Not too long ago, a non-Jewish lifelong New Yorker who grew up on the Upper East Side was asked by a friend to host a screening of the documentary film Israelism. She immediately said no. It wasn’t that she necessarily disagreed with the message of the film—which bills itself as ​​the story of “young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.” Rather, this would-be screening host feared “being socially exiled by many of her Jewish friends” and “possible career consequences. I want to be brave,” she told me. “I’m disappointed in myself.”

As the summer season kicked into gear and much of the Upper East Side migrated to Long Island’s East End, no one wanted to get canceled. Not right when guest lists are drawn up for some of the most exclusive parties in the Hamptons, often held at the sprawling estates of some of the wealthiest people (including some of the wealthiest Jewish people) on the planet.

In the wake of October 7, much of Manhattan’s moneyed Jewish elite has doubled down on what is considered acceptable behavior and speech related to Jews, antisemitism, Israel, and the war in Gaza. There is enormous pressure not to step out of line for reasons that are historically understandable but less defensible considering the right-wing takeover of Israel and the questionable motives of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue the war in order to avoid possible jail time. (Netanyahu has pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust.)

As the war stretches on, with the international community calling for a ceasefire and protests having roiled campuses across the country, this set has become an island upon an island. Numerous outspoken voices, along with some quieter ones from the hushed corners of Sant Ambroeus (the one on Madison Avenue), are leveling accusations of antisemitism, liberally using the “bad Jew” trope for those who aren’t in lockstep with what they believe it means to be pro-Israel.

To address the elephant in the room. It is almost impossible to talk about wealthy, powerful Jews without conjuring abhorrent tropes and stereotypes that will lead people to accuse you (me) of being antisemitic. But just like many non-Jewish cultures in America, there is an elite segment, and that is who I am examining. This is a third rail issue, but it should not force everyone into silence, particularly when the stakes are so high.

Before we go much further: I’m part of this world, one where people pay $43,000 a year for nursery school. I’m also a Jew who attended 12 years of Jewish day school, spent seven seasons at Jewish summer camp, and attended an Orthodox synagogue. I lived in Israel for three months after high school, part of the time on a kibbutz. I can, on a good day, speak, read, and write in Hebrew. I can say October 7 was horrific; I can also say the bloodshed and starvation since then has also been horrific.

In April, at a rally for the hostages at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza near the United Nations, Congressman Jerry Nadler, the current longest-serving Jewish member of the House of Representatives, was booed after calling for “lifesaving humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people” while also acknowledging “heinous crimes committed by Hamas.” Park Avenue plastic surgeon and Upper East Side resident Ira Savetsky heckled him, saying, “How does it feel not to be welcome among the Jewish people?” Nadler responded, “I think I am welcome,” to which Savetsky rebutted, “They’re pissed at you.” (Savetsky presumably included.)

Recently Savetsky’s wife, Lizzy, a fashion influencer, commented on the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll data in an Instagram story, telling more than 350,000 followers that “Israel has killed 14,000 Hamas operatives, you get 7,200 Palestinian civilian deaths. That would be a pretty good ratio as far as wars are concerned.”

Reached for comment, Ira pointed to what he called “widespread dissatisfaction” with Nadler among various constituents and accused the congressman of continuing to “prioritize seeking approval from the most extreme members of his party.” Lizzy also sent a detailed response, declaring that she “along with every Jew I know, want peace.”

“It is quite shocking that media and others would blindly accept numbers and information that originate from a known terrorist entity. My video made the point that even with the numbers they’ve provided, which have been reduced by the Gaza Health Ministry,” she wrote, adding links from the AP and Newsweek that she said supported her comments, “it is still the lowest known ratio of combatants to civilians in modern ground warfare.” (Some academics question how various sources define combatant, with some data including all men ages 18 to 59.)

There’s a phrase making its way around social media’s Jewish glitterati, the types of people whose names adorn wings of museums: “A keffiyeh on an American college campus is just a hipster swastika.” Another one circulating in this crowd is the tagline of the Instagram account @letour​people​gonow: “No ceasefire. No compromise. Let our people go.” (Some Jews of this ilk, I’ve been told, view a ceasefire as a capitulation to Hamas that will put it back in power.)

If you want to ruin a playdate among the socialites of Park Avenue, I caution you not to mention that more than 2 percent of the children in Gaza have been injured or killed.

“Go to any cocktail party on the Upper East Side and there is no open and honest conversation about what is happening in Gaza,” says Amanda Uhry, CEO and founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors.

Uhry says Upper East Side Jewish families account for 40 percent of her client base, typically a total of about 450 in any given year. Her clients pay her more than $20,000 to land their offspring at New York City’s top schools, where tuition can run another $65,000.

