The Jews Should Stand With Eric Adams

We don’t yet know the precise nature of the allegations against New York City’s mayor, Eric L. Adams, who was indicted last night by the federal government in an unprecedented step. Here’s what we do know: New York is a big city with a colorful history of machine politics corruption, dating back to the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. Not even Ed Koch, the city’s larger-than-life, three-term mayor who lived like a monk in a tiny $475 per month rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village, was immune to large-scale corruption charges that eventually destroyed his administration.

That’s because being the mayor of a city as big and wealthy and fractious as New York City, which is the second home of pretty much every nationality and subnational group of people on earth, requires that you have working connections to the city’s neighborhoods. The city’s neighborhoods are run by people who get stuff done, which means that being mayor requires at least the pretense of doing favors for the people who do favors for you. The mayor of New York may be a flamboyant bon vivant like Jimmy Walker in the 1920s, or a tool of the city’s crime syndicates, like William O’Dwyer, or a monk like Ed Koch, who never took a dime from anyone. But even if the mayor himself is a monastic innocent, you can bet that at least some of the people around him are not—and better not be, or else the city would cease to function. The alternative to this crude political math is to elect billionaires like Michael Bloomberg who are rich enough to bribe the city’s clashing interest groups into submission with their own personal funds. (Bloomberg is estimated to have donated over one billion personal philanthropic dollars to city interest groups during his mayoralty.) The problem there is that you wind up with a city that is built to please billionaires, and which the common folk can’t afford to live in.

Prosecuting New York City mayors for their proximity to one form or another of local corruption is like prosecuting bartenders for their proximity to gin. Of course, for all I know, Eric Adams has actually done something seriously criminal to deserve the public spectacle of a federal indictment complete with armed SWAT teams. Perhaps Adams has been using his public office to solicit multi-million-dollar bribes from Ukrainian gas magnates and Chinese spies, or has been making millions by regularly trading on insider information gleaned from his legislative activities, or has been building a billion-dollar fortune through sweetheart contracts with America’s enemies while employing foreign spies in his office. If he has done any of these things, he surely deserves to be locked away.

I don’t think so, though—since those are all crimes that federal prosecutors decline to prosecute, on the grounds that they are too politically sensitive. What is not politically sensitive, though, is to string up New York City’s Black mayor on charges of minor graft, while letting the big fish swim free. That’s not justice. It’s lawfare—meaning, the weaponization of the law to serve a political agenda.

And whose political agenda would that be? Well, the same people who see Eric Adams’ refusal to welcome unlimited numbers of migrants to New York at the cost of collapsing city services as a moral and political embarrassment, rather than as basic common sense. The same people who can’t stand the sight of a Black ex-cop who knows that the police protect the people far more often than they abuse their powers. The same people who think that preventing “Zionist Jews” from walking across campus or using the library at publicly funded universities like Columbia and NYU is a form of social justice work.

That’s why every Jew in New York City, and there are quite a few of them among Tablet’s readers, should stand up, right now, and support our mayor loudly, passionately, and unreservedly. He protected us, in some part, when no one else in city government—or the federal government—bothered to lift a finger on our behalf. Now it’s our turn to support him.

But wait a minute, you may say—what if the accusations are true? What if Hizzoner did receive campaign funds from people close to the Turkish government in return for approving the Turkish Consulate in Manhattan, and illicitly accepted other contributions from people close to foreign governments?

You’re right. I don’t know. But here’s what I do know:

I know that Hunter Biden’s laptop—the one 51 intelligence officials, including several former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, argued was a fictitious story that “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation”—turned out to be very true, and that though it raised very real allegations about the then-vice president’s involvement in his son’s lucrative business dealings with Ukrainian oligarchs, no serious investigation ever targeted Joe Biden.

I know that earlier this year Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, sold 2,000 shares of Visa, worth between $500,000 and $1 million, just weeks before the credit card behemoth was hit with federal antitrust charges. Paul seems to be a very lucky guy, because last November, he purchased call options in Nvidia and made a cool $4 million in one transaction, or about 20 times his wife’s annual salary as a public servant.

I know that Dianne Feinstein was an avid defender of the Chinese Communist Party; as mayor of San Francisco, she became the first sitting American mayor to visit China. She also enthusiastically supported granting China a most favored nation trading status in 2000, significantly relaxing trade limitations and benefiting the government in Beijing. And while the senator was busy saying that the Communist Party had the right to commit flagrant human rights violations—she even downplayed the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown by comparing it to the 1993 shootout in Waco, Texas—her husband, Richard Blum, made a killing by dealing with the Chinese. When Feinstein entered the Senate, in 1992, Blum’s financial interests in China, according to the senator’s own filings, amounted to one project worth less than $500,000. That soon changed, with a $23 million investment in a steel company owned by the Chinese government, the acquisition of a major Chinese manufacturer of soybean milk and candy, and other projects. Which made it sort of awkward when the senator’s chauffeur turned out to be a bona fide Chinese spy, an unfortunate event that was quickly silenced without much consequence.

