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When Standards Disappear: What the Mamdani Reversals Reveal About Jewish Political Vulnerability
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech during his inauguration ceremony in New York City, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office, he pledged to “protect our Jewish neighbors.”
Within hours of taking power and very deliberately, he reversed two policies that many Jewish New Yorkers had reasonably understood as core safeguards: New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, and restrictions barring city officials from participating in boycotts or divestment campaigns against Israel.
The reversals were framed as an administrative reset — a clearing away of a prior administration’s preferences. But their effect was unmistakable. They removed explicit institutional commitments to defining and confronting contemporary antisemitism and to affirming Israel’s legitimacy within city governance.
The public reaction followed a familiar script: condemnation, statements, reassurances, and calls for calm.
What has been missing is a clear-eyed assessment of what this episode actually reveals and what it demands of the Jewish community going forward. This is not primarily a story about tone, intent, or interpersonal trust. It is a story about power, incentives, and institutional design.
As a professor of political science, nothing about this outcome is surprising. Decades of research reveal that democratic governance is often shaped less by stated intentions, than by incentive structures. Elected officials respond to organized pressure, coalition management, and political cost. Policies that are discretionary — rather than embedded in durable institutional constraints — are inherently vulnerable to reversal when political alignments shift. Goodwill is not a governing mechanism. Constraints are.
The IHRA definition mattered not because it resolved every possible case, but because it translated moral concern into an operational standard. It provided guidance to institutions tasked with distinguishing between legitimate political speech and discriminatory conduct. It constrained interpretive drift. It limited the ability of political actors to redefine antisemitism opportunistically when ideological pressure mounted.
Its removal did not merely alter language; it shifted authority. Decisions about what constitutes antisemitism were moved from a widely recognized framework into a discretionary space shaped by coalition politics.
This shift matters, especially because antisemitism today rarely presents itself in its older, easily recognizable forms. Contemporary antisemitism is more often expressed through the delegitimization of Jewish collective identity, through moral exceptionalism applied uniquely to Israel, or through the attribution of collective guilt to Jews as a people.
These forms of antisemitism are harder to name, precisely because they cloak themselves in the language of politics, justice, or critique. That is precisely why definitional clarity matters. Without agreed-upon standards, antisemitism becomes whatever the most powerful actors in the room say it is — and Jews are once again placed in the position of having to prove harm after it has already occurred.
In practice, the removal of IHRA has concrete downstream consequences. City agencies, educators, and law-enforcement officials are left without clear guidance. Complaints become harder to adjudicate. Incidents that previously would have been recognized as discriminatory risk being dismissed as mere political disagreement. Ambiguity does not produce neutrality; it produces inconsistency — and inconsistency predictably disadvantages minorities whose harms are already contested.
Supporters of the reversal argue that definitions like IHRA chill speech. This objection deserves to be addressed directly. Standards do not regulate speech; they guide institutional response once speech crosses into discrimination or harassment. That distinction is foundational to civil-rights law.
Universities, workplaces, and governments have long relied on definitions to enforce equal protection without policing opinion. The alternative to standards is not free expression; it is discretionary enforcement, which is far more susceptible to political bias.
To understand why this matters so deeply in New York, one must take seriously how urban politics actually work. The city is not a neutral forum adjudicating claims in the abstract. It is a competitive ecosystem of organized interests: labor unions, housing advocates, immigrant coalitions, civil-liberties groups, ethnic and religious communities, and pro- and anti-Israel movements, all pressing their claims. Groups that exert influence in this environment tend to be cohesive, disciplined, and capable of imposing consequences — electoral, reputational, or financial — when their core interests are ignored. Groups that rely primarily on access, symbolic recognition, or rhetorical reassurance tend to lose influence over time, even when their concerns are legitimate.
The Jewish community has encountered this structural problem before.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, formal Jewish quotas in elite universities were dismantled. Many Jewish leaders understandably celebrated what appeared to be the end of explicit discrimination. What replaced quotas, however, were “holistic admissions systems” that sounded neutral and humane — yet operated with enormous discretion.
