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Posted by
Olog-hai
on Fri Jul 31 15:10:59 2026
No Brains Collective
Mamdani failed to name any Jewish members to his judicial advisory committee, law groups sayWhen Mayor Zohran Mamdani named the 18 members of his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary on July 22, he said "the committee will help ensure that our judicial system reflects the city it serves."
Mamdani's chief legal counsel, Ramzi Kassem, said the new appointees to the committee offered "a truly representative cross-section" of the city's legal profession.
But a coalition of the city's Jewish bar associations demanded Monday that the mayor fix what they said is an apparent failure to appoint a single Jewish member to the panel that is responsible for choosing judges in New York City.
In a July 27 letter to the mayor obtained by NBC New York, the groups said Mamdani's recent announcement of appointees had left them "deeply disappointed" and urged him to "correct this exclusion" and "reaffirm that Jewish New Yorkers are entitled to the same representation, respect and protection as every other community."
Members of the advisory committee are responsible for evaluating and appointing judges to the city's family and criminal courts, where they serve 10-year terms. The committee also names interim judges to the city's civil courts.
Attorney Elizabeth Forspan, president of the Brandeis Association of Queens, said the committee has the power to choose the next generation of judges that will make crucial decisions, from potentially placing children in foster care to presiding over hate crime cases at a time when antisemitism is on the rise.
"I think we would be naďve to think that — in a city with this high a pool of Jewish lawyers, former lawyers and law professors — to not have someone from our faith represented on that committee cannot be an oversight," Forspan said in an interview with NBC New York. "We hope that if it was an oversight, the mayor will reverse course and admit that he made a mistake and correct it."
Copied on the letter to the mayor were a slew of state, city and judicial officials, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, Attorney General Letitia James and Chief Judge of New York State Rowan Wilson, to name a few.
Mamdani Press Secretary Joe Calvello said the mayor has appointed "a dozen qualified judges from a range of backgrounds, including Jewish judges." The statement did not directly address the allegation that no Jewish members were named to the panel.
Calvello said that "any suggestion that the decision around MACJ was motivated by religion is false."
The new conflict comes as many in NYC's Jewish community have felt unsettled by the mayor's sharply critical rhetoric about Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a rise in antisemitism, including an alleged hate crime stabbing on Manhattan's Upper West Side on Thursday.
The committee members named by Mayor Mamdani may not include any Jewish lawyers, but the group is diverse in other ways. There are former prosecutors, former judges, law professors, public defenders and divorce lawyers with impressive credentials.
Some are partners at top law firms, including Joseph Drayton of the firm Proskauer Rose, who spent decades in commercial litigation. Some earned their degrees at CUNY, others at Ivy league law schools.
Dianisbeth Acquie, for instance, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and worked in the Eastern District U.S. Attorney's office before eventually becoming the Assistant Dean of Judicial Careers at Columbia Law school. Julia Hernandez co-directs a family defense clinic at CUNY School of Law that "challenges government surveillance and the separation of families of color."
There were Jewish lawyers appointed to the committee during the Eric Adams administration, but they are no longer serving on Mamdani's panel. That includes George J. Silver, who chaired the committee and previously served as the deputy chief administrative judge for New York City courts. Adams also named Ronald Richter, who previously served as a family court judge in Queens and as commissioner of the Administration for Children's services.
Other Jewish former members included Judy Harris Kluger, who ran the nonprofit Sanctuary for Families after serving 25 years as a judge, and Rebecca Roiphe, a legal ethics expert, New York Law School professor and former prosecutor.
John Leventhal, a Jewish retired associate justice of New York's Appellate Division, also served on the committee under Adams, but was passed over by the Mamdani administration after being nominated by Chief Judge Wilson.
Leventhal has had controversial clients in the past. That includes representing Ghislaine Maxwell during her federal sex trafficking appeal, which the Mamdani administration said was the reason he did not pass their vetting process.
"When informed that Mr. Leventhal served on Ghislane Maxwell’s legal team, the Mamdani administration chose not to move forward with his appointment," said Calvello.
Shortly after taking office in January, Mamdani signed an executive order directing the very same advisory committee to "engage the full breadth of the legal community" in its selection process for judges. The order also directs the committee to publish demographic data about the applicant pool for judges and to "create a searchable public database" that can be used to track judicial appointments, "ensuring transparency in the process."
That transparency the executive order calls for, however, does not extend to the selection process for members of the committee itself.
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