New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants everyone to know that his administration is serious about fighting antisemitism.
Just don’t ask him to define it.
His new 33-page “Strategy to Combat Antisemitism,” released Sept. 29, is packed with programs, grants, and spending. Mamdani’s administration says it has increased annual hate-crime prevention funding from $3 million to $29 million and set aside another $1 million to improve security at synagogues and other houses of worship.
All of that is welcome.
But halfway through the report comes a section titled “Definitions,” and it is there that Mamdani sidesteps the central question.
The report acknowledges several definitions of antisemitism, including those of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and the Jerusalem Declaration. Yet it goes on to declare that New York City can combat antisemitism “without needing to adopt a definition for this specific form of hate.”
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Think about that.
City Hall is rolling out an entire government strategy against antisemitism while deliberately refusing to define what it is fighting.
That refusal matters because the real debate over antisemitism today is not whether swastikas, synagogue attacks, or anti-Jewish slurs are hateful. Everyone knows they are.
The dispute is over increasingly common forms of Jew-hatred expressed through hostility toward Israel and Zionism.
Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. Neither is opposition to a particular Israeli government or policy.
But when Jews are harassed because they support Israel, when Jewish institutions are targeted over events in Gaza, when Zionists are told they are unwelcome in public spaces, or when Jews are held collectively responsible for Israel’s actions, the line between political criticism and antisemitism has plainly been crossed.
This is not an academic debate.
Jewish New Yorkers make up roughly one-tenth of the city’s population, yet anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for 52.9% of all confirmed hate crimes during the first nine months of 2026.
Incredibly, Mamdani’s strategy never discusses Zionism or anti-Zionism, and Israel is absent from its substantive discussion of contemporary antisemitism.
That silence is especially striking given Mamdani’s own record. He began his mayoralty by revoking executive orders embracing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and aimed at preventing city procurement and investment decisions from being used to advance boycotts of Israel.
He co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin and sponsored legislation in the New York State Assembly aimed at charities supporting Israeli settlement activity. As a candidate for mayor, he also declined to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Seen against that record, the plan’s refusal to grapple with antisemitism expressed through anti-Zionism becomes even more significant. And no amount of new spending can make up for that omission. A city can devote millions of dollars to combating antisemitism while still refusing to recognize the forms of it that are politically inconvenient.
Mamdani himself unwittingly underscored the problem.
In a statement Wednesday marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, he acknowledged the Israelis who were murdered and kidnapped, only to add that “the suffering did not begin nor end that day.” He then proceeded to accuse Israel of “ongoing genocide,” “apartheid” and “war crimes.”
Even on the anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Mamdani managed to turn the occasion into an indictment of the Jewish state.
And therein lies the gaping hole in Mamdani’s antisemitism strategy: It promises to fight Jew-hatred while refusing to confront the anti-Zionist hostility that increasingly serves as one of its primary vehicles. But the significance of Mamdani’s approach extends far beyond New York. Within the Democratic Socialists of America, where Mamdani is a member, his victory is already being held up as a model for what comes next.
Indeed, the organization called his election “the biggest Socialist electoral victory in the U.S. in a century.”
The movement’s position on Israel is hardly ambiguous. At its 2025 convention, delegates voted 675 to 524 to require DSA-endorsed candidates to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and refrain from affiliation with what it calls “Zionist lobby groups,” including AIPAC, J Street, and Democratic Majority for Israel.
Its rules also list statements that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” or that equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, among grounds that can trigger disciplinary proceedings.
So, the question raised by Mamdani’s plan is not merely how New York will deal with antisemitism.
It is what happens if this framework is copied by other cities and states.
A government that refuses to define antisemitism gives itself enormous discretion to decide which forms of Jew-hatred count and which do not. And when antisemitism expressed through anti-Zionist hostility is left unaddressed, hostility toward Jews can be condemned in theory while being tolerated in practice.
That is the danger of the Mamdani model. It offers politicians a way to say all the right things about fighting antisemitism, spend millions of dollars doing so, and still look away when Jews are targeted because of their connection to Israel or Zionism.
New York may be the first place to put it into practice. But if it spreads, politicians elsewhere will not need to excuse antisemitism.
They can simply decide that some of it is not antisemitism at all.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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