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Anti-BDS order will test Mamdani on day one
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.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
The post Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.