Outgoing New York City Mayor Eric Adams is immediately testing his successor’s position on the boycott Israel movement as Zohran Mamdani takes office, at a moment when the city’s Jewish community remains divided over the next mayor’s priorities and his stance on Israel.

On Wednesday, Adams signed an executive order barring city agencies from participating in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions efforts, which would pre-empt any moves by city officials to divest from Israel Bonds and other Israeli investments. Mamdani, a strident critic of Israel, has pledged to end the city’s decades-long practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities and has said he would order the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York.

Mamdani’s transition team had no immediate comment.

But Adams was prepared for a response. “If the incoming administration wants to reverse” the executive order, then “that is on their watch,” he said.

Why ban BDS now? 

Adams announced the measure in remarks at the North American Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, organized by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, in New Orleans, Louisiana. “You are being targeted,” Adams said. “And we have to be as intelligent and as focused, as strategic as possible. … That’s why I am signing an executive order today to deal with BDS, so we can stop the madness that we should not invest in Israel.”

Fabien Levy, the deputy mayor for communications, said the move, weeks before Adams departs, was “a flag in the ground” to state that the current administration “will not waver in the fight against antisemitism.”

New York City is home to the largest concentration of Jews in the United States. Many Jews view the bonds as a bulwark against the BDS movement, whose co-founder has stated that the goal is to apply economic pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and to abolish Israel as a Jewish state.

The city’s investment in Israeli bonds was a flashpoint in the Democratic primary for mayor and in the general election. Mamdani, who co-founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, pledged to publicly back the movement to boycott Israel. In an interview with the Forward in April, Mamdani said he would end Adams’ policies that he regarded as a violation of international law and human rights.

The city’s Jewish voters split in the competitive mayoral election last month — with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo receiving the support of most voters who identify as Jewish and dominating in Hasidic and Orthodox strongholds, while Mamdani got 31% of the vote and swept progressive Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan on his way to a citywide win. A recent poll of 745 American Jews by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 64% of respondents view Mamdani as both anti-Israel and antisemitic, and 67% believe his election would make New York City’s Jews less safe.

Nonetheless, Mamdani’s positions on BDS and stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resonated with a plurality of voters. Nearly half of Mamdani voters, 49%, said his position was a factor in their support, according to a CNN exit poll.

Levy, who is Jewish and accompanied Adams both on his four-day farewell trip to Israel and to Louisiana, said that the mayor is sending a message about what the city’s values are, “even if hating Israel has suddenly become ‘the cool thing’ by some.” In meetings and public remarks during his swing in Israel, Adams pointed out that Mamdani won with 50.4% of the vote, and that his policies were not popular. Mamdani met with Adams at Gracie Mansion earlier this week, a meeting that was kept private.

Mamdani will also have to decide whether to disband the recently-created mayor’s office to combat antisemitism, which has pursued a measure adopting the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic. He’ll also need to decide whether to take action on Adams’ new  New York City–Israel Economic Council, an initiative to strengthen economic ties with the Jewish state.

What the executive order says 

Adams’ anti-BDS order bars agency heads, chief contracting officers and other mayoral appointees with contracting authority from adopting practices that discriminate against Israel or Israeli citizens. It also directs the city’s chief pension administrator and pension trustees appointed by the mayor not to support divestment from Israel Bonds or other assets.

Brad Lander, the outgoing city comptroller overseeing pension fund investments and a Mamdani ally, ended the city’s half-century practice of investing millions in Israeli government debt securities in 2023 when the holdings matured.

At the time, the city’s pension funds held $39 million in Israel Bonds, with a roughly 5% return. Lander, who is Jewish, maintained that he was following the city’s policy of avoiding foreign sovereign debt, treating Israel the same as other countries rather than giving it special treatment in the pension portfolio.

City pension funds also held more than $315 million in Israel-based assets, including nearly $300 million in common stock and over $1 million in Israeli real estate investment trusts.

Mark Levine, the comptroller-elect who is also Jewish, pledged to repurchase the bonds as part of the city’s portfolio. “This has been a rock-solid investment for decades,” he said. “Israel has never missed a bond payment, and a good, balanced portfolio should have global diversity.”

The post Anti-BDS order will test Mamdani on day one appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun moved a step closer to becoming the next U.S. antisemitism envoy on Wednesday, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to advance his nomination in a divided 14-8 tally that reflected the partisan tensions surrounding his bid.

All 12 committee Republicans supported Kaploun, while only two Democrats — Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Sen. Jacky Rosen of Nevada — joined them.

Kaploun, a Chabad rabbi, businessman and 2024 Trump campaign surrogate, used his November confirmation hearing to highlight his personal encounters with antisemitism and to emphasize education, particularly about the Holocaust, as the central tool for combating hatred.

