By: Fern Sidman   

From the moment Zohran Mamdani sealed his improbable victory in New York City’s mayoral race, he was already preparing to do what many Jewish leaders now regard as one of the most destabilizing acts of municipal governance in a generation: dismantle the city’s formal infrastructure for confronting antisemitism and do so under the camouflage of bureaucratic housekeeping.

That revelation, as reported in The New York Times and subsequently analyzed in depth by The Algemeiner on Monday, has sent tremors through Jewish communities in New York and far beyond. According to the reporting, Mamdani knew “from the moment he won the election” in November that he intended to revoke two executive orders promulgated by outgoing Mayor Eric Adams—orders that had enshrined New York City’s recognition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism and codified the city’s opposition to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting Israel.

The problem, Mamdani reportedly realized almost immediately, was not the substance of the move—it was how to sell it.

As The Algemeiner has documented, Mamdani’s political career has been defined by aggressive anti-Israel activism. He has openly supported BDS, refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, accused the Jewish state of “apartheid” and “genocide,” and declined to unequivocally condemn incendiary slogans such as “globalize the intifada.” Under the IHRA definition, many of these positions would be subject to scrutiny as contemporary manifestations of antisemitism.

Yet Mamdani also inherited a city in which Jews are now the primary targets of hate crimes—an uncomfortable reality that made the optics of repealing anti-antisemitism measures politically radioactive.

So, according to the account relayed by The Algemeiner, Mamdani and his advisers devised a strategy of obfuscation.

Rather than directly repealing the IHRA and anti-BDS executive orders, he would revoke every executive order issued by Adams after September 26, 2024—the date on which Adams had been indicted on corruption charges that were later dismissed. By wrapping his rollback in a blanket purge, Mamdani could frame the move as an “administrative reset,” allowing him to insist that no single policy had been targeted.

On his first full day in office, he executed the plan.

“I made that decision because that was the date for the first time in our city’s history that the mayor of this city was indicted,” Mamdani told reporters. “It was a day at which many New Yorkers began to doubt, even more than they did, the motivations behind any executive order or executive action that was going to be taken.”

But as The Algemeiner report observed, the timing was not incidental—it was instrumental.

Among the casualties of Mamdani’s “clean slate” was New York City’s formal adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, a framework used by dozens of governments, law enforcement agencies, universities, and international bodies to identify antisemitic conduct in contemporary contexts.

The IHRA definition does not merely address classical Jew-hatred. It includes 11 illustrative examples that recognize how antisemitism has evolved in the 21st century—into the demonization of Israel, the denial of Jewish self-determination, the application of double standards to the Jewish state, and the recycling of medieval tropes in modern political discourse.

As The Algemeiner report noted, this definition had been welcomed by Jewish organizations precisely because it provided clarity in a landscape increasingly muddled by claims that hostility toward Israel is never antisemitic.

For Mamdani, that clarity was a liability.

By repealing the IHRA definition, he effectively stripped New York City agencies of a widely accepted benchmark for recognizing antisemitic behavior—at a moment when antisemitism in the city has reached levels unseen in modern times.

The timing could hardly have been worse.

Data released by the New York City Police Department shows that Jews were the targets of 54 percent of all reported hate crimes in the city in 2024. That number rose to an astonishing 62 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to a report from the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism—despite Jews comprising only 11 percent of the city’s population.

The Algemeiner has chronicled this grim escalation: assaults in subway stations, vandalized synagogues, children harassed on the way to school, kosher restaurants defaced, and Jewish neighborhoods blanketed in hostile graffiti since the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023.

It is against this backdrop that Mamdani dismantled the city’s most explicit tools for naming and confronting antisemitism.

The mayor also rescinded Adams’s executive order opposing BDS—a global movement whose leaders have openly stated their intention to eliminate Israel as a sovereign Jewish state. For years, The Algemeiner has warned that BDS is not a benign human-rights campaign but a political project rooted in rejectionism and collective punishment.

By eliminating New York City’s formal opposition to BDS, Mamdani not only legitimized a movement that seeks Israel’s eradication but also signaled to Jewish New Yorkers that their city government no longer regards that campaign as inherently hostile to their community.

According to Dora Pekec, Mamdani’s spokesperson, the plan to revoke the orders was months in the making.

“This was not a decision that was made last-minute,” Pekec said, as quoted in The Algemeiner. “This work was being done throughout the fall, throughout the transition, and communicated directly to the public that this was our intention, even before they cast ballots for us.”

The statement may have been intended to convey transparency. Instead, it reinforced what many Jewish leaders fear: that Mamdani never intended to protect Jewish New Yorkers in the first place—only to manage the fallout.

The reaction from Jewish organizations was swift and severe. Both major Jewish umbrella groups in New York issued statements condemning Mamdani’s actions. The Israeli government expressed similar alarm. And polling data published by the Siena Research Institute earlier this month shows just how deep the rupture runs.

Seventy-two percent of Jewish New Yorkers believe Mamdani will be “bad” for the city. Only 18 percent view him favorably. A staggering 67 percent hold an explicitly unfavorable opinion.

The Algemeiner report described these numbers not merely as a rebuke, but as a warning: for the first time in decades, a mayor of New York City has taken office under a cloud of near-universal distrust from the city’s Jewish population.

Mamdani insists that the mass revocation was a matter of principle—an effort to cleanse City Hall of executive orders issued by a mayor under indictment. But as The Algemeiner report emphasized, the logic collapses under scrutiny. The charges against Adams were dismissed. The orders in question had nothing to do with corruption. And the decision to wipe them away was made before Mamdani even took office.

What remains is a portrait of political choreography: a new mayor, ideologically hostile to Israel and deeply skeptical of mainstream Jewish concerns, dismantling anti-antisemitism protections while presenting the move as neutral housekeeping.

In a city where Jewish families are already weighing whether their future still lies in New York, the message has been received with chilling clarity.

This was not a reset.

It was a retreat—from moral clarity, from communal trust, and from the very idea that confronting antisemitism is a non-negotiable responsibility of public office.