When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced his appointment to lead the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, he had one job: choose someone who could unite a frightened community and demonstrate serious commitment to addressing the alarming surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes. Instead, he chose Phylisa Wisdom—a pick so tone-deaf, so riddled with red flags, that it reads like a tragic joke.

Mamdani’s first month in office saw antisemitic hate crimes spike by a staggering 182%. Jewish New Yorkers are being targeted at record levels, synagogues need bollards, and families are afraid. And who did Mamdani tap to address this emergency? Someone who has spent more energy joking about Judaism and criticizing Israel than confronting the actual antisemitism plaguing New York.

Start with a post from 2009. Wisdom casually announced she’d “totally missed” Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, adding: “Oh well, I’ll repent next year??? (What kind of Jew flakes on YOM KIPPUR).”

Setting aside personal observance, the cavalier, joking tone is revealing. Even non-observant Jews tend to treat Yom Kippur with a certain gravity. Treating it like a forgotten dentist appointment and laughing about it publicly doesn’t exactly signal deep connection to Jewish communal life or concerns.

Would this matter for most positions? Probably not. But for the face of New York City’s efforts to combat antisemitism? It’s a problem.

In May 2021, as Hamas launched an 11-day assault that would kill at least 13 Israeli civilians—firing hundreds of rockets deliberately at civilian population centers—then-mayoral candidate Andrew Yang condemned the attacks. His statement was unremarkable, the kind of thing most elected officials say reflexively when terrorists target civilians: “The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.”

Wisdom’s response? She was “floored” by it. Not by the rocket fire. Not by the civilian casualties. By the condemnation of the rocket fire.

“As an American Jew and a New Yorker, I am floored by this tweet,” she wrote, before pivoting immediately to what apparently concerned her more: “NYC deserves a mayor who will stand up for Palestinians in the face of state-sanctioned violence.”

Read that again. Hundreds of rockets. Civilian deaths. And what floors her is someone standing with Israel.

Wisdom’s professional background doesn’t inspire confidence either. As former executive director of New York Jewish Agenda, she led an organization that has consistently criticized Israel’s military operations in Gaza—an organization bankrolled, notably, by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. She describes herself as a “liberal Zionist” supporting a two-state solution, which is a perfectly legitimate political position. But there’s a pattern here: when the moment calls for standing clearly against violence targeting Jews, her instinct seems to be deflection and equivocation.

Mamdani himself is a vocal Israel critic, which makes this choice feel less like a good-faith effort to heal a wounded community and more like ideological box-checking.

“Who in their right mind takes a job to supposedly fight antisemitism for a mayor who markets in antisemitism?” State Assemblyman Kalman Yeger noted to the New York Post—a blunt assessment, but not an unfair question.

The mayor’s office released the standard boilerplate, calling Wisdom a “principled and effective leader.” But principled leadership in combating antisemitism requires more than progressive credentials. It requires someone who, when terrorists fire rockets at civilians, doesn’t get “floored” by people condemning it. It requires someone whose first instinct is to stand unequivocally against violence targeting Jews—not to immediately pivot to joking about Judaism and criticizing the world’s only Jewish state.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)