Jewish New Yorkers are under siege – and the numbers are brutal. In the first eight months of 2026, the NYPD recorded 181 antisemitic hate crimes. One hundred thirty-one of those were felonies. That’s a 16 percent jump over last year and far exceeds every other category of hate crime in the city. For context, anti-Muslim incidents totaled 21. Synagogues, schools, and ordinary sidewalks have become danger zones for a community that once considered New York the safest Jewish city in America.

So when Mayor Zohran Mamdani finally rolled out his big antisemitism strategy last month, Jewish New Yorkers had every reason to pay close attention. What arrived was a 33-page document that manages to be both expensive and empty – a masterclass in spending money while saying nothing of substance.

From The Post Millennial:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new antisemitism strategy doubles funding for a community grant program whose partners include an anti-Israel organization previously led by Linda Sarsour, while omitting Zionism and declining to adopt a definition of antisemitism.

During the program’s announcement, Mamdani’s wife attended a luxury retreat hosted by a group that called for the abolition of Israel.

That should tell you just about everything you need to know about this administration’s priorities. But the specifics are worth examining, because the pattern they reveal is damning.

A strategy that fights everything except antisemitism

The crown jewel of Mamdani’s plan is a $6.4 million allocation to Partners Against the Hate, or PATH – double last year’s funding. Sounds impressive until you look at who’s sitting at the table. Among PATH’s six core partners is the Arab American Association of New York, the organization Linda Sarsour ran for over a decade.

A quick refresher on Sarsour. She was booted from the Women’s March in 2019 over antisemitism. She declared that “Israel was built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else.” And she is no casual acquaintance of the mayor. She endorsed his Assembly bid, bankrolled his mayoral campaign, and publicly warned during an Instagram livestream that she would “hold him accountable” to his promises – including dismantling the NYPD unit that responds to major protests. Mentor is probably the polite word for it.

It gets darker. Since 2021, AAANY has funneled over $223,000 to CAIR-NY. The national CAIR organization was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case – the largest prosecution of its kind in American history. Your tax dollars, routed through a city grant program, landing in that ecosystem. Wonderful.

Then there’s the glaring intellectual fraud at the heart of the strategy. Mamdani’s plan refuses to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism – the globally recognized standard that identifies denying Jewish self-determination and applying double standards to Israel as forms of Jew-hatred. The document doesn’t just sidestep this definition. It never mentions Zionism. Not once across 33 pages.

That’s not an oversight. According to the ADL, 48 percent of antisemitic incidents in New York state last year involved Israel or Zionism. Nationally, that share hit 58 percent in 2024 and sat at 45 percent in 2025. Before October 7, it hovered around 10 percent. Mamdani’s plan addresses antisemitism the way a cardiologist might treat a heart attack by ignoring the chest.

A million dollars and a prayer

The strategy also earmarks $1 million for security at synagogues and houses of worship. On paper, that sounds generous. Do the math and the gesture evaporates. A 2026 Teach Coalition survey found Jewish schools spend an average of $401,432 per year on security, with armed guards eating up 63 percent of that cost. Mamdani’s entire allocation wouldn’t cover three schools – and it’s supposed to stretch across a city where UJA-Federation’s security initiative serves more than 3,400 Jewish institutions. It’s not a policy. It’s a photo op with a price tag.

While the mayor talked, his wife was somewhere else entirely

On September 29, as Mamdani stood before cameras unveiling his strategy, his wife Rama Duwaji was finishing up a luxury Islamic wellness retreat near Porto, Portugal. The host organization, Women Sanctuary, had posted on Instagram calling to “abolish the colonial apartheid state of Israel.” Quite the scheduling coincidence.

Duwaji’s social media trail tells a longer story. She liked an Instagram post published on October 7, 2023 – the day of the massacre – showing a bulldozer smashing through the Gaza-Israel barrier, captioned “Breaking the walls of apartheid.” The next day, she engaged with posts promoting Palestinian “resistance” rallies. She interacted with content dismissing The New York Times’ investigation into October 7 sexual violence as a fabricated “mass rape hoax.” Separately, she shared an image glorifying Palestinian plane hijacker Leila Khaled and amplified a post declaring Tel Aviv “shouldn’t exist in the first place.”

This is not ambiguity. This is alignment.

The community has spoken

More than two dozen Jewish organizations have already demanded a revised strategy – one that actually confronts anti-Zionist harassment and violence instead of pretending they don’t exist. They see what the rest of us see. You cannot credibly fight antisemitism while funneling resources to its fellow travelers. You cannot protect Jewish communities while refusing to define the hatred targeting them. And you certainly cannot lead with moral authority when your own household celebrated the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Mamdani’s strategy isn’t a failure. It’s a confession.

Key Takeaways

• Mamdani’s plan doubles taxpayer funding to a program partnered with Linda Sarsour’s anti-Israel organization.
• The strategy refuses to define antisemitism or mention Zionism – despite nearly half of incidents being Israel-related.
• The $1 million synagogue security budget wouldn’t cover three schools’ annual security costs.
• The mayor’s wife attended an Israel-abolition group’s retreat the same week the strategy was announced.

Sources: The Post Millennial, Fox News