Mamdani’s plan to tackle antisemitism faces backlash from Jewish New Yorkers
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) rolled out a first-of-its-kind municipal strategy to combat antisemitism last week, and it has drawn some criticism from Jewish leaders who say its omission of Israel and anti-Zionism overlooks a key factor behind the recent rise in hate crimes against Jewish New Yorkers.
A joint statement from the United Jewish Appeal (UJA)-Federation of New York, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the American Jewish Committee, and the New York Board of Rabbis welcomed elements of the plan but said the city must also confront anti-Israel rhetoric — including Mamdani’s own — to effectively combat antisemitism.
“While the Mayor’s plan has a number of positive elements, including some increased security funding for Jewish institutions and expanding proven programs, it fails to address a central issue that the Mayor himself has perpetuated: rhetoric that demonizes and delegitimizes Israel inevitably leads to the targeting of Jewish New Yorkers,” the groups wrote in a statement.
The strategy highlights the $1 million allocated in Mamdani’s budget to bolster security at synagogues and other houses of worship, and $6.4 million for Partners Against the Hate grants to community organizations that focus on hate prevention, data collection and survivor support.
The initiative also expands Holocaust and Jewish history education, and strengthens coordination among city agencies on community outreach and access to security funding.
“Antisemitism has no place in New York City. Jewish New Yorkers have helped build this city, shaped its culture and strengthened our communities for generations, and they deserve to be safe, celebrated and protected by a city government that stands with them,” Mamdani said in a statement unveiling the strategy.
Mamdani has faced criticism over his own rhetoric about Israel. In a July 21 video, he acknowledged that he lacked the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited the city, despite repeatedly pledging to do so. After a Jewish man was stabbed on the Upper West Side two days later in what police investigated as an antisemitic hate crime, Jewish leaders urged the mayor to temper his rhetoric about Israel. Mamdani condemned the attack at the time.
Pamela Nadell, author of “Antisemitism, An American Tradition,” told The Hill she thinks it’s “commendable” that the city launched the first municipal-level strategy, and applauded the whole-of-government approach, its objectives and its focus on education. But she criticized the strategy for naming examples of attacks on Jews with roots on the right — like the march in Charlottesville, Va., and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh — while “absolutely ignor[ing] it when it comes from the left.”
“This just happens both on the right and the left. They’re more than willing to see Jew-hatred when it’s coming from the other side of the political aisle. They refuse to acknowledge it when it’s in their own camp,” said Nadell, a professor of women’s and gender history and director of the Jewish Studies program at American University.
There are some exceptions to that rule, Nadell said, but the “reality is that antisemitism is coming from both sides of the political aisle at this moment, which is what makes it so fraught for the Jewish community.”
Hate crimes against Jews in New York City rose 8 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, according to data from the New York Police Department.
Jews were targeted in 229 of the 425 reported hate crimes, more than all other groups combined. Another 46 crimes were based on sexual orientation, 36 fell under the generic “religion” category, 29 targeted Black people and 27 targeted Muslims. No other category had more than 18 reported incidents.
A group of 25 New York City-based Jewish groups signed on to a letter Friday criticizing the report, which they said, “reaches back eight years to highlight right-wing terrorist attacks in other cities, while failing to discuss, or even mention, a single anti-Jewish incident that occurred in New York in the past three years,” according to reports from the New York Post and The Jerusalem Post.
“Our community generally isn’t encountering Charlottesville-style white supremacists in our neighborhoods,” the letter read, according to the reports. Instead, the groups wrote, Jewish New Yorkers face “anti-Zionist animus that too often veers into anti-Jewish harassment, exclusion, and even violence.”
Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University in New York, said the plan includes “some positive steps,” but called the mayor “an arsonist posing as a firefighter” and urged him to roll back his anti-Israel comments and “acknowledge the damage his rhetoric has done.”
Ammiel Hirsch, president of the New York Board of Rabbis, has talked to Mamdani about the effect he sees the mayor’s anti-Israel rhetoric having on the city’s Jewish community but said he sees “a reluctance on his part to forgo the ability to deny Israel’s right to exist, what he calls anti-Zionism.”
Hirsch, senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, a prominent Reform congregation on the Upper West Side, said while anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism, there is “about 120 years of history that establishes, without a shadow of a doubt, that anti-Zionist hostility creates antisemitic, anti-Jewish hostility. You can’t separate the two.”
“The idea that you could write a serious report and seriously attempt to lower the surge in antisemitism in New York City by completely ignoring the primary driver of antisemitism in New York City now — which is obsessive loathing of Israel — is just unserious,” he said, stressing that Israeli policies themselves are “of course legitimately subject to critique and opposition.”
Asked about criticism that the report fails to address Israel or anti-Zionism, Phylisa Wisdom, the executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, said the administration’s strategy “reflects the Mamdani administration’s commitment to rooting out antisemitism in all its forms.”
“Every Jewish New Yorker, no matter their views, deserves to live safely and proudly as themselves in our city,” she said in a statement to The Hill, adding, “Rather than defining Jewish identity or Jewish communities’ relationship to these topics for them, or weighing in on intramural debates, we see our administration’s responsibility as delivering safety and a sense of inclusion, regardless of their views on them.”
The strategy has separately drawn criticism for intentionally declining to adopt a definition of antisemitism.
A statement from Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, said “a strategy to combat antisemitism has to be able to state plainly what is being combatted,” noting a standard can be especially important in determining when rhetoric against Israel crosses into rhetoric against Jewish people.
“Without that clarity, an important question remains: What standard will New York City use to determine when rhetoric or conduct crosses into antisemitism, particularly when ‘Zionist’ becomes a proxy for Jew or when Jewish New Yorkers are targeted because of their connection to Israel?” Berk wrote.
Kenneth Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, called the strategy a good first step and praised many of its objectives, but he said he disagreed with criticism over its lack of a definition. He was the lead drafter in 2004 of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) definition of antisemitism, which was later adopted by the State Department and by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016.
Stern said embracing a single definition could lead to getting bogged down in the details of what counts as antisemitism rather than looking more broadly at its effect on society. He also noted that much of the Jewish community disagrees on a single definition, arguing it would be unwise for elected officials to set one.
“I think it’s terribly inappropriate for the government to decide this. I don’t like Jewish groups basically asking the government to decide,” Stern told The Hill.
“That’s an internal question of how we deal with the future of the Jewish community, how we understand anti-Zionism inside the community,” he said, adding, “That’s, again, something that’s never worked out well for minorities, Jews included, historically.”
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