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Antisemitism is the world’s oldest conspiracy theory. It promises an answer to every problem and demands no evidence.
It survives because it offers something dangerously simple: one group to blame for every problem. No evidence required. No nuance permitted.
When the plague spread, blame the Jews. When the Reichsmark collapsed, blame the Jews. When rent in Brooklyn goes up, blame the Jews.
The shortcut has worn many costumes over the centuries, but the idea is always the same: every grievance you have, every injustice you suffer, every system that has failed they somehow trace back to a single people.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not invent the shortcut. He is simply letting it run his city.
On day one in office, Mamdani rescinded New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the internationally recognized standard used by dozens of countries and American states to identify antisemitism in all its modern forms. He did this before he had even spent a full day in office or met with the Jewish community whose safety it helped protect.
That decision was not symbolic. It was ideological.
Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks in New York City on April 3, 2025. Demonstrators attend a rally for Gaza outside the Israeli Consulate in New York City on Oct. 9, 2023, where supporters of Palestinians and Israel clashed amid ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. (Jeenah Moon/Reuters and Jennifer Mitchell/Fox News Digital)
Since then, the pattern has only intensified. In February, City Hall pushed an Israeli drone supplier out of its lease at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In March, New York quietly removed public-facing material promoting Israeli business ties to the city. And next week, Mamdani is expected to become the first New York City mayor in a generation to skip the Israel Day Parade altogether.
These are not isolated political gestures. They reflect a broader movement on the activist left that increasingly treats hostility toward Israel as a governing principle.
Modern antisemitism rarely shows up wearing its old uniform. Today, it calls itself anti-Israel activism.
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The accusation that Jews secretly controlled the banks became the accusation that Israel secretly controls American foreign policy. The demand that Jews be excluded from civilized society became the demand that Israel, alone among nations, be excluded from civilized commerce. The language may sound modern and progressive, but the obsession underneath remains painfully familiar.
This is exactly what the IHRA definition was written to identify: the ancient hatred in modern dress. It is also exactly why Mamdani rescinded it on day one.
And New Yorkers are paying for it.
People march in New York City on Nov. 20, 2023, to protest the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace at Columbia University. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
In 2023, then-Comptroller Brad Lander quietly allowed tens of millions of dollars in Israel Bonds held within New York City pension systems to expire rather than renew them. Those bonds had consistently outperformed many alternatives. The people harmed were not Israeli politicians. They were New York City workers: police officers, teachers, sanitation workers and retirees whose pension growth became collateral damage, so a comptroller could perform for activists.
Now Lander is running for Congress while continuing to align himself with BDS-style politics that undermine partnerships benefiting New Yorkers themselves.
And here is what these activists never admit: the relationship between New York and Israel has been enormously valuable for the entire city.
Israeli companies support more than 27,000 jobs across New York City. Israeli cybersecurity firms help defend critical infrastructure. Israeli medical innovations improve healthcare outcomes in New York hospitals. The Technion-Cornell partnership on Roosevelt Island has launched roughly 130 startups since 2012, many headquartered right here in the five boroughs.
During the Adams administration, we helped establish the NYC-Israel Economic Council because the partnership between New York and Israel was never about politics. It was about results: economic growth, technological innovation, public safety, investment and opportunity.
That is what governing is supposed to look like.
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Then-Mayor Eric Adams marches up Fifth Avenue during the Celebrate Israel Parade on June 4, 2023, in New York City. (Alamy Live News via AP)
What Mamdani offers instead is grievance politics disguised as morality. Just this month, he sided with mobs protesting a Jewish house of worship instead of defending civil order and public safety. He has driven away companies and investment instead of promoting economic growth. His consistent vilification of Israel is taking New York further down the path of grievance, division and Jew-blame.
History has seen this before.
In 1492, Spain expelled its Jewish population in the name of ideological purity and national unity. The country spent generations economically weakened afterward. Iraq, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world for more than 2,600 years, drove out nearly its entire Jewish population in the 20th century amid anti-Zionist fervor. Baghdad never regained its former status as a thriving commercial and intellectual center.
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Societies that scapegoat Jews rarely solve their problems. They simply create new ones.
The anti-Israel movement promises easy answers and social media virality. It gives frustrated people someone to hate and activists someone to target. But what it delivers is higher rents, fewer jobs, weaker cyber defense, smaller pensions and a Jewish community increasingly wondering whether it still belongs in the city it helped build.
The very New Yorkers Mamdani claims to fight for are the ones his politics ultimately hurt.
Mamdani has confused activism with leadership and grievance with governance.
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The Jewish people have survived every empire, regime and political movement built on blaming us for society’s failures. We will survive this one too.
The tragedy is that New York, one of the greatest cities in the world, appears willing to repeat one of history’s oldest mistakes.
Moshe Davis served as the inaugural executive director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism under Mayor Eric Adams.
