|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate in New York City’s mayoral race, has pledged to abandon the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism if elected.
His comments, made in an interview last week with Bloomberg News, stand in stark contrast to the policy of current Mayor Eric Adams, who signed an executive order in June adopting the IHRA definition.
Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has also long voiced support for the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. The IHRA definition explicitly identifies applying double standards to Israel — the core tactic of the BDS movement — as antisemitic.
Mamdani’s campaign defended his stance by pointing to the Biden administration’s 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. Spokesperson Dora Pekec told the New York Post a Mamdani administration would rely on the Biden strategy’s framework of “education, community engagement, and accountability to reverse the normalization of antisemitism and promote open dialogue.”
This claim, however, distorts the Biden strategy, which described the IHRA definition as the “most prominent” and affirmed it as the standard the United States had embraced. While the Biden administration stopped short of naming IHRA as the sole definition of antisemitism, it made clear that IHRA remained central to America’s fight against Jew-hatred.
More than 1,200 entities — including international, national, and local governing authorities, civic bodies, NGOs, educational institutions, athletic leagues and clubs, and corporations — worldwide have adopted or endorsed the IHRA definition since 2016, making it the most authoritative and widely-accepted tool to delineate all forms of contemporary antisemitism, including anti-Zionism.
Take Action
CAM has launched Report It — a secure app to report antisemitic incidents anonymously and in real time. Don’t stay silent — download it today on the Apple Store or Google Play. See it. Report it. Stop it. Together, we can fight this hate.
