New York City Mayor Eric Adams announcing the formation of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism at a press conference at City Hall on May 13, 2025. Photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced at a press conference on Tuesday morning the creation of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, the first office of its kind to be established in a major city in the US.

The first task of the new mayoral office will be to immediately establish an inter-agency taskforce that will focus on tacking “all forms of antisemitism,” which include monitoring court cases and outcomes in the justice system, cooperating with the New York City Law Department on cases to bring or join, and advising on executive orders to issue and legislation to propose to address antisemitism. The office will also liaise with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) to take action against antisemitism, and it will have the authority to ensure that city-funded entities, taxpayer-funded organizations, and city agencies do not promote antisemitism.

“Anything funded by the city, there are rules and regulations of how you can contract with the city and behave when you contract with the city, and we’re going to make sure that is taken care of in the proper way,” Moshe Davis, the inaugural executive director of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, told The Algemeiner. He explained that the new office will make sure “that these [city-funded] agencies are not doing the wrong thing and if they are, and we have the legal ability, we are going to make sure they are not going to be able to continue doing that.”

“By establishing the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, our administration is taking immediate and concrete steps to address antisemitism at every level of city life,” Davis added during the press conference.

Adams made the announcement about the new initiative amid an unprecedented uptick in antisemitism in New York City and across the nation. In 2024, the NYPD reported that 54 percent of all hate crimes in New York City were against Jewish New Yorkers. During the first quarter of 2025, that number rose to 62 percent.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League’s latest Audit of Antisemitic Incidents revealed a record number of 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the US in 2024. The highest number of incidents were in New York.

New York City has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and Jews make up 10 percent of the population, according to the mayor. New York has 960,000 Jewish residents.

Adams said it is “imperative” to address the increase in antisemitism in New York City.

“We can’t move on with business as usual when we have a population in your city that is overwhelmingly being targeted merely because of their religion or way of life,” Adams said on Tuesday at the press conference. He added that the new Office to Combat Antisemitism will help “send a very clear message in this city that antisemitism cannot live and most importantly cannot grow – cannot grow on our college campuses, cannot grow in our schools, in our work environments … And let’s be honest, it’s not a Jewish issue. Any hate on a group is an issue that we should address. This administration will not remain silent while our Jewish brothers and sisters are targeted.”

“As we continue to see the rising tide of antisemitism here at home, and across the country, this moment calls for decisive action,” the mayor further said in a released statement. “The Office to Combat Antisemitism … will tackle antisemitism in all of its forms, working across city agencies to ensure Jewish New Yorkers are protected and can thrive here in the five boroughs. Antisemitism is an attack not only on Jewish New Yorkers, but on the very idea of New York City as a place where people from all backgrounds can live together.”

Davis’s first course of action as the executive director of the new office will be to form a commission of Jewish leaders from across the city to oversee and advise on the office’s work. The mayor described Davis in a press statement as “a tireless advocate on behalf of Jewish New Yorkers, and he is exactly the right person to lead and build this office.”

Davis joined the Adams administration in November 2022 as Jewish liaison in the Mayor’s Office of Community Affairs. He formerly managed the city’s first Jewish Advisory Council, which the mayor established in June 2023.

“Combating antisemitism requires a sledgehammer approach: coordinated, unapologetic, and immediate,” Davis said. “Mayor Adams has been a modern-day Maccabee, standing up for the Jewish community, and, with the establishment of this office, he is strengthening his resolve to ensure Jewish New Yorkers thrive in our city. I look forward to working closely with Mayor Eric Adams and First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro to continue our forceful response against anti-Jewish hate and discrimination.”

Davis was previously the rabbinic leader at the Manhattan Jewish Experience, a program for young Jewish professionals. He also founded New York Jews in Politics, an initiative that connects Jewish professionals who work in government, advocacy, and nonprofit sectors, and received his ordination from the Rabbinical Council of Jerusalem. As executive director of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, he will report directly to First Deputy Mayor Mastro.

“We are a city that will not tolerate antisemitism,” Mastro said at the press conference on Tuesday.

“The rise in antisemitism in our city, in our country, and around the world is both alarming and intolerable,” Mastro added in a released statement. “Today, Mayor Adams is taking a stand — that in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world — antisemitism is unacceptable, and we have to do more to address it. So, New York City will lead the way as the first major city in America to establish an office dedicated solely to combatting antisemitism.”

New York City also has an Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, which was launched in 2019 and is still active, and the NYPD has a Hate Crime Task Force that addresses bias-motivated threats, harassment, discrimination, and violence throughout New York.

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US President Donald Trump speaks at the Saudi-US Investment Forum, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

US President Donald Trump called on Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords and officially recognize Israel while speaking at the Saudi-US Investment Forum in Riyadh on Tuesday.

“With the historic Abraham Accords that we’re so proud of, all the momentum was aimed at peace, aimed very successfully,” Trump said, referring to a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries during his first term in office.

“It’s been an amazing thing, the Abraham Accords, and it’s my fervent hope, wish, and even my dream that Saudi Arabia — a place I have such respect for, especially over the last fairly short period of time, what you’ve been able to do — but will soon be joining the Abraham Accords,” Trump added.

Trump argued that joining the Abraham Accords would be “a tremendous tribute” to Saudi Arabia and that agreeing to recognize Israel is “very important for the future of the Middle East.”

