On antisemitism, Mamdani sidesteps the semantic bait

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a plan to combat antisemitism in New York City. It focuses mostly on providing funding for security measures and hate prevention, including $6.4 million in grants to partner organizations and $1 million to provide additional physical security to synagogues and other Jewish places of worship. The announcement detailed these steps against antisemitism without including a definition of the term itself.

An announcement of this scope, for a program that is frankly relatively limited, would not typically get that much attention, but the mix of an emotionally charged issue and weird timing has gotten it picked apart. Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, attacked Mamdani directly, calling him an antisemite, while at the same time, some of Mamdani’s political allies, including Councilmember Chi Ossé, were getting arrested while protesting Netanyahu’s appearance, though notably the mayor did not take part. Mamdani had  vowed during the campaign trail to have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York in accordance with the International Criminal Court’s warrant, but then abandoned that plan for ostensibly legal reasons. Since his climb to prominence, the mayor has been dogged by the insinuation that he has espoused or at least supported antisemitism.

I have tried, honestly and in good faith, to grasp how Mamdani may have at any point in his career engaged in antisemitism. Not anti-Zionism, but true, clear antisemitic rhetoric, whether of the open sort or of the surreptitious variety that has found vogue in many corners of the far-right and occasionally far-left, things like the insinuation that the whole of the media and other institutions are controlled by a cabal of (wink wink) “cosmopolitan elites” or some such. I have not found anything. The best his critics can come up with is the notion that, via his criticism of Israeli leadership and his description of its hostilities in Gaza as a genocide — a description that the United Nations and a plethora of scholars agree with, including some in Israel — he has been incentivizing people to be antisemitic in ways that have manifested in increased antisemitic incidents in the city.

The definition fight

At the core of this criticism, and of broader criticism by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, is the idea that political efforts to criticize or constrain Israel are in a fundamental sense antisemitism. The main thing that reporters seem to have taken away from Mamdani’s new plan is its lack of any specific attempt to define antisemitism, though the mayor has to some extent already dealt directly with this question. On his first day in office, he canceled all the executive orders that his predecessor, Eric Adams, had issued from the date of his indictment in 2024 on federal corruption charges, including one that had codified into city policy the definition of antisemitism promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. That definition said that antisemitism included “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” very fuzzy terms that seem to imply that direct criticism of the nation is inherently antisemitic. 

I am not going to attempt to parse that here. Personally, I think it is bizarre to connect support for the political decision-making of a specific country with the right of a religious minority to exist free of discrimination inside and outside that country (not to mention that Jews themselves are extremely and increasingly split on the legitimacy of its actions). Mamdani has publicly addressed the higher-level questions here: He tends to point out that his is a general opposition to ethnonationalism and any state where some populations legally have more rights than others, and it is indisputable that Palestinians in Israel and its occupied territories are enormously disenfranchised. I’m guessing that anyone reading this will at this stage have developed their own perspective (if you have not, then all I can say is congratulations on your recent rescue from the deserted island where you’ve presumably been marooned for the last few years).

What I can say concretely is that the suggestion that New York City’s Jewish population uniformly worries about Mamdani or his impact is demonstrably false. He has a net positive approval among Jewish adults nationwide — putting him far ahead of Netanyahu in the same poll — and won a quarter of Jewish voters in the mayoral election, a number held down by his unpopularity with Orthodox Jewish voters specifically. He remains the most popular politician in the city, by a lot.

A tilted field

At the same time, it’s also a fact that reported incidents of antisemitic hate crimes jumped 8% in the city through August compared with 2025. This puts the mayor in a tough spot. He is facing relentless and well-funded criticism from Zionist groups and their friendly or affiliated news outlets, who will take any opportunity to not only represent him as antisemitic but as essentially responsible for any and all antisemitic incidents and hate crimes that occur in the city and far afield. It is true that there are elements of the left and of the pro-Palestinian organizing movement that are genuinely antisemitic, a minority that is magnified with gusto by the same forces seeking to discredit these movements as a whole. It has also long been the case that liberal political leaders and elected officials are expected to answer for extreme elements of their political coalitions in a way that conservative and right-wing political figures often are not.

Before becoming president, Barack Obama was asked over and over to disavow Louis Farrakhan after appearing in a photo with the Nation of Islam leader taken at a 2005 event at which multiple Black elected leaders were present. Republicans and their media apparatus have spent much of the last month trying to hound Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and others over ties to Hasan Piker, a provocative Twitch streamer who has asserted that “pound for pound,” the U.S. has killed more people through terrorism than Al Qaeda. 

Meanwhile, how often is President Donald Trump asked about the fact that Elon Musk, MAGA’s biggest individual donor and the leader of Trump’s efforts to slash entire agencies and departments, is an open white nationalist who posts constantly on X — formerly a sort of political public square named Twitter, which Musk purchased explicitly to imbue with his own political preferences and agenda — about white people “reclaiming” their nations and ridding themselves of nonwhite interlopers?

So Mamdani is playing on a tilted field. In that context, I do think it’s smart to roll out a plan like this, which promises to enhance public safety for Jewish New Yorkers — ostensibly what his opponents are worried about, and the thing most concretely in his power — while staying out of the more theoretical conversations that people like Netanyahu and certain organizations want to draw him into. That doesn’t mean that he can avoid the issue. Soon enough, someone will demand that he deploy some of these public safety resources to deal with something that is political anti-Zionism and he will presumably refuse (or try to, to the extent that the mayor actually has control over the NYPD and NYC security apparatus, but that is a topic for another time). Then we’ll see this semantic debate reignited.