But Democrats focused instead on the administration’s approach to right-wing antisemitism, pressing Kaploun on Trump’s failure to denounce the extremist influencer Nick Fuentes after a recent interview conducted by Tucker Carlson. Kaploun avoided direct criticism of Trump, stressing free speech principles while asserting that the administration “is clear in condemning antisemitism.”

The vote came two weeks after 18 House Democrats urged the Senate to reject Kaploun’s nomination, citing his past partisan comments and legal controversies previously reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Shaheen said Wednesday she remained concerned about those remarks but hoped Kaploun would “be above partisanship” if confirmed, according to Jewish Insider.

Speaking soon after the vote at the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s North American Mayors Summit in New Orleans, Kaploun framed the challenge in civic terms.

“Antisemitism is anti-American. Racism is anti-American,” he said. “Myself, the president, the secretary of state, and the entire administration are going to work tirelessly to make sure religious liberty, justice, and restoring respect for humanity for everybody is the goal.”

The post Senate Foreign Relations Committee advances Yehuda Kaploun as antisemitism envoy, with some dissent appeared first on The Forward.

Recently, as Jewish Insider reported, bipartisan lawmakers in Congress hailed what they saw as a major advance in fighting online antisemitism — X’s new location feature.

The new tool, showing which country an account operates from — had started revealing that some accounts spreading antisemitic content in US political discussions were based overseas. For legislators on both sides, this represented a digital unmasking.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) remarked that the feature exposed “foreign interests trying to spread antisemitic poison” while “masquerading as Americans.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) insisted Americans “deserve to know which accounts are run from abroad, so we know the true source of these narratives.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) took a geopolitical view: “Beijing, Moscow and Tehran know they cannot defeat us economically or militarily, so they exploit controversial issues, like Israel and antisemitism, and try to divide.” Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared the feature “a huge win for transparency and American security.”

The story is appealing: foreign enemies weaponize antisemitism to fracture American unity, and transparency about account origins helps us counter these external threats. There’s truth here — bad actors do exploit divisive topics.

But this celebration reveals a dangerous misdiagnosis.

As the lead of the Decoding Antisemitism project — which has examined over 300,000 items of digital content across multiple crises — I’ve identified three distinct but connected drivers of online antisemitic radicalization: coordinated malicious actors (foreign and domestic), algorithmic amplification through platform design, and homegrown participatory dynamics enabled by online communication itself — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, and the normalization of extremism through constant exposure.

The issue isn’t that foreign influence exists — it does. The problem is treating it as the primary driver while overlooking the structural and domestic conditions that allow antisemitic narratives to take root and spread.

How we diagnose problems determines how we design solutions — and misdiagnosis doesn’t just limit our response, it actively redirects resources, attention, and political will away from factors we can actually control.

Comprehending online antisemitism demands a virological approach: examining not just where accounts originate, but how hate narratives evolve, which platform features enable transmission, and what conditions allow them to thrive. Yet social media platforms remain essentially black boxes — we lack systematic tools to understand dynamics unfolding within these digital spaces.

Lawmakers celebrate a feature revealing account geography while leaving the actual black box — algorithmic recommendations, engagement optimization, and content amplification — completely unexamined.

The Conflation Problem

The Jewish Insider article and quoted lawmakers collapse “foreign,” “adversarial,” and “antisemitic” into one category. This conflation obscures more than it reveals.

It treats geographic origin as definitive of intent and impact. An account in South Asia or Eastern Europe engaging with US politics isn’t necessarily a state-directed operation. It may simply be someone with opinions about American affairs. Account location reveals nothing about whether content is coordinated, conspiratorial, state-driven, or simply individual opinion.

More crucially, emphasizing foreign accounts distracts from what we know empirically about domestic antisemitic content production.

Following the October 7 attacks, antisemitic discourse surged to 36-38% of comments on major UK news outlet YouTube channels — nearly double the pre-crisis baseline. After the Washington museum shooting in May 2025, antisemitic content averaged 43% across major English-language news channels, with some reaching 66%.

These aren’t fringe platforms infiltrated by foreign bots — they’re mainstream digital spaces where domestic audiences actively produce and amplify antisemitic narratives.

Research on antisemitic discourse spread reveals a three-phase domestic process: elite figures make strategically ambiguous statements, digital intermediaries (podcasters, YouTubers, influencers) reframe and sharpen this messaging, and comment sections collapse ambiguity into explicit hate speech.

This “cascading radicalization” is primarily homegrown, driven by domestic actors and platform dynamics — not solely foreign infiltration.

