JNS
Moshe Davis told JNS that if his successor “wants to be successful in this office, she’s going to have to understand that anti-Israel activism leads to attacks on Jewish people.”
Moshe Davis learned that he was out of a job on Feb. 4 from a public social-media post that Phylisa Wisdom was succeeding him as director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism.
Nearly an hour later, his supervisor made it official. He wasn’t surprised but was disappointed, he told JNS.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani “signaled that they would be taking a different approach that didn’t align with mine,” Davis said.
“I was hoping they wanted to make this office something that rose above politics,” he added. “But they decided to go in a new ideological direction.”
Davis’s view is that delegitimizing Israel leads to antisemitic acts. It is not yet fully clear what Wisdom thinks on the topic. She comes to her new role from New York Jewish Agenda, a liberal Zionist group that supports “a democratic Israel at peace with its neighbors and in line with the liberal vision of its founding.”
The group supports the right to self-determination for both Jewish and Palestinian people and opposes the movement to boycott Israel.
Mamdani has long been vocally opposed to Israel and believes that it should not be a Jewish state. Immediately upon becoming mayor, he cancelled his predecessor’s executive order banning New York City departments and agencies from boycotting Israeli products and institutions.
Soon after that, Wisdom appeared to support Mamdani's cancellation of New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred, which includes the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
Many of those who worked closely with Davis speak highly of him and his effectiveness in the role.
Sydney Altfield is executive director of the Teach Coalition, an Orthodox Union program that advocates for the interests of 120 Jewish yeshivas and day schools in New York State and 250 nationwide. She worked closely with Davis from the day he began as Jewish liaison, she told JNS.
“He showed what he can do as a liaison and turned it into actual items with his report,” she said, of the document issued at the end of Eric Adams’ term as mayor.
“His report showed serious problems, and I hope Phylisa takes those seriously,” Altfield said. “I will work with her if she wants. We all want the same thing for the Jewish community—safety, security and antisemitism to go down.”
“Let’s all work together to make it happen,” she added. “We will see how it plays out.”
Davis, 28, speaks in the rapid-fire manner of a native Brooklynite and has a hint of a “yeshivish” accent.
Raised in the Kensington neighborhood south of Prospect Park, he attended Haredi, but not Chassidic, yeshivahs and played baseball with Bangladeshi and Pakistani boys, as well as other Jewish kids, in the neighborhood.
“I guess it was a bubble of safety and security,” he told JNS.
He was unaware of antisemitism, he said, until later, when he visited synagogues that had guards posted outside and two sets of front doors as security measures.
“It makes you realize that our security is fragile,” Davis told JNS. “It’s scary.”
He spent two post-high school years studying in Jerusalem’s famed Mir Yeshiva.
Davis began working for the former New York City mayor, Eric Adams, as Jewish liaison in November 2022 and was one of many liaisons to a wide range of communities, from South Asian to Muslim to LGBT.
When Adams decided to create the city office to fight Jew-hatred in 2025, he tapped Davis for the job.
Davis said that he is most proud of the ways in which he facilitated increased security measures for Jews and Jewish institutions, by working with City Hall and the Department of Buildings, for instance, which issues permits for construction work, and with the Parks Department, since many antisemitic incidents take place in city parks.
He lives with his wife and their children—a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old—on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He goes to a few different shuls on Shabbat mornings, including the Ridniker Shteibel, an Orthodox shul, and the Jewish Center, a Modern Orthodox synagogue which has Israeli flags prominently on its home page.
Being connected to Israel is inseparable from his Jewish identity. “To me, they are not distinct,” he told JNS.
The spike in Jew-hatred after Oct. 7 made clear to him that there is a link between anti-Israel protests and Jew-hatred.
“We have to understand that anti-Israel rhetoric has been the driver and cause of antisemitic incidents. When people are dehumanizing other people for their connection to their ancient homeland, attacks start happening,” Davis said. “That’s what I see as a key part of what the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism was to protect against.”
If Wisdom “wants to be successful in this office, she’s going to have to understand that anti-Israel activism leads to attacks on Jewish people,” he said.
“She should be able to implement policy and agenda to put that in place,” he added. “That is my call to her.”
