New York City officials from departments as varied as sanitation and small-business services gathered at City Hall in Lower Manhattan on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of New York’s interagency task force on antisemitism, an initiative of the Office to Combat Antisemitism. It was created in May under Executive Order 51.
Randy Mastro, the deputy mayor of the city, addressed a diverse group of agency representatives to underscore the urgency of their mission. (JNS was among the few outlets invited to observe the meeting.)
“This year, over 60% of hate crimes in our city are against Jews,” he told the group of city officials. “I never thought I would live in the greatest city in the world—with the largest Jewish population of any city in the world—and see this level of antisemitism. It’s wrong, it’s intolerable, and we have to do something about it.”
“Unfortunately, we haven’t always been a perfect vessel, but nothing short of perfection will do,” he said at the meeting. “We need zero tolerance, and so the work you’re going to do here today—the coordination with each and every one of your agencies and policies—is critical to the success of this initiative.”
Moshe Davis, executive director of the new mayoral office to combat antisemitism, told JNS that the task force meeting was convened to advance the implementation of Executive Order 52, which adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in June.
“One of the topics we discussed in our meeting was: How can you create policy? How can you create agencies to be proactive and not just reactive,” he said. “This definition helps us do that—we’re not looking to police speech, and we’re not telling people what they should think or how they should think. But we do want our city employees not to be racist, and we want them to be addressing the needs and interests of the Jewish community.”
Davis told JNS that addressing Jew-hatred means engaging city agencies across the board, including some that might not typically be associated with fighting antisemitism.
“We have core partners who are part of the executive order, like the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force, the Human Rights Commission and Community Affairs, but then there are also other agencies that interact with the Jewish community every day,” he said. “Take the Parks Department, for instance—about 4% of hate crimes are happening in parks. Parks can respond directly by removing vandalism, like swastikas, right away, and they can also implement educational initiatives or partner with other agencies to take proactive measures.”
Arrests, prosecution, education
The interagency task force meeting also discussed crime-related hotspots in the city, including the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Midwood, in addition to the Upper East Side in Manhattan, all of which have sizable Jewish populations.
“These neighborhoods have seen rising hate crimes of all kinds, and as a result, we need to focus more on these specific communities, especially since they have significant Jewish populations,” Davis told JNS. “It’s essential to take a city-wide approach to address everything that’s happening. In Crown Heights, for example, we’ve seen protests targeting synagogues, as well as incidents where people are being assaulted on the street.”
He said that “these situations require arrests, follow-up prosecution and proactive education initiatives.”
Davis told JNS that city agencies are motivated to confront the rise of Jew-hatred directly, with many expressing a desire to be part of the solution.
“People are saying, ‘This is a real problem in our city, and we want to help fix it. We’re in,’” he said. “Every city representative in the meeting said, ‘Give me the marching orders.’”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement on Thursday that antisemitism is a “pervasive ugly disease that has sadly infiltrated so many sectors of our city, but we will never allow that to stand unanswered under our administration.”
He stated, “We continue to tackle this crisis head-on by rooting out hateful rhetoric and ensuring it has no place in even the most remote corners of our city government. From schools to sanitation to police, our administration will never allow antisemitism, or any other form of hate, to persist.”
Adams added that “we will continue to build a future in which every New Yorker can live without any fear of hatred.”
