New York City
Mamdani Launches Antisemitism Hotline Staffed By People Who Have Not Defined Antisemitism
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY: Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic frontrunner in the New York City mayoral race, released a formal plan to combat antisemitism Tuesday morning, and it is, by any measure, a plan. It has pages. It has paragraphs. It has a section called "Community Trust and Safety" that uses the word "inclusive" four times without once triggering a definition of the thing the entire document was commissioned to address.
The plan does not adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which 43 countries and the U.S. State Department have signed onto. It does not adopt the Jerusalem Declaration either. It does not, in any legally operative sense, adopt any definition at all, which means Mamdani's antisemitism plan is currently more open-ended than a Yelp review of a falafel cart.
Asked why the campaign declined to include a formal definition, a spokesperson explained that Mamdani believes "fighting hatred requires listening, not labeling," a sentence that works equally well as a campaign slogan, a Fortune cookie, and a reason to do nothing.
The plan also does not acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, an omission that is either a principled political position or an oversight of roughly the same magnitude as a heart surgery manual that does not mention the heart. The campaign has not clarified which.
"This is a comprehensive, living document," said Mamdani at a Tuesday press conference, describing something that, in publishing, is usually called a draft. "We will continue to engage with all communities as we develop our shared understanding of what harm looks like." He then took three questions, none of which he answered in a way that contained a noun and a verb in the same direction.
Rabbi David Feldman of the Crown Heights Interfaith Dialogue Consortium, an organization that does not exist but absolutely should, called the plan "a meaningful first step toward the conversation we will need to have before we begin the process of determining the framework for the definition."
Local resident Patricia Chu, who attended the press conference because she thought it was a permit hearing, said she found the whole thing confusing. "If you don't say what the thing is, how do you know when you've stopped it?" she asked, becoming accidentally the sharpest policy voice in the room.
Mamdani is not alone in this approach. Releasing an antisemitism plan without defining antisemitism has become a bipartisan tradition at institutions ranging from elite universities to municipal governments, all of whom have discovered that the safest version of fighting hatred is a document that commits to fighting something, loosely, when convenient, pending further review.
The plan is expected to be updated following community engagement sessions scheduled for October, November, and a third date described only as "when alignment is achieved."
It currently has an action item, a values statement, and no Jews in it who are Jewish in any way the document is prepared to defend.
The story we are making fun of: https://nypost.com/2026/09/29/us-news/zohran-mamdanis-plan-to-fight-antisemitism-ignores-zionism-refuses-to-define-anti-jewish-hate/