Jewish Legal Groups Slam Mamdani's Exclusion of Jews From Judicial Appointments Panel

Jewish legal organizations have assailed New York City's anti-Zionist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, after he announced a panel on local judicial appointments that included not a single Jew among its 18 members, whom the mayor had said would "reflect" the city's population. New York is home to the largest Jewish population in the United States, with Jews making up about one-tenth of city residents and long prominent in the legal professions from which the Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary recruits its members. In a letter to Mamdani on Monday, July 27, the presidents of the Brandeis Association of Queens, the New York County Jewish Lawyers Guild, the Brooklyn Brandeis Society, and the Bronx County Jewish Bar Association said they were deeply disappointed by the committee's omission of Jews.

The letter argued that leaving Jews off the committee is neither reflective nor inclusive and fits a troubling pattern that has left many Jewish New Yorkers feeling increasingly marginalized, pointing to Mamdani's omission of Jews from a map of New York's ethnic enclaves and his revocation of an antisemitism definition that stigmatizes the denial of Jewish self-determination. The four associations warned that leadership matters at a time when antisemitism in the city is reaching historic levels. They cited the stabbing of a visibly Jewish man on Manhattan's Upper West Side on Thursday, July 23, as "yet another painful reminder that antisemitic violence is real and growing."

Critics of the mayor had blamed that attack, in which the assailant stabbed an Asian man and an Orthodox Jew, on Mamdani's anti-Israel rhetoric, including a video statement issued on Wednesday, July 22, in which he demanded the arrest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The four associations together represent Jewish lawyers across Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Their letter presses the mayor to ensure that Jewish representation is restored to the body that shapes the city's judicial appointments.

(TOI/VFI News)

"Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow." – Isaiah 1:17