, and further embolden the NYPD to racially profile and target protests towards which the agency is historically antagonistic.”
Either way, the statement concluded, “the legislation fails to accomplish the Speaker’s stated goal of combating antisemitism.”
Treyger was one of many Jewish leaders to testify in support of the bill. Others included Manhattan JCC CEO Joanna Samuels; 92NY’s director of Jewish life, David Ingber; ADL’s regional director Scott Richman; and UJA-Federation of New York’s community strategy vice president, Hindy Poupko.
The council also heard testimony from congregational rabbis and leaders of smaller Jewish institutions. Multiple students of SAR Academy, a Jewish school in Dinowitz’s Bronx district, spoke, as did the school’s principal, Rabbi Binyamin Krauss. Letters urging parents to testify were distributed to Jewish schools in Dinowitz’s district.
At one point, hoping to provide a concrete example of how the legislation could work, Dinowitz pointed out that there had been a protest outside City Hall before the meeting.
“Great. That’s fine,” he said. “You know what else there was? A buffer zone.”
