I am amused by the framing that Zohran Mamdani’s propensity to surround himself with anti-Semites is a “hiring hiccup” (Washington Post) or a “process” problem (New York Times). Mamdani has very famously built his entire career in activism on a foundation of nonengagement with people who believe in the Jewish right to self-determination. If one subtracted all the anti-Zionists from Mamdani’s social and professional networks, it is doubtful one would be left with enough people to make a minyan let alone staff a New York City mayoral administration.
The reason major newspapers are talking about this is because last week Mamdani had announced Catherine Almonte Da Costa as his director of appointments, meaning she would oversee the hiring process for the Mamdani administration. The ADL then pointed out past anti-Semitic social-media posts by Da Costa, and she resigned.
Though the posts were a decade old, you can’t have someone who has complained about “money hungry Jews” directing the hiring of the mayor’s administration and still insist the public isn’t giving Mamdani a fair shot.
The Times reports that revamping the “transition committee’s vetting process” is the answer the incoming mayor has settled on. Vetting was being handled by the mayor-elect’s team, but now they will hire an outside firm.
That makes sense, because, again, Mamdani does not surround himself with people who would consider public anti-Semitic rantings to be red flags. Let’s be honest: Such rantings would be more likely to push that resume to the top of the pile.
As one might expect, the Washington Post was tougher on Mamdani than was the Times. The Post notes that Mamdani is keeping Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch on the job, so he is not entirely without pragmatic self-interest. But, the editors warn, “Mamdani’s transition team is rife with ideologues, like Lumumba Bandele, a Black nationalist who advocated for the release of a cop killer; Alex Vitale, author of ‘The End of Policing’; and Lina Khan, who stretched the boundaries of state power as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Mamdani’s chief of staff is a fellow traveler in the Democratic Socialists of America.”
As I argued in August, association with the DSA should be disqualifying. That certainly includes Mamdani, since it “formed the backbone of Mr. Mamdani’s canvassing operation and played an essential role in pushing the nation’s largest city to embrace an unwavering progressive campaign agenda,” as the Times described it. The DSA rallied in celebration of the October 7 attacks and has since been a key cog in the pro-Hamas propaganda machine.
But there was no reason to expect that a post-election Mamdani would be much different from the pre-election Mamdani, who spent his time with anti-Semitic congress members, Jew-baiting progressive podcasters, founts of Qatari propaganda, Moscow mouthpieces, and other categories of fine upstanding citizens.
Even though Mamdani has continued to vow to arrest the Israeli prime minister and offered other insane expressions of his obsession with Jews, he didn’t truly hit his low point until recently, when he justified a raging anti-Semitic mob’s descent upon a synagogue in New York. The lesson from that was, I think, that he still has not hit bottom.
And that is certainly the direction events had been heading until l’affaire Da Costa. Now we see an acknowledgement of something the Jews of New York and beyond had long known: Left to his own devices, Mamdani would just keep surrounding himself with anti-Semites. If you want a non-anti-Semitic mayoral administration, you have to go outside Mamdani. That was the conceit behind the campaigns of his election opponents, of course, and they were right—even Mamdani knows it.
Now, an outside contractor will be given oversight of the mayor’s vetting process. But for how long? And what about the actual mayoral administration once it gets off and running? Who will babysit Mamdani? Because in the end, he’s still the guy making the decisions. And he is personally incapable of putting together a team that isn’t a threat to the well-being of New Yorkers, and not just Jewish New Yorkers. Because as we know, anti-Semitism is a marker of wider decline and an uncontainable civic poison.
So: What now?
