In the city that’s home to the largest Jewish population in the United States, Jewish New Yorkers are being battered from every direction — and nobody in charge seems to care. Last week, an Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver after leaving an Upper West Side synagogue, his attacker allegedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” before plunging the weapon into him. Days later, a hammer-wielding intruder stormed the Jewish Institute of Queens and shoved an eight-year-old boy into a fence, leaving the child with a head injury. Just another week in the greatest city on earth.

But the hostility facing Jewish New Yorkers isn’t confined to random street violence. It’s burrowing into the institutions that are supposed to protect them — the courts, the committees, the levers of power that determine who sits on the bench and who gets justice. And the man pulling those levers? He’s made his priorities impossible to miss.

From Fox News:

City Hall repeatedly touted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 19-member judiciary advisory panel as a “truly representative cross-section” of New York City’s legal profession — but four Jewish bar associations say not one Jewish member was appointed.

The groups, backed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are demanding Mamdani correct what they called a profound omission from the influential committee, which screens and recommends candidates for judgeships across the five boroughs and across various different courts, including Criminal Court, Family Court and, on an interim basis, Civil Court.

Read that again. Nineteen seats. Zero Jewish members. In a city with more Jewish lawyers than most states have lawyers, period.

A “truly representative” panel — minus an entire community

Mamdani’s own chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, praised the appointees as a “truly representative cross-section” of New York’s legal community. Mamdani’s own executive order declared the committee’s membership “shall reflect the cosmopolitan population of the City of New York.” His words. Not ours. Apparently “cosmopolitan” has its limits.

Four Jewish bar associations — the Brandeis Association, the Jewish Lawyers Guild, the Brooklyn Brandeis Society, and the Queens Brandeis Association — sent a joint letter demanding the mayor fix what they rightly called a dangerous omission. “At a time when antisemitism is rising and Jewish communities are increasingly under threat,” they wrote, “excluding Jewish voices from this influential body is not only disheartening, it is dangerous.”

Elizabeth Forspan, president of the Brandeis Association of Queens, was refreshingly direct: “I think we would be naïve to think that — in a city with this high a pool of Jewish lawyers — to not have someone from our faith represented on that committee cannot be an oversight.” Naïve is one word for it. Generous is another.

Erased from the table

Here’s what makes this worse. It wasn’t always like this. Under former Mayor Eric Adams, the committee included several accomplished Jewish members: George J. Silver, who chaired the panel and served as deputy chief administrative judge; Ronald Richter, a former family court judge; Judy Harris Kluger, who spent 25 years on the bench; and Rebecca Roiphe, a respected legal ethics professor. Mamdani swept all four out the door.

When Chief Judge Rowan Wilson nominated retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal — who is Jewish — Mamdani’s administration rejected him, citing his work on Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal defense. Convenient excuse. No Jewish replacement was offered. Funny how that works.

What the record actually shows

This exclusion sits inside a much broader pattern of antagonism. Mamdani rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. His administration omitted Jewish neighborhoods from a map highlighting immigrant enclaves. His incendiary rhetoric toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alienated Jewish New Yorkers at every opportunity.

Civil rights attorney Gerard Filitti laid it bare: “His own chief counsel called the slate a truly representative cross-section of the city’s legal profession, in the city with the largest Jewish population in America, on the panel that will pick the judges who hear hate-crime cases.” That’s not an accident. That’s architecture.

Confronted with criticism, City Hall dodged. Press secretary Joe Calvello insisted the mayor had appointed “a dozen qualified judges from a range of backgrounds, including Jewish judges” — but never addressed the panel itself. He called any suggestion that religion motivated the decisions “false.” When someone answers a question you didn’t ask, you’ve already gotten your answer.

Believe what they show you

Mark Bednar, who previously led communications for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, warned that “the leader of the Democrat Party, Mayor Mamdani, is working to bulldoze the rest of New York government to fit his ideology.”

He’s right. When a government systematically removes a community from the institutions meant to protect them — from the committees that choose the judges who hear their hate-crime cases — the word “oversight” loses all meaning. Jewish New Yorkers aren’t demanding special treatment. They want a seat at a table their tax dollars built. Mamdani’s answer, through one deliberate action after another, has been a resounding no.

Key Takeaways

• Mamdani’s 19-member judiciary panel includes zero Jewish representation in America’s most Jewish city.
• Four Jewish members who served under Mayor Adams were all removed under Mamdani.
• The panel selects judges who preside over hate-crime cases amid surging antisemitic violence.
• City Hall deflected criticism without ever addressing the exclusion directly.

Sources: Fox News, NBC New York