NEW YORK -- Mayor Eric Adams is packing his passport this weekend for his first trip to Israel since becoming mayor, his office said Thursday, making the visit as the country grapples with turmoil over a proposed judicial overhaul.
Adams is slated to arrive in Jerusalem on Monday and stay there for three days before traveling to Tel Aviv next Wednesday and then returning to New York City a day later, according to the mayor’s office.
Adams will “meet with local and national leaders, learn about Israeli technology, and discuss combined efforts to combat antisemitism,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. While Adams has not gone to the democratic country as mayor, his then-Chief of Staff Frank Carone went for a visit in his official government role in July last year.
The mayor’s office did not identify which leaders Adams would meet with during the visit, which is to be sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York.
Adams’ office promised more details later. In June, Adams hosted Israel’s President Isaac Herzog in New York. Herzog, a political centrist, has a mostly ceremonial position.
Israel, led by the hard-right, religiously conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been roiled in recent months by unrest over a plan to weaken the democratic nation’s Supreme Court.
The top court is expected to hear an appeal of the plan on its own power in September.
The situation has thrown Israel’s military into a crisis: thousands of soldiers have threatened not to report for reserve duty in protest of the proposed judicial overhaul.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will travel to Israel next week over US concerns about the state of the Israeli military, Axios reported Wednesday, citing Israeli officials.
Adams has made fight against antisemitism a priority
Adams, a Democrat who once said he wanted to retire to Israel’s Golan Heights, has made fighting antisemitism a focus of his mayoralty.
The mayor decamped to Greece last November to attend the 2022 Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism.
His trip to Greece came with anxieties about antisemitic hate heightened in New York City after authorities arrested two 22-year-olds at Penn Station and charged them with plotting an attack on a synagogue.
In Midtown in February, neo-Nazis held an antisemitic demonstration outside the first Broadway preview of a revival of “Parade,” a musical about an American Jew who was wrongfully convicted of murder and lynched a century ago. There was a heavy police presence at the show.
“While I’m grateful that the NYPD was present last night, we’re not going to just be able to police ourselves out of this,” Adams said in a statement at the time. “Hate has no place in New York City.”