On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released his strategic report on combating anti-Semitism in New York City. It was accompanied by a video in which Mamdani acknowledged the disproportionate level of violence targeting Jewish New Yorkers, who account for just 12 percent of the city’s population yet make up 57 percent of all hate-crime victims.
The mayor admitted that “anti-Semitism is real, and it is growing.” But his administration’s report inexplicably downplays rising anti-Semitism, especially its surge following October 7, in favor of more generic concerns about bigotry. This flawed analysis results in outdated and insufficient solutions.
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The report was produced under the direction of Phylisa Wisdom, Mamdani’s executive director of the Office to Combat Antisemitism. Wisdom previously served as the executive director of the New York Jewish Agenda, which “promote[s] the values of liberal Jewish New Yorkers to influence state and local policies, politics, and the communal discourse.”
Like many progressive Jewish organizations, NYJA sees anti-Semitism as in substantial part the fault of generic bigotry, and especially of white supremacists. “We stand resolute against the increasingly bold and violent forces of white supremacy,” NYJA’s section on anti-Semitism reads; it lacks a similar mention of other potential causes. NYJA also resists the idea that anti-Semitism should be a unique concern for Jews, asserting that “we can only dismantle the machinery of antisemitism as part of the larger movement to fight other forms of racism, bigotry, and oppression.”
Wisdom brings this same outlook to her governmental role. The report, ostensibly prompted by the alarming rates of hate crimes against Jews, includes among its core values the claim that “one form of hatred cannot be combatted in a vacuum. Antisemitism can, and must, be addressed hand in hand with all other forms of hatred.”
That anti-Semitism is treated simply as one “hatred” among a group of biases helps explain why the report downplays the impact of October 7. The report’s discussion of the recent history of anti-Semitism highlights incidents like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. By contrast it omits, among other incidents, Elias Rodriguez’s 2025 murder of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington, D.C., while allegedly shouting “Free Palestine”; Mohamed Sabry Soliman’s 2025 firebombing of a group advocating for Israeli hostages while shouting the same phrase; excessive harassment and violence outside synagogues and on college campuses; and Raul Morales’s recent stabbing of two men near Upper West Side synagogues while allegedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “Justice for Islam.”
In place of these incidents, the report cites surveys showing that Jews have felt increasingly unsafe for years, noting that this was “a result [we] found again in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.”. There is no discussion of how these data may have changed after October 7.
The report cites a United Jewish Appeal (UJA) poll finding that “in more recent years, public opinion research has suggested that an overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers in New York City and the surrounding counties of Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk, as well as Jewish Americans overall, have felt a rise in antisemitic incidents and attitudes.” Yet this omits the critical information the UJA itself reportedly found: “the vast majority of Jews in the eight-county area believed that antisemitism had increased from pre-October 7 levels and that Jewish adults expressed heightened concern for their personal safety.”
The report mentions October 7 just twice: once in Wisdom’s introductory remarks, and once in the admission that “FBI and NYPD data show [that] there was a notable increase in anti-Jewish crimes following October 7, 2023.” One would think the report’s solutions would contend with that finding. Instead, this insight is largely ignored in favor of pages of public-opinion data and paragraphs placing anti-Semitism within the broader context of other biases.
From this foundational error—an attempt to ignore a specific anti-Semitic event in favor of an overarching leftist narrative—flows everything else wrong with the report.
The first such issue is the Office to Combat Antisemitism’s preferred solution. It does not endorse investments in policing or new security initiatives. Instead, the administration’s idea is funding Partners Against the Hate (PATH), which “strengthen[s] relations among diverse communities through programming and restorative practices” that address bias and discrimination. The administration plans to invest $7.4 million in PATH, which will be directed to community-based organizations and synagogues.
Complementary investments in actual security are scant. The report devotes just one page, at the end, to discussing measures the NYPD already undertakes, and proposes no new ones. A mere $1 million is earmarked for the “security of vulnerable nonprofit organizations, including synagogues.” An average Jewish communal institution spends $225,000 a year on security—a figure that doesn’t include the security costs faced by Jewish camps, grocery stores, restaurants, and Judaica shops.
For schools, the administration proposes more Holocaust education and lessons on prominent Jewish figures like Leonard Bernstein. The report cites programs like New York City’s “Understanding Respect for All” or “Understanding Jewish Experiences” as ways to curb anti-Semitic attacks. These programs have been in place for years. They did not prevent more than 250 anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist incidents in public schools since 2023, many involving teachers themselves allegedly making such statements in the classroom, as a recent report documented.
It’s worth noting, lastly, what the report’s understanding of anti-Semitism implies. While it largely shies away from defining the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the report states that “Antisemitism has long functioned as a conspiracy theory that blames the Jewish people for the problems of the day.” Later, its formal definition describes anti-Semitism as “a pernicious conspiracy theory that often features myths about Jewish power and control.”
Against that definition, consider Mamdani’s own rhetoric. At a primary rally over the summer, he infamously told the crowd that “Now is the time of monsters. These monsters take many forms today . . . in AIPAC for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars. They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal: to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.” It’s hard not to see in such words a “conspiracy theory that blames the Jewish people for the problems of the day.”
This irony is difficult to miss. A report devoted to combating anti-Semitism defines the problem in terms that seem uncomfortably close to the mayor’s own words. The implication is key: because Mamdani does not understand anti-Semitism today, what he proposes to do about it is wholly inadequate.