R’ Simcha Felder, an Orthodox Jewish member of the New York City Council, stormed out of the first meeting of the council’s newly formed Task Force to Combat Antisemitism after Phylisa Wisdom, executive director of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, said that City Hall’s policy is not to define hate, including Jew-hatred.
Eric Dinowitz, a council member and co-chair of the bipartisan task force, pressed Wisdom during the hearing on Wednesday about how her office defines antisemitism.
“The vast majority of the Jewish community values the IHRA definition,” he said, of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred.
Among the contemporary examples that are part of the working definition is singling the Jewish state out for unique criticism and denying its right to exist. One of Zohran Mamdani’s first actions as mayor in January was to revoke his predecessor’s executive order using the IHRA definition as city policy.
“Where cities have laid out that anti-Zionism is a proxy for ‘Jew,’ they saw a decrease in incidents,” Dinowitz told Wisdom, who assumed her position in February.
“The policy of this administration,” Wisdom responded, “is that we will continue to not have a codified definition of any form of hate.”
Simcha Felder, a New York City Council member, is pictured as the council’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism holds its first hearing, April 22, 2026. Credit: John McCarten/NYC Council.
Felder, who represents heavily Charedi neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including Borough Park and Flatbush, questioned whether Wisdom has ever experienced real Jew-hatred.
The Orthodox council member also pointed out that the state law mandating Holocaust education in public schools is widely ignored. “It would be very helpful if children at a young age got that education,” he said. “Schools throughout the state are in violation of state law.”
Felder also said that elected officials’ tendency to link Jew-hatred and Islamophobia in the same breath, even when data shows no equivalence in incidence, normalizes anti-Jewish sentiment.
After Wisdom said that city policy was not to define hate, Felder stormed out.
“The last straw was when they asked her about determining whether or not something is a hate crime, and she said that she and her assistant are going to decide case-by-case whether something is a hate crime or not,” he told JNS, of Wisdom. “That was outrageous. She is not competent to decide. I don’t think she should have been hired.”
“That was nuts, and that’s why I exploded,” he said.
“I can’t recall ever hearing something so absurd from someone in the administration,” added Felder, who has represented his area in the state Senate and in the New York City Council for a combined 21 years. “That’s unconscionable and unacceptable.”
Government of inaction’
During the newly formed task force’s inaugural hearing, which ran for five hours on Wednesday, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, senior New York City Police Department officials and representatives of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism testified, including about what city data confirms is a deepening crisis.
Jews, who make up about 10% of the city’s population, are targets of more than half of all hate crimes committed there. The hearing illuminated pointed disagreements about the problems of Jews being targeted by verbal attacks and slurs, which are considered protected free speech.
Michael Gerber, NYPD deputy commissioner for legal matters, testified that Jews accounted for more than 50% of confirmed hate crime victims in New York City in both 2024 and 2025—a proportion that has held steady.
In 2025, there were 566 confirmed hate crimes in the city and 327, or 58%, were antisemitic. In the first quarter of 2026, 78 of 143 confirmed hate crimes, again more than half, targeted Jewish people, he said.
Brooklyn is home to what Gonzalez described as the largest Jewish population of any county in the United States and has borne a disproportionate share of Jew-hatred. In 2025, Brooklyn recorded 239 hate crime incidents, 62% of which targeted Jews. In the first quarter of 2026, the majority of Brooklyn hate crimes continued to target Jews.
Dinowitz, a former teacher and Democrat who co-chairs the task force with Inna Vernikov, a Republican, said that about a quarter of anti-Jewish hate incidents in the city have been directed at children or at places children frequent, including schools and playgrounds. (Dinowitz and Vernikov are Jewish.)
“Throughout our history as a people, we have seen inaction leading to the persecution and eviction of Jewish people from their homes,” Dinowitz said at the hearing. “Today we will not be a government of inaction that allows Jews to be persecuted because we are looking the other way.”
New York City Council members Eric Dinowitz and Inna Vernikov are pictured as the council’s bipartisan Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which they co-chair, holds its first hearing, April 22, 2026. Credit: John McCarten/NYC Council.
Hate crime data
One of the hearing’s most contentious issues concerned how the NYPD counts and reports hate crime data. JNS has reported that after the city recorded a 182% increase in Jew-hatred in the city in the first month of Mamdani’s mayoral administration, in January, that the city has twice changed the way it reports hate crime statistics.
Gerber said that in early March, the NYPD stopped using what he called “hodgepodge numbers,” which he described as figures that did not reflect confirmed hate crimes or the full universe of incidents flagged for investigation by the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force.
Although many have suspected that Mamdani ordered the change in data reporting, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has said that she made the decision on her own, and Gerber reiterated that at the hearing.
Tisch “ordered us to stop using” the earlier figures and “it was not at the directive or initiative of anyone at City Hall,” he said. “We should have done a better job explaining what we were doing, and on reflection should have made those changes in one step rather than two.”
In February, the city said it would only report “confirmed” hate crimes rather than including suspected hate crimes that are being investigated. In March, it said it would report both “confirmed” and “reported” hate crimes. JNS has reported that the city’s decisions make it difficult to compare 2026 statistics with those from prior years and that different city and police sites have varied counts of hate crimes, including anti-Jewish ones.
New York City Council members Eric Dinowitz and Inna Vernikov are pictured as the council’s bipartisan Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which they co-chair, holds its first hearing, April 22, 2026. Credit: John McCarten/NYC Council.
“The fact that a victim is a member of a protected class is not enough,” Gerber said, of what is classified as a hate crime. “The law requires more before we can bring that charge.”
