Last week Zohran Mamdani stood in front of a camera to launch his antisemitism plan, and told New York’s Jews that, in his words, “antisemitism is real, and it is growing.” Very moving. He even did the math for us: Jews are only 12% of the city’s population but the victims of roughly half its reported hate crimes. Excellent, Your Honor. So naturally the money goes to the Jews, right?
Ah, the Talmud. Announcing the plan on X, Mamdani quoted it to say “anyone who sustains one soul sustains an entire world.” Sure, and anyone who sustains CAIR-NY to the tune of $223,500 sustains a 501(c)(3). That one’s in Tractate Schedule I.
Let’s see. The plan sets aside $6.4 million for Partners Against the Hate (P.A.T.H.) grants, “doubling last year’s funding to community organizations such as the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC).” The JCRC. Very Jewish. Very reassuring. Right there in the press release.
Funny thing about press releases, though. They’re not filed with the IRS.
Follow the 990
Enter David Kelsey, a.k.a. The Kvetcher, who did what no City Hall communications staffer will ever do: he read a Form 990. Specifically, the 2025 filing of the Arab American Association of New York, one of P.A.T.H.’s anchor organizations, the ones that take the city’s money and hand it out. Schedule I is the page where nonprofits list grants over $5,000, and in the column marked “Purpose of grant,” the phrase PATH PROGRAM appears over and over like a mantra.
Mamdani’s antisemitism plan doubles Partners Against the Hate to $6.4 million. One anchor in that program is the Arab American Association of New York. Anchors get the city money and regrant it.
— David Kelsey (@TheKvetcher) October 5, 2026
Who’s on the list? CAIR-NY: $57,779. PATH PROGRAM. By Kelsey’s count, about $223,500 to CAIR-NY since 2021, every check labeled PATH. Not a wire from Doha. Not a Qatari endowment. New York City anti-hate money, passed through the Linda Sarsour Memorial Pass-Through. (AAANY is the outfit Sarsour ran from 2005 to 2017, for those keeping score at home, and if you’re Jewish in New York, you’re keeping score.) And AAANY is hardly a scrappy startup: Open the Books found it received more than $4.1 million from the city and state between 2017 and 2024. When you’re that deep in the municipal trough, a P.A.T.H. grant isn’t a lifeline. It’s a side dish.
AAANY’s 2025 Form 990, Schedule I. Every grant: PATH PROGRAM.
Kelsey summed it up in two lines: the rollout named JCRC-NY, and the 990 names CAIR-NY. That’s the whole story, and frankly he deserves a P.A.T.H. grant for it.
My favorite detail is on the same page. Part I, Line 1, the IRS asks whether the organization keeps records to substantiate the grant amounts, the grantees’ eligibility, and the selection criteria. One checkbox, yes or no. AAANY checked “No.” I want that framed. I want it on a T-shirt. The city is doubling a program whose distributor told the federal government, on a signed return, that it doesn’t keep records on how it picks who gets the money. Larry David would send it back as too on the nose.
Framed. T-shirt pending.
Meet the Jews
Now, to be fair, there’s a Jewish group on the list too: JFREJ, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the far-left farbissinahs (Yiddish for sourpusses who could find the oppression in a free bagel) of organized Jewry, ever ready to Yiddish-wash anti-Jewish policies. Take: $58,084, PATH PROGRAM, roughly $222,000 since 2021.
If you’re not from New York, let me introduce JFREJ. It is not the JCRC. It is not your bubbe’s Federation. It’s the group the ADL once called out of touch with mainstream Jewish opinion, and it took that as a compliment. Is JFREJ anti-Zionist? Officially, no. Officially, JFREJ is “broadly and proudly anti-nationalist,” with members ranging from longtime anti-Zionists to progressive Zionists, and it is organized around “Diasporism,” which its founding director invented as an alternative to Zionism. So it’s not anti-Zionist. It just built a whole ideology so it would never have to be a Zionist. That’s like saying you’re not a vegetarian, you’ve just developed a philosophy of Meatlessness.
Since October 2023, the group has demanded an end to “the occupation and apartheid.” It co-organized a letter with Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow accusing Israel of genocide and apartheid. According to NGO Monitor, it joined a JVP sit-in in Congress demanding the U.S. stop arming Israel. It takes no position on BDS, but insists there should never be any policy penalizing it. That’s the “I’m not saying I’ll drive the getaway car, I’m just saying no one should ever be stopped at a light” school of neutrality. When Mahmoud Khalil faced deportation, JFREJ answered with a protest seder. To their credit, they also asked for the hostages back. It was item two, right after the ceasefire.
