In the days after the Penn Station arrest (both men now face terrorism charges), Paulette was haunted by a nagging fear: What if we had somehow missed the alert? She was in her early 30s, not long out of grad school, and now a member of a team with a most unlikely livelihood: searching for the lone wolves and sociopaths threatening the 1.6 million Jews in New York City and its surroundings.
Paulette’s intelligence group has operated largely out of public view. But with the spiraling growth in antisemitic violence, and in social media vitriol, I wanted to understand the origin story of the operation—and why it had become so critical.
On any given day, Paulette and her colleagues at the Community Security Initiative (CSI)—a group funded primarily by the United Jewish Appeal–Federation of New York and private donors, including hedge fund financier Paul Singer—monitor and evaluate at least 100 potential security threats. Their work has become crucial. The Anti-Defamation League, which closely tabulates alleged antisemitic acts, has compiled data indicating the grimmest of facts: US incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault toward Jews increased by a third last year. In New York State alone, there was a 39 percent rise. Of those incidents, there were 72 assaults reported to the police, the highest number in the state’s history.
During the past year, the ADL has documented a spate of BB gun attacks across New York, including one from a passing car that targeted a seven-year-old Hasidic boy and his father as they left a grocery store on Staten Island. In Monsey, a city upstate with a large Orthodox population, a Jewish mother pushing a stroller was sprayed with BBs by assailants from out of town. In Central Park, a 63-year-old was struck by a passing cyclist yelling, “Kanye 2024”—a not-so-veiled reference to recent antisemitic declarations by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. (It took weeks for the NYPD hate crimes unit to determine the identity of the cyclist. The suspect has yet to be found.) In Brooklyn, schoolboys were witnessed rushing off a bus in Williamsburg and attacking anyone they could find wearing a black hat. Their primary weapon: the bus’s fire extinguisher.
Swastikas now appear with regularity on the city’s synagogue walls and sidewalks. At a Jewish school in Brooklyn last year, a threat was received “to burn down the building with Jewish little children in it.” Recently, there have been 12 recorded antisemitic bomb threats that have resulted in building evacuations—10 directed at Jewish Community Centers, one at a Holocaust memorial center, and one at a Jewish university. In November, someone firebombed a synagogue outside Newark. There were threats posted to the websites of five different Jewish organizations, which, according to the ADL, mentioned Zyklon B—the hydrogen cyanide tablets the Nazis used for concentration camp exterminations.
In January, a Hasidic man crossing a Crown Heights street was struck by a car and left to bleed on the pavement. (He survived. Again, no arrest has been made.) In April, there were incidents of Jews in the city being threatened on the streets with a razor and pummeled with rocks.
The ADL’s director, Jonathan Greenblatt—who has been instrumental in drawing attention to the escalation—notes that last year “there were 23 separate bomb threats against Jewish institutions in New York and New Jersey. This is personal to me. This is my home…. Community-driven collaborations”—like the efforts of Paulette and her peers—“are critical to addressing our communities’ threats from violent extremism.”
Part of the most sophisticated such network in the US, Paulette and her team at CSI operate as a privately funded adjunct to law enforcement. The unit—which includes former members of the NYPD and Israel’s Shin Bet—quietly assesses threats, sets up and evaluates security protocols for more than 2,400 Jewish establishments, and facilitates working relationships between those organizations and relevant parties within the criminal justice matrix, from federal agents to counterintelligence experts to beat cops. (In Chicago, the Secure Community Network, a nationwide tracking system, now employs 75 people around the country in parallel initiatives; New York City, with its immense Jewish population, maintains its own autonomous force.)
Launched at the end of 2019 by the UJA-Federation, the program was created to meet the pressing need for a sophisticated private counterintelligence team to deal with the heightened level of danger. Mitchell Silber, CSI’s director—and former director of intelligence analysis at the NYPD—was at first brought in to consult on how to organize the operation and to hire a hands-on administrator with the relevant skill sets. After a few weeks interviewing candidates, he said, “I’m going to throw my hat into the ring.” Silber knew how to recognize real-world threats: After 9/11, he had been in charge of tracking suspected terrorists. It had been unimaginable to him, he later told me, that in 2019 “the NYPD and the FBI, with all their resources, could not handle what we were seeing.”
Law enforcement was swamped—and underprepared. In the decade or so after September 11, Silber explained, “if you were going to disrupt a terrorist plot, you needed to track a member who was part of a group. At the NYPD, in those years, we were able to stop 16 planned attacks. Now, everything is different. You need virtual undercover monitors”—like Paulette and Ari—“who can penetrate a plot. The methodology has completely changed.”
I first encountered Paulette last November on a closed Zoom call organized by the New York chapter of the UJA-Federation. The session had been pulled together quickly to brief community leaders and philanthropic donors about an explosion of antisemitic attacks, mostly focused on Brooklyn. Even though the meeting was never posted online, I was surprised that Paulette allowed her face to be seen. (Certain names have been changed in this story to protect identities.)
My first thought after that Zoom call was, Here we go again. This feels like Paris, Marseille, Le Blanc-Mesnil. Because of my reporting for this magazine over the past 20 years, I’d been all too aware of the antisemitic wave that had swept across France in the early 2000s, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to emigrate elsewhere. Now, here was New York, where I had lived since 1970, a city with one of the largest Jewish populations on earth—and the nation’s most formidable police force—having to rely on the local Jewish community to protect its own by marshaling millions of dollars to support private security forces. Would guards with automatic weapons, as I’d witnessed in France, soon be stationed outside our synagogues?
Paulette, a CSI threat analyst, keeps her identity guarded for security reasons.Photo by Devin Yalkin