Over time, and without enforceable constraints, Jewish representation declined in some institutions — not because of overt hostility, but because the rules no longer anchored Jewish inclusion in durable standards. Once discretion expanded, Jewish objections carried less weight.
This is not to claim that history repeats mechanically. The analogy is not that today’s New York mirrors yesterday’s campuses. It is that the same structural error — substituting discretion for durable standards — predictably produces vulnerability over time. When protections are treated as administrative preferences rather than institutional commitments, they become reversible.
What, then, should the New York Jewish community do?
First, it must reorient its strategy away from reassurance and toward institutionalization. Executive orders and informal commitments are inherently fragile. Jewish leaders should be pressing for protections embedded in municipal law, administrative code, and binding procedures that cannot be undone unilaterally by a single mayor. Standards that survive political turnover matter more than promises offered in moments of controversy.
Second, the community must move beyond consensus statements to coordinated escalation. Unity is valuable, but unity without consequences signals disappointment rather than resolve. Effective political actors develop escalation ladders: clear benchmarks for action, followed by predictable increases in pressure if those benchmarks are ignored. That means legislative engagement, legal review, donor accountability, voter mobilization, and sustained public argument — not episodically, but over time.
Third, Jewish leaders must be clear-eyed about coalition politics. Coalitions are not moral communities; they are transactional alignments. When interests diverge, coalitions realign. Coalitions that require Jews to accept weakened protections in exchange for continued inclusion are not partnerships; they are asymmetries. Participation in pluralistic civic life does not require surrendering the authority to define antisemitism or abandoning institutional safeguards that Jews have repeatedly said they need.
Fourth, the community should frame this issue not as a narrow Jewish concern, but as a rule-of-law problem with broader implications. A city that abandons clear standards for identifying and addressing bias weakens protections for all minorities. Discretion may feel humane in the short term, but it is precisely discretion that allows enforcement to be politicized when pressure mounts. Equal protection requires standards that do not fluctuate with ideology.
Finally, Jewish institutions must invest in long-term political capacity rather than episodic crisis management. This moment exposes a collective-action problem, not a moral failure. Influence is cumulative. It is built through persistence, clarity, organizational discipline, and a willingness to tolerate conflict when core protections are at stake.
This is not a moment for panic, but for sobriety. The lesson of the past weeks is not that Jewish concerns lack legitimacy, but that legitimacy must be secured through structure.
Protections that rely on tone, trust, or reassurance will fail under pressure; protections that are codified, enforced, and defended endure. For Jewish communal leaders in New York, the task is clear: stop treating safeguards as favors, stop confusing access with influence, and build constraints that survive political change. In democratic politics, what is not institutionalized does endure.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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A gunman attacked a Michigan synagogue. Here’s what happens to the community next
On Thursday, a driver rammed his pickup truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Hills, Mich., a large Reform Temple about 25 miles from downtown Detroit. Blessedly, there were no casualties besides the shooter, whom security guards rapidly engaged. One guard was injured. Aside from that, everyone who was inside the synagogue, including 140 children attending school there, was unscathed.
“There’s hopeful news and there’s sad news about the aftermaths of these shootings,” said Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood, a methodical, lyrical look at what happened to the Pittsburgh neighborhood shattered by the Oct. 27, 2018 shooting that left 11 people dead.
The hopeful news is that older, established Jewish communities can rely on close, long-established bonds within and outside the community to get them through.
The sad news is that people unaffected by the shooting tend to move on and forget.
“So whereas this will haunt the Jewish community for years,” Oppenheimer told me in a phone interview, “most people outside the Jewish community will quickly move on to whatever the next horrible incident is.”
What happens next
Authorities have not confirmed the attacker’s motive, although he has been identified as a Michigan man who was born in Lebanon. But among all the unknowns, we do know a few things for certain.