The legal threshold, which requires prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a perpetrator was motivated at least in part by bias, was a recurring source of frustration for council members.
Several pressed Gerber and Gonzalez on where the legal lines fall.
Chanting in support of Hamas outside a synagogue is protected speech, as is screaming an antisemitic slur at someone on the street, according to Gerber. He said that something would rise to the level of “hate crime” only if there is a specific threat of violence or obstruction.
Blocking the entrance to a synagogue or school is a crime, and those who do so are subject to arrest, he said. But anti-Israel graffiti on a restaurant isn’t necessarily considered a hate crime, and the NYPD would have to prove the motivation was anti-Jewish rather than political, he said.
Dinowitz, the task force co-chair, said that police officers misread the use of “Zionist” and “Zio,” which perpetrators use as stand-ins for “Jew.”
“There are people using this as a proxy,” he said. “Kosher restaurants being graffitied with the word ‘Zionist,’ there should be no question that those are hate crimes,” he said. “What you’ve delivered is the ‘out.’ If you just use the word ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jew,’ you may be okay.”
Gerber told the council members on the task force that his hands are tied.
“We have to follow the law, which distinguishes between religion and political viewpoints,” he said. “It is not lost on me that this may well be an anti-Jewish hate crime, but we have to prove that.”
Vernikov, the Republican co-chair of the task force, cited a recent incident which upset Jewish parents in her South Brooklyn district.
Two nights earlier, protesters marched through the heavily Jewish area carrying Palestinian flags and some covered their faces with keffiyahs. They paused outside a synagogue, where a rabbi was helping a bar mitzvah boy prepare. Parents called her office, frightened.
Gerber said that based on the video he reviewed, the protestors did not stop or block entrances, which meant that their actions were not criminal. He acknowledged that the department did not have enough uniformed officers on site, because the anti-Israel group stood previously at a commercial site to protest without marching.
“They were on the sidewalk,” Gerber said. “We can’t say the sidewalk is open to the public except for them. That would be content-based speech regulation.”
“What can I tell my constituents, so they can feel that their children will be safe?” Vernikov said.
Phylisa Wisdom, head of the New York City mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, is pictured as the New York City Council’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism holds its first hearing, April 22, 2026. Credit: John McCarten/NYC Council.
‘Openly, proudly and safely’
Vernikov noted that the task force invited all five district attorneys of New York City’s boroughs, but Gonzalez, of Brooklyn, was the only one to appear before the task force.
He established a Hate Crimes Bureau when he took office in 2017, and six prosecutors and four analysts and clerks staff the bureau, he said.
“Jewish life should be lived openly, proudly and safely,” Gonzalez testified. “No one should be afraid riding the subway, going to shul, visiting friends or opening a Jewish-owned business.”
While the Manhattan and Queens district attorneys offices each receive more than $1 million in dedicated hate crime funding from the city, his office, which handles the highest volume of antisemitic hate crimes, has received $50,000, he told the council.
“I asked for $1.1 million,” he said. “We received $50,000 to fight all hate crimes. The increase in incidents has not been matched by more funding.”
Gonzalez described a conviction rate of more than 90% on cases brought to trial but noted that juries sometimes convict on the underlying crime, like assault or vandalism, but acquit on the hate crime enhancement.
Phylisa Wisdom, head of the New York City mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, is pictured as the New York City Council’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism holds its first hearing, April 22, 2026. Credit: John McCarten/NYC Council.
Juvenile offenders and people with serious mental illness are among the most significant perpetrators, he said, and argued for more investment in prevention and education.
“When I confront young people who have been arrested, they don’t understand the history or the meaning of a lot of these symbols,” he said. “Social media plays a role. The education piece, which is not happening, is critical.”
Gale Brewer, a council member who represents the Upper West Side, said that of a dozen middle schools in her district, only four have taken students on an educational trip to a Holocaust museum in the city.
“It is a free program. I will badger the others and they will go,” she said. “We’re not doing enough. We have to focus on prevention.”
Report to come
Wisdom, who runs the Mamdani administration’s office on hate crimes, which it says it won’t define, testified that her office added another staffer and is embarking on a listening tour of Jewish community leaders.
The office plans to release a report before the High Holy Days summarizing what it heard from the Jewish community and how that will shape policy over the remaining years of the mayor’s term, Wisdom told the task force.
The public portion of the hearing included vivid personal accounts and sharp criticism.
A Queens public school educator described a student doing a Hitler salute in his classroom, but the city’s Education Department and district superintendent didn’t follow up after the principal filed a report.
The New York City Council’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism holds its first hearing, April 22, 2026. Credit: John McCarten/NYC Council.
A subway rider, who wears a kippah, described his fear riding public transit after a masked group took over a subway car last year. “I am openly identifiably Jewish,” he said. “This is an unacceptable breach of public safety.”
Not all testimony supported the task force.
Leo Ferguson, who identified himself as scholar in residence at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, called the committee “not serious” and accused Vernikov, who has faced criticism in the past for her comments about Muslims, of undermining its credibility.
He argued that Jewish community safety cannot be separated from the safety of other communities.
Dinowitz pressed officials to commit to specific next steps: more granular reporting on perpetrator demographics and enhanced training protocols for police, who too often dismiss reports of antisemitic attacks as political speech.
Gerber agreed to bring the request for disaggregated age data back to Tisch, the police commissioner.
“This work has to lead somewhere meaningful,” Dinowitz said, at the close of the hearing. “Anything that forces a Jewish person to hide their Star of David or remove their yarmulke is a problem we have to address. We have to do the work to get it done.” JNS
{Matzav.com}
