Just past midnight on May 1, a young rabbinical student was walking home on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn when he thought he was being followed. A moment after that intuition struck, two men grabbed him, threw him against a car and started punching him.

The victim had dropped a box containing $200, meant for charity, but the money went untouched. The student, it seemed, was attacked because he was overheard speaking Hebrew on his cellphone. His two assailants were indicted on assault and hate crime charges.

No other American city is more closely associated with Jewish identity than New York or more adamantly imagines itself as the capital of liberalism’s most cherished values of tolerance, acceptance and diversity.

And yet, at the same time, New York has become an increasingly unsettling place to be Jewish. The first inkling of this emerged several days after the 2016 presidential election when swastikas and the phrase “Go Trump” showed up on playground equipment in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn Heights.