Yes, status still reigns on the Upper East Side. The neighborhood might be leaning a bit more tribal (see: the new Upper East Side Jewish day school Emet Classical Academy, which was flooded with applications when it announced its opening a few weeks after October 7), but none of Uhry’s clients, she says, turn down top-tier schools. Even if parents didn’t love what they call the “both-sides-ism” of the various administrative responses to October 7, says Uhry, “they aren’t saying no to Dalton, Spence, Brearley, Fieldston, Horace Mann, Riverdale, Trinity—even Dwight.”

“If you feel a need to take a stance on the Israel-Gaza war, perhaps another area of New York would be a better place to live,” says Uhry. “If you want to make a stance on anything, the Upper East Side is probably not an ideal place to do it.” Cue Upper West Side resident Jerry Seinfeld, whose comedic brand used to be “going on about nothing” but post–October 7 has been increasingly vocal about his support for Israel. “There is a social contract here [on the Upper East Side] not to initiate a controversial conversation because you never know whether the person you are offending is someone you’ll need to get your kid into school or raise money from for your hedge fund. It’s like England in the 1950s,” Uhry says.

Yes, the winds blow differently on the Upper East Side, a cloistered, moneyed enclave home to many master-of-the-universe types who, to some degree, create the weather—it’s a kind of influence and power that allows them to live in their own echo chambers and steer clear of people who challenge or disagree with them. Or just completely obliterate those who do (see: Ackman, Bill).

A former development professional at a mainstream Jewish organization tells me that she’s seen “how fear—based in a core of reality and magnified on purpose and not on purpose, for well over a decade—has diminished some of the Jewish community’s ability to think beyond themselves, or generously or realistically.”

Some American Jews are understandably traumatized by what happened on October 7, when Hamas killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel and took an estimated 240 hostage. In early June the Israeli army confirmed the deaths of four of the 80 hostages believed to still be alive. A military operation weeks later resulted in the rescue of four more, though the Gaza Health Ministry said the Israeli army killed more than 270 Palestinians in this mission.

According to the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force, there were 81 reported antisemitic incidents between January and April this year, compared with a reported 46 targeting the Muslim community. On a national scale, the Anti-Defamation League reported a 140 percent surge in antisemitic incidents in 2023 compared with 2022. (In June the editors of Wikipedia concluded that the ADL is no longer “generally reliable” as a source on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and can only “roughly be taken as reliable” on the topic of antisemitism when Israel and Zionism are not concerned, in part because it is a pro-Israel organization and often categorizes criticism of Israel as antisemitism.) The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported a 178 percent increase in anti-Muslim incidents for the last three months of 2023. Both organizations said these numbers had set records.

The moment feels existential for worldwide Jewry. And for many on the Upper East Side, the impulse has been to turn inward.

When I ask Mijal Bitton, spiritual leader of the Downtown Minyan and visiting researcher at NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, for her opinion on Upper East Side Jews “closing ranks,” she tells me that “it’s a complicated observation” and that she “wouldn’t describe it that way.” The complexity, says Bitton, who recently returned from a tour speaking about Israel and antisemitism at several US graduate school programs, centers on how betrayed many Jews feel by their supposed “allies.”

She describes a dynamic that cuts the other way just as easily. “I’m hearing from my Upper East Side Jewish philanthropist friends that in the art community, even calling yourself a Zionist and speaking of support of Israel makes you persona non grata. I have another friend who is a lifelong supporter of feminist causes but feels she can’t talk about the sexual violence taking place against Israeli and Jewish women at the hands of Hamas.”

When I tell a Palestinian friend of mine who used to live on the Upper East Side that expressing horror over the death toll in Gaza felt out of bounds in certain wealthy Jewish enclaves—for instance, at my son’s $43,000-a-year predominantly Jewish Upper East Side preschool, or at any restaurant on Madison between 96th and 60th streets—she agrees, worrying I’d get the attack line of being a “self-hating Jew.”

My friend, who has strong ties to both Israeli and Palestinian communities and was recently in Israel, laments, “It’s so sad that Jewish friends of mine are afraid to open their mouths and say they sympathize with people who don’t have their homes, people who have been sitting in a tent with no food, no water, no clean bathrooms, for months, and have been moved five times.”

In some ways, wealthy Upper East Side Jews are starting to sound like hardened Israelis. New York Times opinion writer Megan K. Stack reported on Yehuda Shlezinger, a right-wing Israeli journalist, who said that the people of Gaza “deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying [themselves] on the beach.” Stack argued that Shlezinger isn’t a “fringe figure” and asserted that Israelis wouldn’t be shocked by his “bloody fantasies.” Some stores in Israel sell bumper stickers that say “Finish them,” referring to Palestinians.

