Flanked by Jewish community leaders and First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, Eric Adams announced the establishment of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism in a press briefing at City Hall on Tuesday. According to a document released by the Mayor’s Office alongside the briefing, the new City Hall office will establish an interagency task force with a broad mandate of action, including “monitoring court cases and outcomes at all levels of the justice system, liaising with the New York City Law Department on appropriate cases to bring or join, [and] advising on executive orders to issue and legislation to propose to address antisemitism.”
Adams has appointed Moshe Davis as the office’s first executive director, who will report directly to First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro. “I never thought that I would have to be stamping out fires of Jew hatred in our schools and in our streets,” Davis told reporters, speaking of a changed environment after Hamas’ October 7th 2023 attack on Israeli civilians and military personnel. Davis went on to dub Adams “our modern-day Maccabees,” referencing the group of Jewish warriors that would led a successful rebellion against the Romans in Jerusalem in the 2nd century CE. He employed similarly militant language in defining his new position at City Hall: “this office will be a sledgehammer–deliberate, coordinated, and unapologetic.”
Moshe Davis, speaking at City Hall. Tuesday, May 13, 2025. Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.
The city already has other parts of government charged with addressing hate crimes more broadly, like the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, which tracks incidents, seeks to prevent them, and address constituents’ concerns, including those that relate to antisemitism. “To be clear, that office still exists and it does important work about hate crimes against any group,” Mastro told reporters when asked about the potential for overlap. “It’s not just about crimes, it’s about culture.”
Mayor Adams described the phenomenon of antisemitic hate as “something [that] just really jumps off the charts and the graphs when we analyze how severe our problem is.” Citing figures from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Adams claimed that while Jews make up around 10% of New Yorkers, they are the target of more than half of hate crimes, a figure rose to 62% in the first quarter of 2025.
The ADL has faced significant controversy over these assessments since Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2023, with analyses of their data pointing to a pro-Israel bias that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, leading Wikipedia to label the organization an “unreliable source” on the matter. ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was broadly condemned by other Jewish organizations and media outlets for his defense of Elon Musk after the Silicon Valley financier twice did a “sieg heil” gesture at Trump’s inauguration in January, with sources inside the organization telling Jewish Currents that Greenblatt was “especially willing to excuse Musk’s white nationalist sympathies if it helps the ADL fight anti-Zionism.”
The mayor appeared to make this conflation himself when answering a question from Gothamist’s Liz Kim on whether he equated anti-Zionism and antisemitism, making use of an old saying; “if it if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it’s quack like a duck, call it a duck.” Adams affirmed the rights of those protesting against Israel’s actions as “free speech,” but again made problematic conflations in framing their actions, claiming he had seen protesters who claimed to be “gays for Hamas,” – a group which does not exist – while there are instead protesters who have called themselves “queers for Palestine.”
