As he settles into his role leading the Partnership for New York City, a prominent business advocacy group, Steve Fulop, the former longtime mayor of Jersey City, N.J., has a few major issues on his mind, chief among them countering the rise of antisemitism.

For Fulop, a Jewish Democrat who assumed his new job last month, just five days after he left office on Jan. 15, such efforts are not only personal as a former yeshiva student who was also the grandson of Holocaust survivors. They are directly connected, he explained to Jewish Insider, to promoting a friendlier climate where businesses can feel safe and welcome in the city.

Many of the Partnership’s Jewish board members, representing some of the city’s most powerful firms in finance, real estate and other leading sectors, also share his sense of urgency, Fulop said, as do many of the 800,000 employees who make up his group’s core constituency.

“They often say of the tax conversation that we could talk about whether people stay or go, if they migrate elsewhere,” Fulop said of his conversations with members in an interview with JI on Tuesday at his fifth-floor office in the Financial District, which looks out on Jersey City. “But if you continue on a trend where it feels like antisemitism is increasing and quality of life is decreasing, that is a trigger for people to leave very, very fast.”

Citing statistics from January that showed a sharp, year-on-year uptick in antisemitic incidents in New York City, Fulop emphasized that the city now finds itself on an “alarming” track. “Those are things that will push people to leave immediately,” he warned.

“Obviously you have a fringe far left that often says antisemitic things and has normalized it, and that’s not OK,” he said. “If it continues on a trajectory, we will be vocal on it.”

Fulop said that he has met with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “multiple times,” and described their discussions as “very positive and pleasant,” despite clear differences on hot-button topics ranging from support for Israel to proposed tax hikes on wealthy New Yorkers.

“To be honest with you, I don’t think we’re going to agree on everything,” he told JI, “but we do try to find places where we agree,” including such shared affordability issues as “housing growth” and child care.

Speaking from his own experience as a former Democratic “outsider” who also rose to mayor in his 30s, Fulop, who turns 49 next week, acknowledged that Mamdani has a “tough job” as he faces pressure from his far-left base in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has aggressively pushed boycotts of Israel. “There is clearly antisemitic rhetoric coming from that base,” Fulop said. 

“Even if he’s not sympathetic to some of them, his base is very vocal,” Fulop said. “That’s going to be something that we pay attention to, when you start talking about some of the rhetoric around the BDS language, where the left pushes, and how [Mamdani] stands up to them,” he elaborated, referring to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. “It’s early days at this point.”

Fulop’s assessment underscores how the business community, in conjunction with Jewish leaders and others concerned about Mamdani’s policies, is now formalizing an approach to act as a bulwark against the mayor while navigating a new political landscape it views as largely inhospitable to its goals.

Even as he expressed a desire to be “helpful” to Mamdani, Fulop has also indicated that he will not hesitate to stake out more adversarial positions on key areas where they are not aligned. In November, for instance, he described Mamdani’s proposal for a corporate tax hike as “absolute suicide” for the city.

“The goal is to be more aggressive on tenor, not necessarily adversarial all the time,” he said. “To be clear that we think that a fragile city environment is at risk.”

Regarding the administration’s track record on Israel and antisemitism a month and a half into Mamdani’s tenure, Fulop voiced reservations in particular about the mayor’s skepticism of the partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion on Roosevelt Island, which Mamdani’s team had suggested during the campaign he would review.

“We think that would be shortsighted and a double standard to Israel,” Fulop, who said he held a call “with some people affiliated with the partnership” to discuss the situation last week, told JI. “Singling out one country that happens to be the Jewish state is, I don’t think, OK with anybody.”

In his final days as mayor, Fulop signed executive orders banning Jersey City from engaging in BDS and regulating the kinds of protests outside houses of worship that Mamdani has struggled to condemn decisively as mayor.

“The guy following me wants to be like Mamdani, but he’s less charismatic,” Fulop said of his mayoral successor, James Solomon, a progressive Democrat. “I thought that there was risk, and better off putting guardrails in place — because you don’t know where things go.”

During an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for governor of New Jersey last year, Fulop had criticized efforts to legally codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. But he said he believed that Mamdani had made a strategic error when, on his first day as mayor, he swiftly revoked — as part of a blanket repeal of all of former Mayor Eric Adams’ executive orders following his September 2024 indictment on federal corruption charges — an executive order that had adopted the definition in the city, along with an order prohibiting BDS in city agencies.

“It obviously elevated the idea that the incoming administration is anti-Judaism,” he told JI, saying he is closely monitoring Mamdani’s next steps amid rising rates of antisemitism the mayor has vowed to confront.

Fulop said that the Partnership’s board members, who met with Mamdani during the campaign as he drew criticism over his refusal to condemn calls to “globalize the intifada” and rejection of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, remain worried about his hostile views on Israel and commitment to fighting antisemitism. “Very, very very, very” worried, Fulop said.

Mamdani’s office did not respond to a request for comment from JI.

Eric Goldstein, the CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, which was among the first groups that Fulop met with when he took over the Partnership, said he looked “forward to working with” the former mayor. 

“Steve brings a strong record of public service, principled leadership and a commitment to civic responsibility,” he told JI. “We also support and appreciate Steve’s deep support of Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland and commitment to fighting antisemitism and the delegitimization of Israel.”

Now that he is no longer a politician, Fulop, a former Goldman Sachs banker and Marine veteran who recently relocated to Hell’s Kitchen across the river from Jersey City, is appreciating his time away from elected office, he said.

“It’s a little bit of a different world not being on the elected side, which I’m thankful for, to be honest,” he told JI. “We’re in a very polarized environment here for people in elected office. So, for me, I think this is kind of a sweet spot of advocacy and impact without some of the headaches of being in elected office.”

Fulop praised his predecessor, Kathy Wylde, the former longtime Partnership leader who reportedly faced internal backlash from members who felt that she was too deferential to Mamdani. But the group finds itself in a moment “where we need to be more assertive with both our actions and voice,” he said, noting that he is seeking to focus on a “very narrow subset” of advocacy issues, including antisemitism.

To that end, he says he is expanding the group’s political advocacy arm, hiring an executive director to help steer its current $10 million in reserves, on top of lobbying, research and a venture capital fund.

“I think we have a reasonable, centrist message that most people agree with — whether it’s antisemitism or homeless encampments,” he explained. “I think we’re in a place where most people would say, ‘You know what? What they’re saying kind of makes a lot of sense.’”

New York City is now “in a unique time and space,” Fulop told JI. “We haven’t seen a socialist mayor of prominence anywhere in this country for decades.”

“The Partnership has a significant voice in that,” he said. The city is “going to be front and center in this experiment of what it means to be an executive in a DSA world.”