But the mood among the moneyed and powerful class of Jews might be shifting. On May 22 Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel blasted Netanyahu as the “problem creator” and a “failure”—characterizations that were booed by some in the audience. He emphasized it was now up to Israel to decide how this war ends, which he framed as a necessity “for the security of Israel and the sake of innocent people on both sides.… That means negotiating a political two-state solution that delivers peace, security, and dignity for all.”

But even seemingly sensible points of view, ones that acknowledge the harsh realities and sufferings of both Israelis and Palestinians, aren’t taking hold among the well-heeled on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood where it feels like the radios are all turned to the same frequency and produce the same loop of talking points. Namely, Jews are the only real victims, most Palestinians are sympathetic to Hamas, and there are many other wars taking place, such as in Ukraine and Sudan, and no one is protesting those, ergo the world’s outrage to the war in Gaza is a double standard and undeniable antisemitism.

In March, when Senator Chuck Schumer said that Netanyahu has “been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza,” a friend of mine who lives at an enviable Fifth Avenue address and has been on the front lines of fighting global antisemitism, investing loads of time and money (and who is no radical leftist), texted me: “Your crazy New Yorkers,” referring to the dynamics I’m writing about, “are missing the zeitgeist.”

Context, as many learned in the aftermath of October 7, is off-limits. That still holds true on the Upper East Side. In other words, you can’t say there is any basis for October 7, even if exploring the backdrop can help explain why and how the events occurred. A resident of the Upper East Side who runs in a high-achieving social circle of executives, lawyers, and media types tells me what happened to her at a posh dinner party when she tried to “make a point that when history is written, Hamas might look heroic to some because they put the Palestinians’ rights back on the table at a time when the Israelis were ignoring them and focusing on making peace with the Saudis and Emiratis.” “It ended,” she says, “in allegations that I support Hamas.”

During the early phase of the war, she would post on social media about the devastation taking place in Gaza but stopped because, she says, “I was going to lose all these friendships I’d had for 30 years. My Jewish friends were saying to me that I was adding ‘fuel to the fire’ of antisemitism” by exposing how many people are dead in Gaza.

She says the social fallout is ongoing. Three of her Jewish friends, she says, aren’t speaking to her and avoid sitting next to her at group dinners.

In January I went to a soiree in a palatial loft downtown for PEN America, which recently had to cancel its literary awards because nearly half the honorees withdrew over the organization’s perceived sympathy with Israel. Salman Rushdie was there. The conversation naturally turned to the intersection of Israel, freedom of speech, and social shunning. One guest told me that Matthew Lindenbaum, one of the executive producers of Israelism—which recently landed a US distributor and is available to stream on Apple TV+, Prime Video, and Google Play—had really become persona non grata.

Lindenbaum signed a letter to support a New York state bill called Not on Our Dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act and contributed to a 2022 research report on “philanthropy and the Palestinian freedom movement” (Lindenbaum declined to comment for this piece). For someone whose family’s name adorns the middle school gymnasium at Ramaz, the Modern Orthodox Jewish day school on the Upper East Side, these positions amount to heresy.

“Anyone who is a super-outspoken critic of Israel in tight-knit Jewish circles faces a social cost,” says Simone Zimmerman, who speaks in Israelism about how she was taught by the Jewish schools and summer camps she attended to “support Israel at all costs.” “The Upper East Side is not unlike other insular pro-Israel communities. And that is one of the reasons why we don’t see more people speaking out, because of the high cost to your own personal life.”

The Upper East Side’s social shunning has also led to some strange alliances, ones that seemed unfathomable before October 7. In December Jill Kargman, an astute chronicler of this wealthy bubble and a denizen of the Upper East Side, wrote the blog post “The Enemy of My Enemy May Not Be My Friend.” Kargman, who is a well-known Donald Trump critic, disclosed that she accidentally reposted “a right-wing maniac simply because they were pro-Israel” and liked social media posts by “women who firmly believe abortion is murder and are anti-choice and pro–locking up doctors.” Kargman, pointing to unlikely agreement with Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, concluded that while “this is a time of strange bedfellows,” she was “getting out of their bed.”

The bedfellows are indeed getting weird. Recently the ADL, which “strongly condemned” the Trump administration’s immigration policies, honored former Upper East Side resident and senior Trump administration adviser Jared Kushner. As for Trump, he recently said that Jews who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and “their religion.”

In her blog Kargman warned, “Both fringes are BFTJ (Bad For The Jews), so instead of sticking with Stefanik, let’s just stick together.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the event that PEN America recently canceled. It was the organization’s literary awards.