We know that a great tragedy was averted due to the guards’ bravery and expertise, and due to the planning and preparation of synagogue leadership.
We know such attacks have gone from being extremely rare in the United States, to being more frequent.
And we know that what happens now, in the aftermath, matters a great deal.
That’s why, in writing about the worst mass shooting in American Jewish history, Oppenheimer spent most of his time researching what came after the atrocity.
“When the cameras and the police tape were gone, what stayed behind?”Oppenheimer, who teaches at Washington University’s John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, wrote in the book’s introduction.
The power of connection
Both the Tree of Life synagogue and Temple Israel are older, deeply entrenched congregations with close ties to a number of local communities — Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
In one chapter of Squirrel Hill titled, simply, “Gentiles,” Oppenheimer chronicles how non-Jews came to the aid of the stricken congregation, including clergy, politicians and neighbors.
Emblematic of that was the capacity crowd of 2,500 people that came together at Soldiers and Sailors auditorium on the one-year anniversary of the shooting, where law enforcement, politicians and Christian, Muslim and Jewish clergy all spoke.
“There are usually people in government, in community organizations, in neighborhood organizations, who reach out, who want the Jews to know that they’re not alone,” said Oppenheimer.
Evidence of such connection was already on show in Michigan on Thursday. One reporter interviewed a woman praying outside the synagogue, who said, through tears, that the “Holy Spirit” had told her to turn her car around once she saw police cars racing past her to the scene, and go lend support.
In Pittsburgh, the 2018 shooting was also a time for the Jewish community itself to come together.
Squirrel Hill’s close-knit Jewish community crossed denominational divides to show support. An Orthodox rabbi organized a spreadsheet to manage the 24-hour vigils Jewish law prescribes over the bodies of the dead prior to burial.
“In Squirrel Hill, one of the nice things is there is a lot of community and solidarity across denominational lines and levels of observance,” said Oppenheimer, “and that’s pretty rare in American Judaism. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in Detroit.”
A new reality
Iin recent years, the need for solidarity and resilience in the face of such attacks has become, unfortunately, more apparent.
When Oppenheimer wrote his book, he was able to state the shooting was “a unique event” in American history. It’s true that until the Tree of Life massacre, antisemitic violence had claimed just 26 lives in U.S. history. The U.S., more than any Western country, and far more than Israel itself, had truly been a safe haven for Jews.
Since Squirrel Hill, six more people have died in four attacks. The previously well-earned sense of safety has been shattered.
“While the odds that any given Jew will be attacked remain quite low, it is obviously pretty terrifying,” said Oppenheimer.
Some critics of the national focus that fell on Squirrel Hill after the Tree of Life shooting argued that the tragedy got far more attention than similar mass shootings that had befallen non-Jewish communities.
But it’s the very rarity of these attacks that makes them so shocking and, at least for American Jews, so memorable.
In this new normal, it’s even more important for Jews to form strong, mutually supportive bonds among themselves, and with others.
And the world moves on
Those bonds are especially crucial because while the victims of violence don’t soon forget and move on, the world does.
“It’s a short burst of solidarity, and then people leave. Understandably so,” Oppenheimer said.
I suspect that even though prayers of gratitude and deliverance will echo through the sanctuaries of Detroit — and in Jewish hearts everywhere — the attack will haunt its intended victims long after the police tape comes down.
What will make the difference in how the community faces those fears and moves forward is the amount of support it receives from those outside it. If the broader Bloomfield and Detroit community refuses to forget this awful incident, it will change the course of healing.
I asked Oppenheimer what lesson he learned from the Tree of Life aftermath could apply to Temple Israel.
“In Pittsburgh, there was a long history of people showing up for each other,” he said Oppenheimer. “The relationships, or lack of relationships, that exist become more noticeable when something goes wrong.”
“Where there are strong ties before a shooting, there are strong ties afterwards.”
