Lawmakers Move to Bar Protests Near Houses of Worship After East Side Synagogue Clash

Efforts to ban protests within 25 feet of New York’s houses of worship reflect mounting tensions between free expression and personal security—and could reshape both constitutional and community norms.

On a recent Saturday, as the sun set in Manhattan, the Park East Synagogue—a storied Jewish sanctuary on the Upper East Side—became the unwilling stage for a raucous protest. Chanting slogans such as “death to the IDF” and “globalize the intifada”, a crowd of several hundred anti-Israel demonstrators jostled the fine line between protected speech and outright intimidation. Calls from the portable loudspeakers to “take another settler out” boded ill for the synagogue’s congregants, many of whom braved heckling to attend services, while others thought better of venturing out at all.

This episode has prompted an unusually prompt legislative response. Last week, state Assemblyman Micah Lasher of Manhattan and Senator Sam Sutton of Brooklyn—both Democrats—unveiled a bill (with support from fellow Democratic legislators) that would outlaw protests, rallies, or picketing within 25 feet of any house of worship’s entrance, driveway or parking lot. A parallel provision would apply to abortion clinics. Breaching this “buzzer zone” would expose violators to a Class A misdemeanor—criminal interference with access to a place of religious worship or of healthcare, punishable by up to a year’s confinement on Rikers Island.

The sponsors’ rationale is plain: ensuring that New Yorkers of any religious stripe can pray or participate in their chosen traditions without running a gauntlet of taunts, threats, or outright hostility. “That balance broke down outside Park East Synagogue,” Lasher observed, striking a recognisably New York chord of hard-nosed pluralism. Senator Sutton, whose district encompasses Orthodox Jewish enclaves like Borough Park, invoked “simple decency and mutual respect” as the city’s minimum standard.

The stakes are anything but tepid. New York, with its mosaic of faiths and protesters alike, has ever been a proving ground for First Amendment boundaries. The city’s public spaces serve as crucibles not just for intense debate but for jagged social confrontation. As scenes like that outside Park East multiply—by no means limited to Jewish targets or the Middle East conflict—the calculus of how and where free expression may occur grows ever more fraught.

If codified, the 25-foot rule would represent a tangible contraction of the public sphere, at least in the narrow corridors adjacent to religious institutions and abortion providers. The prospect conjures images of orderly passage for the pious (or simply the punctual), yet also portends legal friction with civil libertarians and protest organisers, who bridle at any encroachment on the right to assemble. The city’s perennial need to balance order with agitation is rendered more acute—and more contested.

Second-order ripples bear watching. For New Yorkers, heightened protection at synagogues, mosques, and churches could restore a measure of confidence to worshippers who legitimately fear harassment or violence. A constituency weary from the ceaseless whir of protest (Jewish, Muslim, Christian, pro-life, pro-choice, there is no shortage) may quietly welcome a buffer from the din. At the same time, enforcement challenges loom: the NYPD, already stretched thin, may soon add sidewalk tape-measuring to its daily brief.

Economically, the city’s reputation as both a sanctuary for dissent and a haven for difference stands at its fulcrum. Protestors—whose numbers have been bolstered by global events from Gaza to Washington—may simply decamp to the nearest avenue or thoroughfare, congesting adjacent sites and adding to the city’s cacophonous ambience, not diminishing it. For local politicians, notably those in closely watched swing districts, the bill offers a photo-op as protectors of “community safety”, with all the attendant messaging advantages and minefields.

Nationwide, efforts to cordon off “sensitive spaces” from protest are hardly novel, but their resilience is patchy. Federal courts have previously upheld “buffer zones” around abortion clinics (see Hill v. Colorado, 2000), only for similar rules to be clipped by subsequent decisions (such as McCullen v. Coakley, 2014). Houses of worship, as opposed to political headquarters or private homes, occupy a cultural space that Americans tend to treat with wary reverence. States from Massachusetts to Texas have experimented with various protest limits, but rarely have such ordinances escaped legal challenge unscathed.

A new status quo, or just another legal gauntlet?

If New York’s legislation passes, we can expect litigation at every turn. Civil-rights groups, reliably alert to even modest erosions of free speech, will test the measure’s constitutional mettle. They may find some traction: the Supreme Court, in recent years, has signalled growing impatience with “content-based” restrictions on protest, especially where political speech is concerned. New York’s lawmakers, for their part, frame their bill as “content-neutral”, but reality may prove less tidy: the line between protest and harassment can be stubbornly subjective.

The bill’s fate will reverberate beyond the city. If it can withstand the gales blowing from Washington’s courts, it will likely become the template for other urban jurisdictions facing their own surges of targeted protest. If, on the other hand, it founders under judicial scrutiny, it may simply further animate activists, who see in every unsuccessful clampdown an invitation for grander disruption.

Locally, New Yorkers’ appetite for order is perennially at odds with their penchant for vocation and voice. We suspect that many—including those with little time for the political message du jour—reckon that some threshold of tolerance must be maintained if city life is to remain civil. Yet the idea that any patch of New York’s famously unruly pavement might be “off limits” to opinion feels, if not heretical, at least distinctly un-Gothamite.

Still, it is difficult to dismiss the plea for sanctuary, literal and figurative, amid rising tides of hate speech and intimidation. New York’s strength has long lain in its capacity to absorb, sometimes witheringly, the gusts of protest and the friction of difference—without ceding to violence or fear. The city earned its global standing precisely because such equilibrium, though never perfect, was always aspired to.

We are thus left with a familiar New York bargain: in the face of witless aggression, the city attempts a careful dance between permitting robust dissent and protecting those who simply wish to worship—or receive health care—in peace. Whether the dance is gracefully performed, or descends into litigious wrangling, remains to be seen. But even in this new legal choreography, the city’s raucous pluralism is not easily tamed.

On balance, we view the pending “buzzer zone” as an understandable—if imperfect—attempt to right a broken balance. In the long run, ensuring both safety and dissent may depend less on the size of the legal buffer than on New Yorkers’ perennial willingness to negotiate the ambiguities of urban life, one sidewalk at a time. ■