I can go on like this for a very long time. Bill and Hillary Clinton became wildly wealthy by offering high level access to the U.S. government to every corrupt uranium trader on the planet. Barack Obama, the most politically active retired president in U.S. history is the proud owner of a stately portfolio of uber-luxury properties around the country. Who knows what a raid on those properties might turn up? The iron-clad ties between the NGO-industrial complex and the Democratic Party are why, just earlier this week, we saw Democratic vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz huddling with Alex Soros, the son of billionaire George Soros, whose extensive philanthropy has been instrumental in electing radically progressive law enforcement officials across the nation. Yet no one ever investigates how these links allow both radical billionaires and the Democratic Party to gut limits on political expenditures.

So should we care about the allegations against Adams if they turn out to be true? In theory, sure! The law is the law and it should favor no one! But all available evidence suggests that it does. And all available evidence suggests that Mayor Adams is now the victim of a lawfare campaign, in which deliberately loose legislation is weaponized as a tool for settling scores with political foes. This, if you’ve paid any attention, is precisely what New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, another Soros protege, did to Donald Trump, inventing out of whole cloth a bafflingly unconstitutional theory of criminal liability and instructing the jury in such fuzzy ways that a conviction was all but guaranteed. And now, it’s Eric Adams’ turn.

What did the mayor do to make the powers that be so upset? Take your pick! He criticized the Biden White House for secretly flying tens of thousands of illegal migrants to New York City, a move that has cost the city upward of $5 billion to date and threatens to smother an already overtaxed system of social services like shelters and schools. “We need to mobilize,” the mayor stated as early as December, urging New Yorkers to march on Washington, D.C., and tell the president that they’ll have none of his insane and reckless opening of our borders and flooding our cities with people we can neither vet nor support.

Adams also struggled to fight crime as his party increasingly deemed the very act of policing inherently racist, and he stood for New York’s Jews as his party increasingly snuggled up to their pogromists. The federal government, which has the power to uphold laws and deport foreign students who support terrorism, say, or withdraw funding for universities that coddle antisemitic mobs, many of which appear to have direct links to the foreign terrorist organizations they support, did nothing. Mayor Adams, on the other hand, sprung to action as soon as he could, breaking down the Tentifada encampment at Columbia and repeatedly advocating a zero-tolerance approach to the Hamasniks in our streets.

But even if you don’t or can’t see the workings of a machinery of power that has corrupted the foundations of our legal, political, and cultural systems in these examples, and even if you don’t find it peculiar that the one city official who stood up for law and order and safety and decency and the Jews is now being targeted, you should still support Eric Adams with gusto, because his party-line successor, whoever that may be, is guaranteed to make the city considerably less safe for New Yorkers in general (bienvenidos, Venezuelan gangs!) and Jews in particular (ahlan wa sahlan, Hezbollah enthusiasts!). On that question, I have zero doubt.

Adams may also be the canary in a very deep and very dark coal mine. For here is where the logic of this indictment is leading: Small-scale donations by disfavored political players—like Turks in Queens, or Zionist Jews who support AIPAC, the ADL, or Bnai Brith, let alone those who have a nephew studying in a yeshiva in the West Bank—will be criminalized, with every donation subject to suspicion of a violation of the fuzzy laws governing interactions with foreign governments, followed by federal prosecutors (remember when that term was a synonym for apolitical application of the law?) and SWAT teams. One might reasonably suspect that the sequel to the Adams horror show will be an investigation of a major Jewish organization for “bribing” legislators with fact-finding trips to Israel, and thereby acting as arms of the Israeli government—which will make anything connected to the “Jewish lobby” politically radioactive. At the same time, the giant sewer of corruption will continue to flood the Democratic Party with cash and pay for more violent migrants, less law enforcement officers, and other insane policies that have no impact on George Soros and his son, but have a very large and continuing impact on normal Americans.

So because I don’t want to see the weapons of lawfare turned against the Jews; because I don’t want to live in a third-world swamp that prosecutes political enemies and rewards flunkies with impunity; and because I don’t want gangs targeting my wife in Central Park or on the subway or savages chanting “from the river to the sea” outside my children’s day school or my favorite kosher restaurant; because of all that and more, I stand with Mayor Eric L. Adams, a hero to Jews and New Yorkers. When he is reelected, thanks in part to the support of our community, and of all sane New Yorkers, I will proudly pass out squares of Turkish delight.