When Standards Disappear: What the Mamdani Reversals Reveal About Jewish Political Vulnerability

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.