On his first day in office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani revoked all of the executive orders that his predecessor, Eric Adams, has issued since Sept. 26, 2024, including several designed to protect Jews, in order, he said, to have a “fresh start for the incoming administration.”
The mayor, who has said he would have the Israeli prime minister arrested in New York City and who has many Jews in the city worried for their safety, didn’t say why he chose that date. But Sept. 26, 2024, was the day that Adams was indicted on federal bribery and campaign finance offense charges.
Mamdani stated at first in a release that he was revoking all order prior to Sept. 26, 2024, although the text of the order stated that it was discontinuing all of the orders post-Sept. 26, 2024. The mayor’s office sent out a second press release specifying that it was orders after that date.
In the waning hours of his mayorship, Adams and the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism released an annual report on combating Jew-hatred. Adams created that office on Jew-hatred on May 13 via executive order No. 51. Moshe Davis, its executive director, still had his title listed on LinkedIn and on X as of press time, and Mamdani told a reporter that he intended to keep the office.
A second executive order that Mamdani issued about structure and operations of his administration lists the office on antisemitism and says that the executive director is to be appointed by the mayor.
In the Dec. 30 report on Jew-hatred, Adams and the mayor’s office noted other executive orders that he issued—which Mamdani now appears to have axed. On June 8, Adams adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred via executive order No. 52.
On Dec. 2, Adams signed executive order No. 60, which barred city entities and personnel from boycotting or divesting from Israel, and No. 61, which directs the New York City Police Department to look into creating zones around houses of worship in which protesting would be prohibited.
After protesters blocked Jews from entering a Manhattan synagogue in November, Mamdani’s spokeswoman said that synagogues shouldn’t host pro-Israel events which, she said, violated international law.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Adams had created the New York City–Israel Economic Council via executive order in May or via another means, or what its current status is.
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, stated that it is “hard to overstate how disturbing it is that one of the first acts of the new New York City mayor was to delete official tweets and executive orders addressing the protection of Jewish New Yorkers.”
Adams, the former mayor, agreed. Mamdani “promised a new era and unity today,” he stated. “This isn’t new. And it isn’t unity.”
In his inaugural address on Thursday, Mamdani referred to the beginning of a “new era.”
“I stand alongside countless more New Yorkers watching from cramped kitchens in Flushing and barbershops in East New York, from cell phones propped against the dashboards of parked taxi cabs at LaGuardia, from hospitals in Mott Haven and libraries in El Barrio that have too long known only neglect,” he said.
“Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try,” he said.
Mamdani added that the authors of the city’s story will “speak Pashto and Mandarin, Yiddish and Creole” and “will pray in mosques, at shul, at church, at Gurdwaras and Mandirs and temples—and many will not pray at all.”
“They will be Russian Jewish immigrants in Brighton Beach, Italians in Rossville and Irish families in Woodhaven—many of whom came here with nothing but a dream of a better life, a dream which has withered away,” he said. “They will be young people in cramped Marble Hill apartments where the walls shake when the subway passes. They will be black homeowners in St. Albans whose homes represent a physical testament to triumph over decades of lesser-paid labor and redlining.
(JNS)