“It will be a special day in the Middle East, with the whole world watching, when Saudi Arabia joins us. And you’ll be greatly honoring me, and you’ll be greatly honoring all of those people that have fought so hard for the Middle East,” Trump stated. 

During the first Trump administration from 2017-2021, the White House helped broker the Abraham Accords, a series of historic normalization agreements between Israel and several countries in the Arab world: Sudan, Bahrain, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has vowed to expand on the Abraham Accords, arguing that bolstering the normalization agreements will help foster greater peace and prosperity in the broader Middle East. According to recent reports, however, the US is no longer demanding Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel as a condition for progress on civil nuclear cooperation talks.

During his remarks on Tuesday, the US president also lambasted Iran, saying that he plans to exert “massive, maximum pressure” against Tehran. Trump vowed to “drive Iranian oil exports to zero” if the White House and Iran cannot successfully broker a deal to place restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program.  

“If Iran’s leadership rejects this olive branch and continues to attack their neighbors, then we will have no choice but to inflict massive, maximum pressure … and take all action required to stop the regime from ever having a nuclear weapon. Iran will never have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, vowing to never allow Tehran to threaten the US or its allies “with terrorism or nuclear attack.”

Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, maintains that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than building weapons. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog, reported last year that Iran had greatly accelerated uranium enrichment to close to weapons grade at its Fordow site dug into a mountain.

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Hatem Bazian, founder of American Muslims for Palestine and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Photo: Screenshot

A circuit court judge in Richmond, VA, ruled on Friday that American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a nonprofit which has sponsored a series of anti-Israel protests following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks across southern Israel, must provide financial information which the activist group has long guarded from government investigators.

Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares has said that the organization possesses connections to terrorists and has submitted multiple filings to compel AMP to provide its donor list. He said his office “has a legal obligation to ensure that charitable organizations operating in Virginia are following the law” and vowed to “continue to enforce state law without exception or delay to protect Virginians.”

Judge Devika Davis’s decision represents the end of AMP’s efforts to legally delay Miyares’s investigation.

Labeling Miyares’s claims a “defamatory smear,” AMP lawyer Christina Jump said the “vague accusations that AMP has anything to do with Hamas or Oct. 7 just got thrown out completely by a federal court judge.” She referred to the dismissal last week of a Nevada lawsuit against the group.

A second suit in Illinois remains ongoing, arguing that AMP is a resurrection of the former organization Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which a judge found liable for $156 million due to its support for Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group.

Individuals formerly involved with IAP and now supporting AMP include AMP’s current executive director, Osama Abuirshaid; Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Rafeeq Jaber, a former president of IAP who speaks at AMP events; former AMP executive director Abdelbaset Hamayel, who worked for IAP as executive director and secretary general; Kifah Mustafa, who worked for IAP in Illinois; and Raeed Tayeh, a former IAP member.

The lawsuit charges that AMP includes “largely the same core leadership as IAP/AMS; it serves the same function and purpose; it holds nearly identical conventions and events with many of the same roster of speakers; it operates a similar ‘chapter’ structure in similar geographic locations; it continues to espouse Hamas’s ideology and political positions; and it continues to facilitate fundraising for groups that funnel money to Hamas.”

In 2015, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) first revealed the extensive cross-over between IAP and AMP.

In a speech while protesting at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC on Dec. 1, 2023, Abuirshaid denied the atrocities committed by Hamas during the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre: “Most of the civilians were killed by their own army … They killed their own civilians … There were no rapes, that’s what they told us. And they still lie to us, why?”

Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and kidnapped 251 hostages while perpetrating widespread sexual violence during their Oct. 7 onslaught.

Abuirshaid has a history of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories such as the claim that Jews originated not in ancient Israel but among the Khazars.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes AMP as “at the core of the anti-Israel and anti-Zionist movement in the United States” and notes that the group’s leadership “promotes antisemitic tropes and support for violence against Israel, such as praising Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack which marked the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

Founded in 2006 by Hatem Bazian — a senior lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley and the group’s current national board chairman — the ADL says that “some AMP-sponsored anti-Israel rallies have featured flags of terrorist groups and the glorification of individual terrorists, such as Hamas spokesman Abu Obaida; speeches and posters that contained antisemitic conspiracy theories about Zionist control of the US government; and incidents of harassment towards Jewish people.”

Bazian has previously made comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, a claim which the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism characterizes as antisemitic. In 2015, he wrote that Gaza was “an epistemic Warsaw Ghetto but only different Semites are locked up this time around” and that “the Europeans who fought Nazism with arms were labeled ‘terrorist’ by Hitler. Hamas is fighting against the occupation of Palestinian lands and is labeled ‘terrorist.’”

AMP works closely with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), another anti-Israel activist group also cofounded by Bazian. Jump told the Daily Mail in an April 2024 statement that AMP provides between $500 and $2,000 to Jewish Voice for Peace and SJP in support of protest events.

According to NGO Monitor, an independent, Jerusalem-based research institute that tracks anti-Israel bias among nongovernmental organizations, “SJP is the campus organization most directly responsible for creating a hostile campus environment saturated with anti-Israel events, BDS initiatives, and speakers. Each SJP chapter operates independently and is responsible for forming its own constitutions, finding funding sources, and organizing activities.”

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