Mamdani Has Made His Judicial Advisory Committee Judenrein And Packed It with Anti-Establishment Progressives

Much attention has rightly been paid to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s scandalous exclusion of Jews from serving on his 18-member Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which is responsible for the vital task of screening and recommending candidates for the City’s Family, Civil and Criminal Courts. This despite the fact that Jews comprise 10 percent of New York City’s population and an estimated 35-50 percent of practicing lawyers in the city.

Yet the Mayor has also quietly begun, under the radar, executing his plan for the ideological capture of the New York City judiciary by the left. Rather than maintaining the historically nonpartisan composition of their panels favored by previous mayors, the Mamdani administration, by executive order, directed the committee to prioritize individuals from indigent legal services and public defense backgrounds. Plainly an effort to deliberately tilt the scales is in play. To be sure, diversity of legal experience is valuable, but fashioning a vetting board top-heavy with activist leftist lawyers ensures that judicial nominees sent to City Hall will likely mirror the same ideological viewpoint.

The administration’s aggressive approach goes beyond mere recruitment; it includes active ideological gatekeeping. Thus, City Hall took the highly unusual step of rejecting a recommendation for a place on the panel made by New York State Chief Judge Rowan Wilson. The administration blocked retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal – a widely respected mainstream legal figure – from joining the panel, a move widely described as virtually unprecedented and a clear sign that ideological alignment has become the primary prerequisite for the bench.

The political nature of this judicial coup is underscored by the reason Mamdani gave for barring Judge Leventhal and by whom he has named to the panel.

When pressed by a coalition of Jewish bar associations that noted the absence of Jews on the panel, he responded that Judge Leventhal, who is Jewish, was rejected only because he had once served on Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team.

Extraordinary!

While we recognize that Ms. Maxwell’s association with the notorious intimate of the powerful Jeffrey Epstein makes her persona non grata with the Mamdani crowd, criminal defense attorneys’ representation of unpopular clients is a bedrock principle of the American legal system. Moreover, Mamdani’s own chief counsel Ramzi Kassem, famously represented an al-Qaeda operative.

So Mamdani applied an absurd purity test exclusively to a Jewish applicant while including lawyers who defend international terrorists. It is nothing other than a transparent excuse to freeze the Jewish community out of the judicial selection process at a time when antisemitic hate crimes account for over 55 percent of all hate crimes in the city.

And, of course, this is to say nothing about who Mamdani actually did appoint to the panel. While his executive order pledged to “revitalize” the panel, in practice this came to mean stacking it with left-wing advocates, academics, and former public defenders, ensuring that the judicial pipeline is controlled by the progressive fringe. Indeed, the newly appointed panel is heavily populated by civil rights advocates and academics who share Mamdani’s radical worldview.

Mayor Mamdani’s reconstitution of the Judicial Advisory Committee is a multi-front assault on the integrity of the New York City courts. He has frozen out the Jewish community and stacked the deck with ideological leftists.

Isn’t it time we heard something from Governor Hochul?