When former New York City Mayor Eric Adams created an Office to Combat Antisemitism last May, it was widely interpreted as a political gesture intended to boost his failing independent run for re-election in November. Adams had always been broadly supportive of Israel and the wider Jewish community. But his move was too little and too late—both to do much about the surge of antisemitism that followed the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and to save his mayoral campaign.

Adams dropped out of the race in September, six weeks before Zohran Mamdani was elected to succeed him. Mamdani, an avowed opponent of the existence of the State of Israel and a supporter of the pro-Hamas mobs who were the shock troops of the wave of Jew-hatred that swept across the country, hasn’t abolished Adams’s pet project. Similar to his predecessor, the motive for this is political. While Adams used it to signal his somewhat ineffectual support for the Jewish people, Mamdani seeks to employ it to provide cover for the fact that he is still doubling down on his anti-Zionism and efforts to link that noxious cause to other items on his agenda, such as opposing the Trump administration’s effort to crack down on illegal immigration.

To do this, he has appointed Phylisa Wisdom, a veteran left-wing activist, to lead it.