Mamdani's 18-Member Judiciary Panel Has Zero Jewish Appointees, Jewish Bar Groups Demand Fix

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed 18 new members to the Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary this week. According to JNS, none of them appear to be Jewish, in a city where Jewish attorneys make up a significant share of the bar association.

The committee isn't a symbolic panel. It screens and recommends judges for Criminal Court, Family Court, and interim appointments to Civil Court, according to Fox News. That means the people it vets can end up hearing hate crime cases.

Four Jewish legal groups, the Queens Brandeis Association, the Jewish Lawyers Guild, the Brooklyn Brandeis Society, and the Bronx County Jewish Bar Association, sent Mamdani a joint letter Monday. "Not a single Jewish attorney, former judge or legal professional was appointed to a committee your administration described as one that would be 'truly reflective of New York City,'" they wrote, according to Matzav. The New York Jewish Week reported the letter came from four Jewish bar associations backed by the Anti-Defamation League.

The timing matters. City Hall's Jan. 2 executive order establishing the committee said its membership "shall reflect the cosmopolitan population of the City of New York." When the 18 (Fox News initially reported 19) appointees were announced July 22, Ramzi Kassem, chief counsel to the mayor, called it "a truly representative cross-section of the legal profession in New York City."

The Leventhal Rejection

The letter singled out one case: retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal was passed over for the committee, which the groups called an "unprecedented rejection."

Mamdani's office says that had nothing to do with religion. Press secretary Joe Calvello told Politico that Mamdani has appointed a dozen judges from a range of backgrounds, "including Jewish judges," and that Leventhal was excluded after the administration learned he had served on Ghislaine Maxwell's legal team, according to Matzav and the New York Jewish Week. A spokesman separately told the New York Times that the claim appointments were "motivated by religion is false."

If Leventhal's résumé includes work for a convicted sex trafficker's defense, a mayor declining to seat him on a judicial screening panel is not obviously an act of religious discrimination. The Jewish bar groups haven't disputed that Leventhal worked on Maxwell's team. Their objection is that his rejection, combined with zero Jewish appointees among 18 people, still adds up to an exclusionary pattern.

One Appointee's Record Draws Scrutiny

JNS reported that one new committee member, Julia Hernandez, an associate professor at CUNY School of Law, signed a 2020 statement from CUNY Law students, faculty and alumni backing Students for Justice in Palestine. That statement argued that "a subset of Zionist activists choose to weaponize the genuine threats of antisemitism elsewhere in our society as a tactic to repress activism and harass and threaten Palestinian students and Muslim students more broadly."

That's a five-year-old advocacy statement, not evidence of how Hernandez would vet judicial nominees. But for critics already alleging a pattern, it's the kind of detail that reinforces suspicion rather than dispels it.

A Broader Pattern, Critics Say

The Jewish bar groups tied this to other grievances: Mamdani's refusal to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism, and the omission of Jewish neighborhoods from a city map highlighting immigrant communities, according to Matzav. They also noted the letter came days after a violent antisemitic attack outside an Upper West Side synagogue.

Mark Goldfeder, a rabbi and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS the committee's makeup "is all part of a pattern and practice of under-protecting Jewish residents in this city," calling it "the normalization of antisemitic hate." He argued that if you pulled 18 people at random from New York's legal profession, "you would expect there to be several Jewish members."

Statistically, such a composition is unusual. City Hall's own "truly representative" language invited scrutiny of that anomaly.

The NYPD's own hate crime data, cited by the New York Jewish Week, shows Jews were targeted in 181 hate crime incidents since January 1, the largest share of any bias group and 55.6% of all hate crimes reported this year. City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who is Jewish, allocated $750,000 to the Brooklyn DA's hate crimes bureau on Monday after DA Eric Gonzalez requested more funding, according to JNS.

Separately, the New York Jewish Week reported backlash over a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Mamdani's Antisemitic Smoke Signals," which ran an image of a protester depicting the mayor in a Hamas headband. Mamdani communications director Anna Bahr called the image "incredibly Islamophobic."

No investigation or legal complaint has been filed over the committee's composition. The four Jewish bar associations have asked Mamdani to add qualified Jewish members and to publicly "reaffirm that Jewish New Yorkers are entitled to the same representation, respect and protection as every other community." As of now, City Hall has defended the appointments as merit-based and has not announced any changes to the panel's makeup.