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Political standoff causing DHS shutdown delays security grants for synagogues
(JTA) — A shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, leaving Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups in limbo at a moment of heightened concern about antisemitic threats.
The most recent threat came Thursday when an armed assailant rammed his vehicle into a large synagogue in suburban Detroit, where trained security forces shot at him and he was killed before he could injure anyone.
The closure stems from a political standoff over immigration enforcement: Senate Democrats are refusing to fund DHS unless the bill includes new oversight and limits on ICE operations, while Republicans and the Trump administration insist on passing funding without those changes. The dispute intensified after the killings of U.S. citizens during recent immigration operations.
Applications for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps synagogues, schools and community centers pay for security guards, cameras, reinforced doors and other protections were due Feb. 1 But because the program is administered through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of DHS, the ongoing shutdown has frozen the process before applications could be reviewed. An effort to end the shutdown failed in the Senate on Thursday.
That means organizations that spent months preparing proposals are now waiting indefinitely to learn whether they will receive funding, at a time of rising anxiety and threats.
The grant program has become a cornerstone of security planning for Jewish institutions across the United States, especially in the wake of sometimes deadly attacks. Demand for the grants has surged in recent years as antisemitic incidents have climbed and security costs have soared.
According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years, with Jewish institutions frequently targeted with threats, vandalism and harassment. Community leaders say the uncertainty surrounding the grants is arriving at precisely the wrong moment.
The NSGP is designed to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars annually to nonprofits considered at high risk of attack. Organizations submit detailed applications outlining their vulnerabilities and the security improvements they hope to fund, which FEMA then reviews and awards through state agencies.
But during a federal shutdown, most DHS personnel responsible for reviewing those applications are furloughed. As a result, the process has effectively stalled.
For many nonprofits, the delay creates practical and financial uncertainty. Security upgrades such as surveillance systems, bollards, access-control systems and trained guards often depend on the grants, and institutions typically plan their budgets around the expectation of federal support.
Jewish communal security groups say the program has been one of the most successful federal efforts to help protect religious institutions. Michael Masters, CEO of the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security nonprofit, said Jewish organizations rely on federal funding to cover essential security needs, saying that it was “a challenge” that DHS was currently not processing security grant applications.
“There’s no other faith-based community in the United States that needs to spend $760 million a year, at a minimum, on security that we do,” Masters said. “That’s a reality of the threat environment that we have to adapt to, that we have adapted to.”
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A gunman rammed a Michigan synagogue. Its security preparations may have saved lives.
(JTA) — The suspected assailant, armed with rifles and smoke bombs, who rammed into Temple Israel on Thursday encountered a synagogue that was well prepared for just such an attack.
He hit and injured the congregation’s security director with his car as he plowed through the synagogue’s doors and drove down a hallway. But he didn’t manage to harm anyone else as he was found dead after trained and armed security guards shot at him
And because the rest of the staff knew exactly how to respond to an active shooter threat.
“We always worry that you can plan and plan and plan and practice and practice, and it won’t matter, because it will be something else, but it feels like a miracle that everything worked the way it was supposed to, that our team was so incredibly brave, local law enforcement’s been amazing, and that everybody’s OK,” Rabbi Jen Lader of Temple Israel told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard and West Bloomfield County Police Chief Dale Young also immediately praised the security response in the wake of the attack.
“I am deeply proud of the response, not only from the security that was on site, but also of all the police officers and the firefighters that are here right now, we train on active shooter events a lot,” Young said during a press conference outside the synagogue on Thursday. “I think that training certainly helped to mitigate what happened here today.”
Indeed, it was a situation that Jewish institutions across the United States have trained for, as antisemitism and threats of violence have ticked up in recent years, especially following the 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that killed 11 Jews during Shabbat services. The rabbi of a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, credited a security training with enabling him to respond when a man took him and three congregations hostage in 2022.
