On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani removed the IHRA definition of antisemitism from city policy. Now, he's appointed Phylisa Wisdom, a longtime IHRA critic, to run the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.
Pause and think about what that means in practice: the same political camp that fought the most widely adopted working definition of antisemitism now gets to shape what the city recognizes as hate, what gets enforced, and what gets waved away as activism.
This is happening while NYPD data shows reported anti-Jewish hate crimes in January jumped 182% versus the same month last year, with 31 incidents reported.
When institutions stop asking basic questions like why the safeguard exists, what it is responding to, and who benefits when definitions get blurred, then antisemitism doesn't get solved. It gets managed, minimized, and normalized.
