New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has published the first municipal strategy against anti-Semitism drawn up by an American city, five days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked him from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly.
The strategy, released on September 29, is organised around seven objectives and coordinated by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. “Jewish New Yorkers have helped build this city,” Mamdani said.
The office will oversee a $26 million (€22.9 million) increase in hate-crime prevention funding announced earlier in 2026, which City Hall said amounted to a rise of more than 800 per cent on the previous year. A further $6.4 million (€5.6 million) goes to community grants, doubling last year’s figure, and $1 million to the physical security of synagogues and other houses of worship.
The city is also spending $2 million to complete a Holocaust memorial in Queens and $2.5 million on a new Jewish cultural centre in central Brooklyn. Police figures show anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for about 55 per cent of confirmed hate crimes in the city in the first half of 2026, though Jewish New Yorkers make up between 10 and 12 per cent of the population.
The 30-page document does not adopt a definition of anti-Semitism, the central demand of several Jewish organisations in the city. Mamdani, whose victory was celebrated by much of the European Left in November 2025, revoked his predecessor’s executive orders on the question hours after taking office.
Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the office, told reporters it was not the city’s role to settle that argument. She said governments that had adopted a formal definition had not seen anti-Semitism fall as a result.
Jewish groups including the UJA-Federation of New York have accused the mayor of fuelling hostility towards Jewish residents through his language on Israel and Gaza. Mamdani has repeatedly described Israeli operations in Gaza as genocide and pledged during his campaign to have Netanyahu arrested under an International Criminal Court warrant, a commitment his own legal review abandoned in July.
Netanyahu returned to that episode on September 24, telling a General Assembly hall that delegates had largely emptied that the smears came from “the anti-Semitic mayor of New York”. Mamdani answered that the Israeli Prime Minister remained the subject of the court’s warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The argument over how to define anti-Semitism runs through European politics as well, from the French bill that has split parliament in Paris to the Berlin association that asked the European Parliament in September to examine anti-Jewish rhetoric inside the Greens.
