In the first week of the Mamdani administration, the New York City mayor has already taken actions that may be construed as antisemitic. On day one in office, Zohran Mamdani issued Executive Order 01, revoking orders issued by his predecessor, Eric Adams, after Adams’s indictment for federal corruption charges. This included Executive Order 60 (which prohibited New York City entities from boycotting Israel, often termed BDS) and Executive Order 52 (which adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism).
Like those university presidents said in December 2023, when New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican, asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews was protected speech on campus, context matters.
In a late September discussion on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Dave Smith, who hosts the libertarian podcast “Part of the Problem,” argued that Tucker Carlson’s eulogy comparison—likening the assassination of Charlie Kirk last fall to those “hummus eaters” who killed Jesus—was apt. After all, Tucker was presenting Kirk as an evangelical truth-teller in the Christian mold, someone shot and killed not for violence but for speech. On that reading, the Jesus comparison was not antisemitic, but rather, a familiar Christian analogy about martyrdom and the futility of silencing ideas through murder.
At first blush, especially given Smith’s track record, his defense seemed surprisingly fair. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it wasn’t—because context matters.
The relevant context here is the individuals Tucker had platformed prior to this speech. Some examples include Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos, who portrayed Hamas as freedom fighters with no pushback, and right-wing podcaster Darryl Cooper, who didn’t get any interrogation on some of his revisionist ideas such as portraying Churchill as the “bad guy” of World War II and claiming Hitler didn’t start the war intending to genocide the Jews but that it was more of a “logistics issue.” These guests and others, like Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes, make it difficult to defend Tucker’s comparison as anything besides antisemitic. The pattern speaks louder than the isolated gesture.
The same principle can be applied to Mamdani. His actions seem to be a blanket revocation following the indictment of Adams. Additionally, the revoked orders occupied politically fraught territory: Executive Order 60’s anti-BDS protections raise questions about legitimate preference versus discrimination, while Executive Order 52’s adoption of the IHRA definition navigates the difficult line between legitimate criticism and bigotry, and between protected political expression and government-sanctioned speech. However, despite this, context matters.
As with Carlson’s comparison, which could be defended as Christian martyrdom symbolism, Mamdani’s first-day moves, when looked at in isolation, are not necessarily problematic. Still, considering the context of who Mamdani is and the actions he’s undertaken so far, his decisions can be examined.
Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College in Maine. In 2014, he agreed to the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli academic institutions. He has repeatedly utilized the term “genocide” when referring to Israel’s actions in Gaza during the two-year war against Hamas, when Israel was trying to recover its hostages while implementing an effective deterrent against a repeat of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which the terrorist organization has vowed to repeat.
He has refused multiple times to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” most notably in June 2025 during his mayoral campaign, discounting its common usage and instead repeating its literal translation of “shaking off”—a standard defense used to sanitize the phrase. During his 2025 campaign, while saying Israel has a right to exist, he refused to say this right was for Israel to exist as a Jewish state, claiming instead that it should have “equal rights for all"—a red herring, since unlike the rest of the Middle Eastern region, Israel does have equal rights for all, however flawed that equality may be.
And he has threatened to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he were to arrive in New York City—something that he apparently cannot do legally, despite his authority as mayor.
The Jews are a people whose history has entailed many expulsions and genocidal attempts. Events after Oct. 7 have shown us that these sentiments remain extant today. The people of “Never Again” are burdened by this past, contrary to what some may wish.
When a pattern consistently targets the world’s only Jewish state, dismisses Jewish historical experience and sanitizes language associated with violence against Jews, the conclusion is neither hysterical nor partisan. It is evidence and context-based. And it can be called antisemitism.
