NYC’s incoming socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, triggered a flurry of speculation as to why he so quickly accepted the resignation of Catherine Almonte Da Costa within hours of appointing her as his director of appointments. In that role, she would have been responsible for identifying and recruiting true believers in his agenda to serve in his administration.
However, as has been widely reported, she offered her resignation soon after some of her social media posts from 2011 and 2012 containing antisemitic comments were brought to public attention by the ADL – and Mamdani promptly took it.
Yet this was a classic case for him not to have done so. The comments were made when Da Costa was in her late teens, and she has insisted that they do not reflect who she is now. To be sure, though her comments did include such references as “money-hungry Jews,” “working alongside these rich Jewish peeps,” and the “Far Rockaway train is the Jew train.”
She was a natural for the role of Mamdani’s personnel gatekeeper given her teenage woke proclivities and subsequent series of jobs in the woke social work and nonprofit worlds embraced by Mamdani.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, she is also married to a deputy N.Y. comptroller who identifies as Jewish and has children with him whom she identifies as Jewish.
So, more than in most other circumstances, Mamdani had some cogent reasons for not letting her leave his administration without a fuss. Why, then, did he go along so easily and, in the process, disappoint, and perhaps alienate, a big part of his base? Some have suggested an overarching need to disabuse the public perception that he harbors a deeply ingrained antisemitism.
Others see a desire to show the world that he is pragmatic and fully capable of moving his political center of gravity.
Thus, throughout his campaign, Mamdani was characterized as a “turbocharged” version of the city’s previous progressive leaders, with a victory speech often described as “laced with identity politics” and “resentment.” However, to some, the Da Costa incident demonstrates a burgeoning practical strain.
Thus, they say, by moving swiftly to distance himself from antisemitic rhetoric, Mamdani is not only attempting to soothe the 58% of Jewish voters who supported his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, but also that he is prepared to govern from the center.
But we rather think that Mamdani was up to something else as well. Plainly, he now has some measure of deniability as to claims of antisemitism. Yet we remain persuaded that he is still committed to a reinvention of New York in an Islamic image. So he is positioned to argue that he is moved by principle and not old-style anti-Jewish bias.