News/Commentary

Mamdani’s handpicked judicial panel left out one group entirely

July 29, 2026 | | Print Article

Jews in New York City aren’t happy after discovering that the city’s 19-member judiciary advisory panel is 100 percent Jew-free.

This is upsetting to them because NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently alleged that the panel, which his team described as being a “truly representative cross-section” of the city’s legal profession, “will help ensure that our judicial system reflects the city it serves,” according to WNBC.

Not so fast, Jewish New Yorkers say. According to Saul Sadka, a 37-year-old socialite from Tel Aviv, the numbers simply don’t add up.

“About 45% of NYC lawyers are Jewish,” he noted in a tweet. “The odds of selecting 18 NYC lawyers at random and ending up with a panel containing no Jews are 0.55 to the 18th power—or roughly one chance in 47,149”:

This is why a coalition of NYC’s Jewish bar associations submitted a letter to Mamdani on July 27 saying the panel’s makeup left them “deeply disappointed” and urging the mayor to “correct this exclusion.”

“At a time when antisemitism is rising and Jewish communities are increasingly under threat, excluding Jewish voices from this influential body is not only disheartening, it is dangerous,” the groups wrote.

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“The absence of Jewish representation on a committee entrusted with shaping the future of our judiciary sends a deeply troubling message to the Jewish community and undermines the committee’s credibility and ability to serve all New Yorkers fairly,” they added.

The groups also sent the letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and New York Chief Judge Rowan Wilson.

For now, some Jews like Attorney Elizabeth Forspan, the president of the Brandeis Association of Queens, are giving Mamdani the benefit of the doubt and assuming this error was just an oversight versus being purposeful.

“I think we would be naïve 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,” she told WABC. “We hope that if it was an oversight, the mayor will reverse course and admit that he made a mistake and correct it.”

Will he, though? So far he’s been too busy opening government-run, communist grocery stores:

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But Mamdani’s team doesn’t appear to be playing nicely. In a statement, his press secretary claimed he’s appointed “a dozen qualified judges from a range of backgrounds, including Jewish judges.”

The press secretary added that “any suggestion that the decision around MACJ  [the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary] was motivated by religion is false.”

Jewish civil rights attorney Gerard Filitti wasn’t impressed by the spokesperson’s reasoning.

“City Hall did not deny the exclusion,” he wrote on social media. “It changed the subject to judges Mamdani appointed elsewhere. Jewish New Yorkers are owed the same representation as everyone else, and this mayor just seated a panel that gives them none.”

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Mark Bednar, the former communications director for former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, also wasn’t impressed.

“Make no mistake, the leader of the Democrat Party, Mayor Mamdani, is working to bulldoze the rest of New York government to fit his ideology,” he told Fox News in an interview. “Americans of all backgrounds should take notice of the threat his ideology poses, and to sound the alarm about anyone he appoints to important positions.”

Vivek Saxena
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