“Everybody flees danger, and our team went straight toward it, and they were the ones who neutralized the terrorist and saved everybody,” said Lader. “And our teachers followed, you know, to the absolute letter, our active shooter training and lockdown procedures, and saved every kid.”
Beyond the synagogue’s full-time director of security, Lader said Temple Israel also has a full team of armed security guards on the premises at all times as well as a remote security system that is able to secure different areas of the building during threats.
In late January, FBI agents also visited Temple Israel to train clergy and staff about how to respond to an active shooter.
According to a social media post from FBI Detroit, the Active Shooter Attack Prevention and Preparedness course “combines lessons learned from years of research and employs scenario-based exercises to help participants practice the decision-making process of the Run, Hide, Fight principles and take necessary actions for survival.”
Michael Masters, the national director and CEO of the Secure Community Network, an organization that coordinates security for Jewish institutions nationwide, said that the outcomes of the attack Thursday reflected the preparedness of Temple Israel.
“Investing in security is an investment, it’s a down payment on the Jewish future,” said Masters. “The community that made up the synagogue, the larger Detroit Jewish community, has been making that investment for years and years, and today, that investment paid off and lives [were] saved.”
Among the security measures that Masters said his organization recommended were “bollards or fences or natural obstructions” to the building, controlling access to the facility through reinforced doors or windows and having a security presence.
“What we hope this reaffirms is that security needs to be an ongoing investment in order to allow Jewish life, faith based life, to thrive,” said Masters. “And very much that investment can result, and did result, in Jewish lives being saved, and so we all need to recognize that and commit ourselves as members of the community at every level to be a part of making that investment at whatever level we can.”
In the wake of the fatal shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington D.C. in June, the synagogue hosted a town hall on hate crimes and extremism.
Among the speakers at the town hall was Noah Arbit, a lifelong congregant of Temple Israel who represents West Bloomfield in the Michigan House of Representatives. Arbit said in an interview on Thursday that after he first learned of the attack while working on the state house floor, he immediately began to cry and raced down to his home synagogue.
“I campaigned on taking on hate crimes,” said Arbit. “To be working on these issues, and then to see it come home to roost in my own community, in my own synagogue, in my hometown that I represent is, frankly, just like my worst nightmare.”
While Arbit praised the response by security and law enforcement as the attack unfolded, he said he was “outraged and enraged and deeply pained that it was necessary in the first place.”
“Jewish communities across the country and world have watched, you know, for the past decade, as our institutions have congealed into fortresses,” he said. “We are now forced to live behind, basically, you know, militarized, institutionally securitized institutions, and what a shame that is. It’s not just a shame, It’s unfathomable, it’s unforgivable.”
For Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple Beth El, another Reform synagogue a 20-minute drive away in Bloomfield Hills, the attack on Temple Israel served as a stark reminder of why security infrastructure was essential for Jewish institutions.
“This is one of those moments when, for years and years, we have bemoaned that we have to put so much time and energy into security for our institutions,” said Miller. “And this is one of those days that reminds us that we don’t have a choice.”
Miller’s synagogue had a recent security crisis of its own, when a man drove through its parking lot in December 2022 and shouted antisemitic threats as parents walked their preschoolers into the building. The assailant, Hassan Chokr, was sentenced to 34 months in prison in September for illegally possessing multiple firearms inside a gun store after leaving the synagogue.
“It’s a terrifying day, obviously for a lot of people, especially for parents with their kids at not only Temple Israel but at ours and other temples and Jewish institutions,” Miller said.
Lader said that among her congregants, two competing sentiments had jumped out: Those who “never, in a million years, in our heart of hearts, thought it was ever going to happen to us” and others who “knew it was only a matter of time before it knocked on our door.”
But another feeling was even stronger, she said.
“I think the overarching sentiment, and the one that I want to make sure gets out there, is our absolute gratitude to our internal teams, our amazing staff, local law enforcement and our teachers for really, like, a building full of absolute heroes, who were able to keep us safe,” Lader said.
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