And JFREJ isn’t just a grantee. It’s practically the plan’s ghostwriter. On definitions, JFREJ declared back in 2023 that the battle over definitions was an unhelpful distraction and that putting IHRA into policy makes fighting antisemitism harder. Fast-forward to 2026: Mamdani’s plan reviews the IHRA definition, the Jerusalem Declaration and the Nexus Document, and adopts none of them, because, as the plan puts it, the city can fight antisemitism without adopting a definition. Three definitions read, zero chosen. It’s antisemitism by Tinder: swipe, swipe, swipe, “I’m just not looking for anything serious right now.”
Meanwhile, JFREJ’s political arm, JFREJ Action, has a side hustle. In 2024 it landed $150,000 from the Open Society Action Fund for, and I am quoting the grant, “policy advocacy on countering the weaponization of antisemitism.” So one pocket gets paid to fight antisemitism, and the other gets paid to fight people who complain about antisemitism. That’s not a nonprofit. That’s a hedge fund.
On money, the Forward noticed in May that Mamdani’s hate-crimes funding hike looked a lot like a JFREJ proposal calling for $26 million to $30 million. Mamdani delivered $26 million. JFREJ, which had endorsed him in the primary, took a victory lap on X in June, praising the mayor for the 800% increase in hate violence prevention funding and for keeping the NYPD headcount flat, which, they said, significantly raised the bar. This from a group whose X bio says it fights for an NYC that “funds care, not cops.” You write the position paper, your candidate wins, the position paper becomes city policy, and a slice of the program comes back to you through Linda Sarsour’s old shop. It’s the circle of life, if The Lion King were produced by the Department of Community Safety.
Then there’s JFREJ’s record on actually enforcing hate-crime laws. After the Monsey Hanukkah stabbing in 2019, when a man with a machete attacked a rabbi’s home during candle-lighting, JFREJ’s executive director opposed increased police presence as a response to antisemitism, on the grounds that it could make Black Jews and other Jews of color feel unsafe. In January 2024, per NGO Monitor, JFREJ condemned Governor Hochul’s proposal to expand the list of crimes that can be charged as hate crimes. So the city’s antisemitism money flows to a group that opposed more cops after a Hanukkah machete attack, opposed more hate-crime charges, and threw a party when the NYPD didn’t grow. That’s not a partner against hate. That’s a partner against partnering against hate.
Of all the Jews in New York, all eight hundred billion of us, the ones who made the cut are the ones whose position paper the plan reads like.
Locks for Us, Keys for Them
Meanwhile, the plan notes that neither the NYPD nor the FBI considers protest outside a house of worship hateful or antisemitic, a position the Mamdani administration shares. So the guys screaming outside the shul aren’t hateful, the shul gets $1 million for security, which pays for stronger door locks and shatter-resistant glass, and the coalition fighting the hate gets six-figure checks. The synagogue gets the locks. CAIR gets the keys.
Protesters at Park East Synagogue in New York City, November 19, 2025. (Luke Tress/Times of Israel)
Even the man who built this office isn’t buying it. Moshe Davis, the first executive director of the city’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, says the new strategy has plenty to say about celebrating Jews but nothing about the movement that has made them afraid. Rabbi Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center was blunter: it’s basically the Adams plan Mamdani scrapped on his first day, minus every page about Israel. When your predecessor’s work is the best part of your work, that’s not a strategy. It’s a book report.
One commenter under Kelsey’s thread captured the genre perfectly: Mamdani is boosting funds for an aggressive fox group as part of his plan to guard henhouses. Another asked the only question that matters: did anyone ever think this was sincere? And Kelsey had the line of the week. The mainstream Jewish orgs, he wrote, were too busy demanding Mamdani sing Hatikvah to look carefully.
For sure, but we knew when JFREJ started celebrating that something was very wrong. Like even more than we had expected. And by "we" I mean like 5 of us on X.
Mainstream J org were too busy demanding Mamdani sing Hatikvah to look carefully. https://t.co/JtdvskAOJj
— David Kelsey (@TheKvetcher) October 5, 2026
He’s right. While the macher class held press conferences about vibes, one guy on X opened a PDF.
So here’s my free advice to City Hall, no grant required. If you’re going to spend Jewish-safety money, maybe ask the Jews first, or at least the ones who go to shul and not the ones who hold seders outside ICE. And if your distributor checks “No” on the box that asks whether it keeps records, maybe don’t double its budget. That’s not Zionism. That’s accounting.
Receipts: AAANY 2025 Form 990 (Candid) | David Kelsey’s thread | JFREJ on Zionism and BDS | JFREJ and Israel-Palestine | NGO Monitor on JFREJ | InfluenceWatch on JFREJ Action
― Tom Robbins
