As he leaves office after nearly 13 years, Jersey City’s Jewish mayor Steven Fulop is leaving his successor “guardrails” he hopes will help protect the city’s Jewish community.
Fulop, who has served as Jersey City’s mayor since 2013, signed two executive orders on December 22: one banning the city from participating in efforts to “boycott, divest from, and sanction the State of Israel,” and the other to protect houses of worship and congregants from protest.
Fulop said in an interview that he assigned the orders to ensure that the “next administration doesn’t go in a direction that I think is adverse to some of the communities in Jersey City.”
James Solomon, who is being sworn in on Wednesday after being elected in November, has not publicly commented about Israel or the war in Gaza. But Fulop said he expected Solomon to soon face “pressures from a lot of different people, including the city council.”
New members elected to Jersey City’s city council last month include Jake Ephros and Joel Brooks, who are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leading critic of Israel. Ephros, who is Jewish, has been a vocal pro-Palestinian advocate and co-organized a October 2023 letter titled “Not in Our Name! Jewish Socialists Say No to Apartheid and Genocide,” which compared Israel to Nazi Germany.
“For me, it was important to set Jersey City in a place that, even with a new council coming in, that it was set on a path to protect a large and growing Jewish community in Jersey City so that they do not feel that there’s any discrimination,” Fulop told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Fulop’s executive orders echoed those of former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who also signed executive orders shortly before leaving office, banning BDS and regulating protests outside of synagogues, knowing that his successor, Zohran Mamdani, is a staunch critic of Israel.
Mamdani swiftly repealed Adams’ orders within his first hours in office this month.
Fulop said he doesn’t know where Solomon leans. “There isn’t a lot that he said on it, so how he views this, and if he views it as something that he’s going to engage in in Jersey City, is unclear,” he said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you see a trend nationally that definitely is leaning more into antisemitic rhetoric, and I think we need to be conscious of that.”
Solomon did not respond to requests for comment. In 2021, Solomon said that he was raised “half-Catholic, half-Jewish, and mostly confused,” and that his family celebrates Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah and Passover.
Fulop chose not to run for reelection as mayor last year after serving for three terms. In June, he lost his bid for the Democratic nomination in the New Jersey gubernatorial election to Mikie Sherrill, who won the race in November.
Jersey City, home to approximately 6,000 Jews
With a total population of about 300,000 just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Jersey City is home to approximately 6,000 Jews, according to a 2018 population study by the Berman Jewish DataBank, and hosts roughly seven synagogues and a handful of kosher eateries. The city’s Jewish population has grown over the past decade, driven in part by Orthodox families seeking more affordability than in neighboring New York City.
Fulop garnered national attention in 2019 after he was one of the first New Jersey officials to describe a deadly shooting at a kosher market as antisemitic.
“The governor and attorney general were reluctant to call it an antisemitic attack, and I pushed publicly,” Fulop recalled. “I got criticized for it, but I thought it was important at the time to recognize what it was while the world and the country were watching how we respond to make sure that it is clear that it was an antisemitic attack because we can’t be dismissive of these sorts of things.”
At the time, an influx of Jewish residents in the city had stoked tensions over concerns about gentrification, but Fulop said that he had worked to “build bridges” between the city’s diverse communities.
“There was a lot of strain between the African American community and the Jewish community, a lot of misunderstanding between the two communities,” said Fulop. “We did our best to facilitate conversations between leadership in both those communities in order to build bridges. I think we did a good job.”
Fulop’s efforts to contend with antisemitism have not always placed him in lockstep with Jewish leaders in New Jersey. Last year, for example, he announced that he opposed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, saying that he believed New Jersey “already has strong hate crime legislation” and that it was important to “protect free speech.” The definition has drawn criticism for identifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic.
“I think that specific definition is counterproductive,” he said in his announcement, which came amid a push for the state to adopt the definition. He added, “I say this in the context of someone who is Jewish, as someone who has a Jewish education, as someone who is a descendant of Holocaust survivors, as someone who is a continued supporter of the NJ-Israel Commission, and someone who opposes BDS legislation.”
Last week, the New Jersey Legislature failed to advance a bill to adopt the IHRA definition, eliciting criticism from the state’s five Jewish federations, including the one serving Jersey City.
Fulop said that, so far, protests outside of synagogues and BDS efforts had not been as prevalent in Jersey City as they have been in New York in recent months. Still, he said, he hoped the executive orders could serve as “guardrails.”
“Historically, antisemitism kind of creeps up in a lot of different places when it’s unexpected, and from my standpoint, even when you’ve seen it in other cities across the country, even though it hasn’t been in Jersey City, putting those guardrails in place and those protections were important,” said Fulop.
Looking ahead to Jersey City’s new leadership, Fulop, who will soon serve as the president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said he viewed his executive orders as “helpful” to his successor.
“I view this as helpful for him, ultimately, that it sets up principles that protect everybody, and you’re not going to discriminate against anybody,” he said. “That was how we looked at it.”