Eric Adams is an unlikely trendsetter, but a trendsetter he appears to be. Having signed executive orders combating anti-Semitism on his way out the door of Gracie Mansion, the former New York mayor was setting up an early-warning system for New York’s Jews. If his successor, Zohran Mamdani, planned to be the same obsessive anti-Zionist in office that he was as a candidate, the young socialist would immediately revoke those orders.
And in fact Mamdani did just that, undoing the orders on day one, confirming the suspicions that his fanaticism was no act. One of the executive orders Mamdani revoked had instructed the city to adopt the mainstream Jewish community’s consensus definition of anti-Semitism for purposes of antidiscrimination law. The other prohibited the city from joining the BDS campaign against Israel, which seeks the alienation of most Jews in America from public and private institutions.
Thus Mamdani was forced, in some way, by Adams to make his bad intentions clear from the beginning. There was no indication that other mayors would follow suit, but now one has. Steven Fulop’s 12-year run as mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, ends tomorrow. His successor is a former councilman named James Solomon. In December, Fulop signed an anti-BDS order as well as one protecting houses of worship, no doubt having in mind the current trend of pro-Hamas mobs attacking synagogues in New York and elsewhere.
That the outgoing mayor of Jersey City believes this is even necessary is an indication of just how much anti-Semites are seeking to widen the battlefield and force Jewish communal organizations to stretch their resources.
One difference between the two mayoral moves is that Fulop doesn’t accuse Solomon of having ill intent on issues related to Israel and anti-Semitism. Instead, he expects Solomon to be under pressure from others on the council to push Jersey City into a more anti-Israel position. The executive orders, therefore, would tie Solomon’s hands and give him a non-ideological reason to say no to the more extreme elements in the city’s progressive political echelon.
JTA reports that two members of the Democratic Socialists of America were elected to the Jersey City Council last month. One of them organized a letter “which compared Israel to Nazi Germany” soon after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.
Regarding Solomon, Fulop said: “There isn’t a lot that he said on [the Gaza war], so how he views this, and if he views it as something that he’s going to engage in in Jersey City, is unclear. But it doesn’t change the fact that you see a trend nationally that definitely is leaning more into antisemitic rhetoric, and I think we need to be conscious of that.”
Indeed that is the main lesson, and it has far-reaching implications. Within the progressive coalition, it seems the expectation is that each crop of candidates will be more vocally anti-Zionist than their predecessors.
Which is why the Jersey City case is so interesting. On the one hand, one is tempted to say that the stakes are low in Jersey City—it has a Jewish population of 6,000 compared to nearly a million in New York City. Nor does it set any sort of national cultural or media tone the way Gotham does.
But on the other hand, that is why it is worrying that the outgoing mayor feels the need to put up these guardrails. BDS’s primary purpose in the U.S. is to foment suspicion and exclusion of Jews. That the DSA and similar progressive organizers are trying to blanket the country’s city councils with anti-Zionist fanatics shows their level of dedication to the spread of anti-Semitism. Your local town’s decision to divest from Israel may have no tangible economic effect, but it isn’t intended to: The point is to spread the social and cultural effects of anti-Semitism.
This doesn’t really have much to do with Israel at all. Jews are the targets, and not just in major U.S. cities or in state governments but everywhere.
All of this has been clarifying. And it means American Jewish organizations must find the resources to join the fight on all fronts.
