Declaring himself a ‘Maccabee,’ NYC’s Adams bids farewell to Jewish allies on Hanukkah |
NEW YORK — At a Hanukkah party on Monday night, New York City Mayor Eric Adams walked past the podium ahead of his speech to deliver his address from the floor, standing among the Jewish crowd.
“I wanted to come down among you because all of these ropes keep us away from each other,” Adams said. “I’m not here to be treated as though there’s a level of royalty that’s associated with being the mayor of New York. I want you to know that your pain, I feel your pain.”
The Hanukkah party, held at a historical courthouse in downtown Manhattan, marked Adams’s final public Jewish event before his successor Zohran Mamdani takes office, heralding a seismic shift in the Jewish community’s relationship with City Hall. For the first time, the US city’s Jews — the largest Jewish Diaspora community — will be faced with an anti-Zionist mayor viewed as a threat by the majority of Jewish New Yorkers, an abrupt shift from Adams’s outspoken support for Israel and conservative Jewish communities.
Adams has deep bonds to New York City’s Jews stretching back decades, particularly Orthodox communities in Brooklyn, while Mamdani has had a rocky relationship with mainstream Jews due to his antagonism toward Israel and Zionism, and has allied with far-left Jewish critics of Israel and the Adams administration.
The mayor’s alignment with mainstream Jews and Israel was on display on Monday night.
In his speech, Adams tied contemporary antisemitism to historical persecution of Jews, citing ancient Rome, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.
“This is not about Israel. This is about Jewish people. And they can use whatever terms they want. They can sugarcoat it all they want,” he said of antisemites. “We have to be dedicated to stopping the ignorance, to stopping the false narratives that are out there, to stopping those who want to start spreading this hate even more.”
Adams’s recent statements have been rife with criticism of Mamdani’s anti-Israel rhetoric, without mentioning his successor by name.
“I am not going anywhere, and we have a job in front of us in the next administration,” Adams said on Monday.
He implied that Mamdani was a hypocrite for refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in comments at the Hanukkah party and a media event before it.
“Go to the Vatican. That’s a Catholic country. Go to Tibet. That’s a monk country, or go to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman. I’ve visited these countries, folks. These are Muslim countries,” he said at the media event. “You can’t say, ‘You can’t have a Jewish state, but you can have a state for any other group.’ Come on.”
“This is not about Israel, this is about hate for Jewish people and we have to be honest with that. This country and this globe is known to hate groups and right now, what is happening to Jewish human beings, it’s just wrong,” he said.
Adams said he did not have an immediate desire to remain in public life, and that his plans included smoking cigars, drinking Scotch and spending time with family, and could be summed up in “just three letters — fun.”
Before becoming mayor, Adams climbed the police ranks, then became a local and state elected representative in Brooklyn, building ties with Jewish communities in the borough. The crowd at the Hanukkah party was heavily Orthodox, reflecting Adams’s connection to Brooklyn’s Jews.
While he shepherded the city’s recovery from the COVID pandemic........