Eighteen lawyers, zero Jews

For generations, Jewish life has been one of the defining aspects of New York’s identity, with Jews playing an important role alongside the city’s other ethnic, racial and religious communities.

Is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signaling that this is no longer the case?

City Hall’s shocking exclusion of Jews from the new 18-member judicial screening committee suggests that this may very well be the case.

New York City is home to one of the world’s largest and most accomplished Jewish legal communities. For generations, Jewish lawyers—not as Jews, but as New Yorkers who happen to be Jewish—have helped shape the city’s courts, law firms, bar associations and civic institutions.

Yet in constituting his new screening panel, Mamdani somehow managed not to include a single Jew. Not one.

Several Jewish bar associations and communal organizations immediately protested. Their concern is not merely symbolic. Judicial screening panels influence who ultimately becomes a judge and therefore help shape the character of the city’s judiciary for years to come. Excluding an entire community from that process sends a message, whether intended or not.

Equally striking has been the response—or, more precisely, the absence of one.

So far, the objections have come almost entirely from Jewish organizations. Where are New York’s non-Jewish bar groups? Where are the civil rights organizations that routinely insist that racial, ethnic and religious statistical disparities demand explanation, if not legal challenge?

Apparently, disparate impact adversely affecting the Jewish community does not generate much concern.

But the central question is Mamdani’s conduct.

Mamdani is a remarkable politician. His political instincts are superb. His operation is disciplined and sophisticated. It strains credulity to believe that neither he nor anyone around him anticipated the uproar that would result from appointing an 18-member judicial screening panel without a single Jewish lawyer, particularly given his already fractious relationship with much of the city’s Jewish community.

Avoiding that controversy would have been effortless. New York has no shortage of distinguished Jewish lawyers, including those whose politics closely align with the mayor’s. Appoint one or two, and the issue largely disappears.

Instead, the administration walked straight into a huge and ugly controversy. It accepted—or chose—a panel with no Jewish representation whatsoever. Why?

In defending the indefensible, the mayor even found a way to invoke Jeffrey Epstein, dismissing criticism over the exclusion of retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal because Leventhal represented Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell on appeal.

That inflammatory argument ignores one of the oldest principles of our legal system: Lawyers are expected to zealously represent even unpopular and reviled clients. Indeed, New York’s chief judge recommended Justice Leventhal for the committee notwithstanding his representation of Maxwell.

Similarly, Mamdani’s protest that he has appointed or reappointed Jewish judges is beside the point. The screening panel debacle stands on its own. It potentially signals an institutional shift irrespective of any individual judicial appointment.

One need not claim the ability to read Mamdani’s mind to perceive a troubling possibility: that the absence of Jewish representation was no mere oversight but was intended to convey a message about a new reality—a reality in which the place of Jews in New York City will be suppressed.

That possibility cannot be viewed in isolation. It comes in the backdrop of the anti-Zionism Mamdani himself has said was at the “crux” of his decision to enter politics, his repeated accusations that Israel is committing genocide, his branding of AIPAC as a “monster” and his increasingly antagonistic relationship with much of the city’s organized Jewish community. And now comes the screening-panel affront.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps the exclusion of Jews from this panel was simply a colossal blunder. If so, the mayor should say so, explain how it happened, and correct it.

Until then, New Yorkers—not just Jewish New Yorkers but all New Yorkers—are entitled to ask whether an administration that prides itself on inclusiveness in virtually every other context deliberately chose to send a message of exclusion when it came to Jews.

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