Senator Cassidy’s IHRA Crusade Is a Political Stunt, Not a Plan to Protect Jews
Senator Cassidy, Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, sent a letter to the New York City Mayor launching what he calls “oversight” into the mayor’s decision to rescind the executive order adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, threatening billions in federal education funding. He wants us to believe that New York City’s Jewish community became less safe the moment Mayor Zohran Mamdani rescinded that executive order. This is nonsense. And Cassidy knows it.
What Cassidy’s letter to Mamdani actually represents is not oversight—it is a politically motivated witch hunt dressed up in the language of civil rights. A senator from Louisiana, who has built his brand on “states’ rights” and limited federal government, is now demanding that New York City’s mayor explain local education policy decisions to a Senate committee. The irony would be amusing if the stakes weren’t so serious.
Let’s start with the obvious: the IHRA definition is not a security measure. It does not fund a single hate crime unit. It does not train a single campus security officer. It does not provide resources to a single synagogue in need of protection. It is, at its best, an educational tool—one that IHRA itself describes as “non-legally binding.” Treating its adoption or rescission by NYC’s government as the dividing line between safety and danger for Jewish Americans is not just wrong; it is an insult to the intelligence of the very community Cassidy claims to be defending.
If Senator Cassidy were genuinely concerned about the safety of Jewish students, he might start by looking at his own record. Has he championed the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act, which would create a national coordinator, fund hate crime tracking, and invest in actual campus safety infrastructure? Has he pushed for full funding of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—the very agency he invokes in his letter—rather than supporting the budget cuts that have left it understaffed and overwhelmed? He has not. What he has done is write a letter, generate a press release, and call a democratically elected mayor a “socialist.” That is not leadership. That is theater.
Those of us who have previously testified before Congress on this issue know exactly how seriously its Republican members take the fight against antisemitism. Last year, Senator Cassidy’s colleague John Kennedy—another Louisiana Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee—accused me of “dipping into my ketamine stash” during my own testimony at a hearing on combating antisemitism. This is the same Senator Kennedy who outrageously told Arab American civil rights leader Maya Berry to “hide her head in a bag” at a Senate Judiciary hearing on hate crimes. These are the people lecturing a mayor about protecting Jewish communities? Please.
The deeper hypocrisy here deserves attention. Cassidy represents a political movement that has spent decades arguing that Washington should stay out of state and local governance—particularly on education. Many of his colleagues have fought federal involvement in curriculum standards, school funding mandates, and civil rights enforcement with the rallying cry that local communities know best.
Yet when a mayor of the nation’s largest city makes a policy decision that Cassidy finds politically useful to attack, suddenly federal oversight of municipal executive orders becomes an urgent priority. You simply cannot spend your career arguing that the federal government has no business telling local schools what to do and then launch a Senate investigation the moment a city makes an educational policy choice you disagree with. Or rather, you can—but only if you are a hypocrite whose concern was never really about principles, but only about politics.
And that is precisely the problem. The weaponization of antisemitism for partisan purposes does not make Jewish Americans safer. It makes us pawns. Every time a politician or leader waves their support for the IHRA definition like a talisman, while doing nothing to address the actual mechanisms of hate—law enforcement resources, community coalitions, educational programming, mental health intervention, nonprofit security grants—they are choosing political points over protection. Jewish communities deserve better than to have their safety reduced to a talking point in someone else’s culture war. The Mayor’s recent appointment to run his office to combat antisemitism, a progressive Zionist, understands this well. The Mayor and others would be well served by listening to informed Jewish leaders like her and not partisan demagogues like Dr. Cassidy.
The deadliest attacks on American Jews were carried out by white nationalists, not by local officials who declined to adopt a particular definition. The threats Jewish students face on campus are real, but they are not addressed or resolved by hyper-politicized definitional debates. They are addressed by trained personnel, clear reporting mechanisms, institutional accountability, and the kind of comprehensive approach that requires sustained effort rather than a single press conference.
Senator Cassidy’s letter asks Mayor Mamdani many questions, but here is one question the senator must answer himself: What tangible action has he taken—beyond letters and press releases—to make Jewish Americans safer? Until he can answer that honestly, we can safely conclude that his latest oversight crusade is exactly what it appears to be: a bad-faith, cynical political exercise that exploits Jewish concerns over antisemitism, while doing nothing to address them.