Our analysis cannot definitively establish every anonymous commenter’s geographic origin. What we observe are linguistic and cultural markers — idiom, references, political framings — indicating domestic participation, combined with the absence of coordination patterns typical of bot networks. The antisemitic discourse we documented emerges through “dialogical warfare”: organic exchanges between users presenting as ordinary Americans who deploy antisemitism as an explanatory framework for complex issues.

When a US Congressmember amplifies antisemitic tropes, when popular podcasts platform guests trafficking in conspiracy theories about Jewish power, when partisan media deploy dual loyalty accusations — these aren’t foreign operations. They’re homegrown productions embedded in American political discourse and amplified through domestic networks.

The Missing Architecture

Most striking about celebrating X’s location feature is what remains unexamined: the platform itself.

There’s virtually no discussion about platform design, algorithmic amplification, recommendation systems, the attention economy, or structural dynamics allowing hateful content to scale. The feature is treated as inherently truth-revealing, exposing hidden foreign manipulation.

But this framing evades more important questions: why do certain narratives spread, how do platform architectures enable amplification, and how do online communication conditions — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — create environments where antisemitic ideas mutate and take hold?

The answer has little to do with account location and everything to do with how platforms are built. Engagement-based algorithms reward emotionally provocative content — outrage, fear, tribal solidarity. Recommendation systems create filter bubbles and radicalization pathways. Virality architecture privileges simplification, moral clarity, and villain identification. The attention economy systematically rewards polarizing, enraging content. These are design choices, not inevitable features.

Meanwhile, online communication conditions themselves — anonymity removing social accountability, mutual confirmation among like-minded voices, omnipresent hate speech normalizing extremity — create participatory environments where ordinary users become active radicalization contributors.

Contemporary antisemitism increasingly operates through coded expressions, memes, and multimodal signals evading simple keyword detection. The watermelon emoji, the paraglider symbol — these function as in-group markers regardless of geographic location. Strategic ambiguity, not foreign origin, enables antisemitic narratives to spread while maintaining plausible deniability.

The Political Convenience

The “foreign adversaries spreading antisemitism” narrative aligns with a bipartisan preference: attributing social breakdown to hostile external actors. This framing is politically convenient across the spectrum.

For Republicans, it allows condemning antisemitism without confronting how right-wing media has mainstreamed antisemitic conspiracy theories — “great replacement” narratives, George Soros accusations, “globalist” rhetoric. For Democrats, it enables criticizing online hate without reckoning with how segments of progressive activism have normalized anti-Zionist rhetoric often sliding into antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and loyalty.

The foreign influence frame permits symbolic accountability –the appearance of action without institutional change. Lawmakers can call for location transparency, celebrate platform implementations, and position themselves as defenders against external threats. What they needn’t do is examine how American political rhetoric contributes to normalizing antisemitism, push for regulatory interventions altering platform incentives, or confront how online communication creates radicalization pathways.

This isn’t analytical sloppiness. It’s moral abdication.

What Accountability Would Actually Require

Genuine accountability for online antisemitism requires confronting all three drivers — not just one.

First, acknowledging that while malicious actors (foreign and domestic) exploit divisive issues, they operate within a larger ecosystem. We must recognize the United States as an active site where antisemitic ideas are produced, circulated, and normalized through domestic political culture, media ecosystems, and participatory online dynamics — not merely as an innocent target.

Second, confronting how platform architecture shapes what spreads, and demanding transparency not just about account locations but about algorithmic recommendations, content moderation, the attention economy’s incentives, and metrics driving platform design.

Third, recognizing that high-profile domestic actors — politicians, media figures, influencers with millions of followers — bear far more responsibility for mainstreaming antisemitic narratives than anonymous accounts. We must understand the three-phase process through which elite ambiguity cascades into radicalized discourse.

Fourth, examining how partisan political discourse traffics in antisemitic tropes through strategic ambiguity — and being willing to call this out when politically inconvenient.

Fifth, acknowledging online communication conditions themselves — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — are creating environments where ordinary users become radicalization participants.

X’s location feature may provide useful information about one factor among many. But treating this as revelatory, exposing the “true source” of antisemitic narratives, is a dangerous misdiagnosis.

If democracies want to confront antisemitism seriously, they must address all three drivers: monitor and counter malicious actors where they exist, examine platform architectures amplifying hate, and confront participatory dynamics and communication conditions enabling antisemitic narratives to flourish in mainstream spaces.

How we diagnose problems shapes how we conceptualize solutions. Focusing exclusively on foreign actors may be politically convenient. It will not protect the public sphere.

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is the AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Lead of the “Decoding Antisemitism” project, which analyzes how antisemitic ideas spread and mutate in digital communication.