A former Women’s March leader who was forced out of the organization for anti-Semitism has reemerged as a member of Zohran Mamdani’s transition team.
Tamika Mallory, an inaugural co-chair of the Women’s March protest group that formed in response to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, was among more than 400 people named to various transition committees on Monday. She will serve on the transition team’s Committee on Community Safety.
The Women’s March cut ties with Mallory in 2019 after founder Teresa Shook wrote in a Facebook post that Mallory and three other leaders had “allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LBGTQIA sentiment, and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs.” Shook called on the co-chairs to leave the organization, stating that their extremism had “steered the Movement away from its true course.”
During the first Women’s March meeting in November 2016, Mallory reportedly “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” Tablet reported in 2018.
She also reportedly berated a Jewish co-founder, telling her, “Your people hold all the wealth.”
The notion that Jews led the transatlantic slave trade, Tablet noted in its report, has been “popularized by The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.”
Mallory has a well-documented relationship with Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. She posted a photo with Farrakhan on Instagram in 2017, calling him “the GOAT.” She also attended a Nation of Islam event in 2018 where Farrakhan denounced “Satanic Jews” and declared them “the mother and father of apartheid.” He added that “the Jews have control over those agencies of government” and accused Jews of using marijuana to induce homosexuality in black men.
When asked on The View whether she condemned Farrakhan’s remarks about Jews, Mallory said they were not her “language” but refused to explicitly disavow them. She did the same on a private phone call with march organizers, citing Farrakhan’s work on behalf of minorities to defend his anti-Semitic rhetoric, Tablet reported.
By 2019, the Democratic National Committee rescinded its official sponsorship of the Women’s March in large part because of Mallory’s extremism, and interest in the organization continued to flag. In 2024 the group begged for cash to pay for porta potties.
Mallory, a longtime activist with roots in Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, rebranded herself as a Black Lives Matter activist after the death of George Floyd. She made enemies on that front as well, with Samaria Rice—whose son, Tamir, was killed after pointing a replica gun at police officers in November 2014—blasting her as a “clout chaser” who was “benefitting off the blood” of police brutality victims.
“I’ve never met Tamika Mallory,” Rice said in 2021. “But I don’t like the way she’s moving. You’ve seen her over the years, and now [her status] is elevated. They need to go get a life and stand back and get up out our fight.”
Mallory appeared in a Black Lives Matter-inspired Cadillac commercial the same year, leading to new criticism that she was commodifying activism, a charge she dismissed as “misogynoir.”
Mallory is far from the only controversial member of Mamdani’s transition team. The mayor elect appointed Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer best known for representing al Qaeda terrorists, as a legal adviser. Kassem’s former clients include Shaker Aamer—a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden—and Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda member convicted in 2017 for bombing a French oil tanker, among other Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Kassem more recently drew media attention for representing Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University who organized the school’s pro-Hamas encampments, after the Trump administration revoked Khalil’s green card. Like Mamdani and Khalil, Kassem got his start in anti-Israel campus activism. While a student at Columbia, he lobbied to rename a sandwich in the student dining hall called an “Israeli wrap,” arguing that the name was offensive to Muslims.
Transgender rabbi Abby Stein, a biological man who was once booted from a Biden White House pride party for disruptive anti-Israel chants, was named to the transition team’s Committee on Health. Before signing up with Mamdani—and appearing in a widely mocked “Jews for Zohran” video before the election—Stein found common cause with Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, just days before the Islamic Republic launched nearly 200 missiles at the Jewish state.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on Tuesday that another Committee on Community Safety member, Alex Vitale, is an outspoken supporter of defunding or abolishing almost every law enforcement agency in the United States. He has described police officers as “violence workers” and the “natural enemy of the working class,” and has called to “abolish prisons,” “abolish the Border Patrol,” “Abolish the FBI,” “Abolish the DEA,” “Abolish the Texas Rangers,” and implement “open borders.”
Lumumba Bandele, named as a community organizing adviser on the transition team, is a black nationalist who organized campaigns to free several prominent cop killers, including a Black Liberation Army member who admitted to murdering two NYPD officers, the Free Beacon reported Tuesday.
