The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, a boycott-Israel activist since his college days who as recently as this month was denouncing the Israeli prime minister as a war criminal who should be arrested and prosecuted, rolled out a “strategy to combat antisemitism” that was immediately met with withering derision from the very Jewish community the strategy was ostensibly intended to protect.
The UJA-Federation of New York, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, and the New York Board of Rabbis issued a joint statement denouncing Mamdani’s plan. “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 statement said. “Those who truly seek to address antisemitism must unequivocally reject such rhetoric and help ensure that Jewish New Yorkers are never made to feel suspect, excluded, or unsafe in their own city.”
The Anti-Defamation League of New York and New Jersey also laced into Mamdani. “This mayor does not treat the hate facing Jewish New Yorkers as an emergency and refuses to acknowledge the different shapes it takes. Since he took office 271 days ago, ADL has recorded hundreds of antisemitic incidents in NYC, nearly 40% of which were related to Israel,” the league said. “He has looked the other way as flags glorifying terror groups have been flown outside synagogues, a deliberate act meant to intimidate families walking in to pray, and as crowds gathered outside houses of worship voicing support for the same groups. At the same time, he continues prioritizing his anti-Israel agenda over the basic promises he made to Jewish New Yorkers.”
ADL’s national CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, also weighed in. “Security grants do not substitute for moral clarity. A mayor who will not define antisemitism, will not confront terror flags being marched around in Jewish neighborhoods and terror sympathizers at the doorstep of a synagogue, and will not put his own politics aside is not fighting this crisis. He is managing around it,” Greenblatt said. “The mayor’s actions or inactions only serve to help fuel antisemitism in NYC.”
Israeli diplomats based in New York were even more fierce in their denunciations of Mamdani and his “strategy.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, said, “Mamdani, you fan the flames and then shout ‘fire.’ You are the one who kindled the hatred in New York City against Jews! You are the biggest inciter—and the last one who can comment on this matter.”
The consul general of Israel in New York, Ofir Akunis, said in a statement directed at the mayor, “Until you recognize that your language against the Jewish State, which you don’t recognize as the homeland of the Jewish people, is the fundamental reason for the rise of antisemitism in New York City, it will continue to increase.”
Mamdani rolled out the strategy with a press release that, at nearly 5,000 words, was almost as long as the strategy itself. It included quotes from 38 politicians and far-left community activists, many of them anti-Israel activists. Among them was Rev. Chloe Breyer, whose father, Stephen Breyer, was a Jewish Supreme Court justice. Rev. Breyer is an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of New York who “received her Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in 2017 and her doctoral dissertation focused on interfaith activism, Christian peacemaking, and Islamophobia.”
Absent from the 38 people quoted in the press release was the sole member of the Mamdani administration with a scintilla of credibility in the mainstream Jewish community, the police commissioner, Jessica Tisch.
The NYPD’s director of social media and digital strategy from 2014 to 2020, Yael Bar Tur, said of Mamdani, “Oh look, the wolf has come up with a sheep guarding policy.”
Mayors under whom the Jewish community in New York City flourished—Ed Koch, Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg—didn’t need some elaborate office for combating antisemitism. There’s a case for simply scrapping the entire operation. The best thing for the Jews is pretty much the best thing for other New Yorkers—a pro-growth, tough-on-crime approach combined with aggressive surveillance of institutions that might pose terrorist threats. When I was a partner in a New York-based newspaper that faced a threat, Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, had so many heavily armed personnel on our doorstep to protect us that my biggest worry was whether there was any ammunition remaining for the troops deployed at the time in Afghanistan and Iraq. And those were just the visible measures.
Mamdani’s strategy promises “listening sessions” and “listening to constituents.” Maybe if Mamdani listens enough he will discover that, aside from a smattering of fringe figures, the Jewish community in his own city detests him. And for good reason. He, his father, and his wife have aligned themselves with those who would wipe the Jewish state of Israel off the map, while also aiming to eradicate the free market economy and associated system of strong property rights and rule of law in which American Jews have prospered.
Mamdani professes to admire Jewish contributions to New York City culture. He mentioned Leonard Bernstein, who is from Boston, and Katz’s, a non-kosher deli. One thing he seems to have appropriated without acknowledgment is the trait of chutzpah, or gall. Yiddish For Yankees or, Funny, You Don’t Look Gentile, by Martin Marcus, defines it as “colossal nerve.” Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yinglish explains the term to mean “unbelievable, unmitigated, astounding, brazen gall.” The common definition used to describe chutzpah involves a story: Someone murders his parents, and then begs for mercy in front of the court, arguing that he is an orphan. Here the blood is on Mamdani’s hands. The court of public opinion detects no remorse. No mercy is merited.
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