Given Mayor Mamdani’s anti-Israel campaign rhetoric, we were not all that surprised that on his first day in office he revoked Mayor Adams’s Israel-related executive orders, which were designed to generally protect those of us who were political or economic supporters of the State of Israel.
One of the revoked orders had barred city agencies from boycotting or divesting from Israel and another had adopted an expansive definition of antisemitism – the so-called International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance that equates some forms of anti-Israel criticism, like opposition to Israel’s ethnically Jewish character – with antisemitism.
So, the rescinded anti-BDS order, by its terms, had prohibited city agencies from boycotting or divesting from Israel and the IHRA definition of antisemitism includes certain types of anti-Israel rhetoric.
Thus, the IHRA working definition includes such things as “calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion”; “making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or as a collective – such as especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government, or other social institutions.”
Also, “accusing Jewish people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person, or even for acts committed by non-Jews”; “denying the act, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)”; “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust”; “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”; “applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations,”
In addition, Mamdani also canceled an Adams directive requiring the NYPD to establish “safe zones” to keep protesters a specific distance from synagogues and other religious sites.
Question! Are these the sort of rules that had the kind of urgent negative impact that would prompt a new mayor to act to get rid of them immediately upon taking office? Seems unlikely. In fact, they seem to be directed at real and growing problems faced by Jewish New Yorkers.
Yet on inauguration day, Mamdani did sign an executive order revoking all directives issued by his predecessor, Mayor Adams after Adams’s federal indictment in September, 2024. According to Mamdani, he was interested generally in establishing a “clean slate” to restore confidence in the mayor’s office and also to promote debate on the underlying issues in the interests of free speech. Ergo, he says he eliminated a slew of Adams executive orders which only included some related to Israel and the Jewish community.
But on balance, his stated motives were slim pickings and actually served to not only delegitimize efforts to address antisemitism but also to encourage intimidation of Jews by eliminating protections against it, however packaged. The new mayor bears watching.