Mamdani’s Two-Tier Justice

Mamdani built an 18-member judicial panel with no Jews, then rejected a Jewish former judge for representing Ghislaine Maxwell while his own chief counsel defended an Al Qaeda terrorist.

When Zohran Mamdani announced the 18 people who would advise him on judicial appointments, City Hall said the committee reflected New York City. That would be a strange claim under any circumstances given that the committee apparently does not include a single Jew, but it becomes even harder to defend in a city with close to a million Jewish residents and one of the largest concentrations of Jewish lawyers, judges and legal professionals anywhere in the world.

Four Jewish legal organizations wrote to Mamdani objecting to the omission, and his office did not identify a Jewish member they had somehow overlooked. Instead, his spokesman pointed out that Mamdani had appointed Jewish judges elsewhere, which does nothing to answer the actual question of how a committee created to help shape the city’s judiciary could be described as representative of New York while excluding Jews entirely.

The explanation becomes even more insulting when you look at what happened to retired Justice John Leventhal, who had been recommended for the committee by New York’s chief judge. Leventhal served for 13 years on the Appellate Division, had already spent three years on the committee under Eric Adams and had the kind of experience that would normally make his appointment unremarkable.

But Mamdani rejected him, and the administration eventually said the reason was that Leventhal’s firm had represented Ghislaine Maxwell on appeal.

That excuse would be difficult to take seriously coming from any administration that claims to respect due process, but it is especially absurd coming from Mamdani’s administration because his own chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, spent his career representing men accused of terrorism and other severe national security offenses. Kassem served as lead defense counsel for Ahmed al Darbi, an actual Al Qaeda member who pleaded guilty to charges connected to the bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg, an attack that killed a crew member and injured others.

Kassem’s work representing al Darbi was never treated as a stain on his career. It was presented as proof of his commitment to civil rights, due process and the principle that even the most hated defendant is entitled to legal representation, and that is exactly how it should have been treated because al Darbi was entitled to a lawyer and Kassem was entitled to represent him without being held personally responsible for his client’s crimes.

The problem is that the same principle suddenly disappears when the client is Ghislaine Maxwell.

Leventhal did not participate in Maxwell’s crimes, defend what she did or ask anyone to sympathize with her. His firm represented her during an appeal involving legal questions about her conviction, which is ordinary legal work in a system that is supposed to provide process even to people who are widely and justifiably despised.

Representing an Al Qaeda terrorist is celebrated as principled advocacy, or at the very least held up as an example of how our justice system is supposed to function, while representing a white woman accused of horrific crimes is apparently enough to get a respected former judge rejected from a judicial advisory committee. There is no serious legal principle that explains why one representation reflects honor and the other reflects moral contamination, but there is a very obvious ideological distinction running through the way this political movement talks about crime, punishment and responsibility.

Progressive criminal justice politics has trained people to evaluate a defendant according to where he sits in a hierarchy of power. When the defendant belongs to a group viewed as marginalized, the discussion immediately expands beyond the crime itself and turns toward discrimination, poverty, policing, immigration, trauma, American foreign policy and the failures of the system that supposedly produced him.

The defendant is no longer treated simply as a person who committed an act. He becomes a product of institutions, history and social pressure, which means that the moral blame starts moving away from the individual and toward the state, the police, the courts or society itself.

When the defendant is viewed as wealthy, white, powerful or politically hostile, that entire framework disappears. Nobody demands context, nobody asks what forces shaped the defendant and nobody worries that the government may be applying too much power, because the accusation itself becomes part of a broader moral judgment about the class the person represents.

That is how Kassem’s representation of an Al Qaeda terrorist becomes evidence of his commitment to justice while Leventhal’s representation of Maxwell becomes a reason to exclude him. The legal work is not meaningfully different, but the ideological value assigned to the defendant is completely different, which changes how the lawyer is judged.

The same thinking helps explain how Mamdani ended up with a judicial committee containing no Jews while still describing it as representative of New York City.

His executive order said the committee should reflect the city’s population, and his administration talks constantly about inclusion, representation and the need for institutions to resemble the communities they serve. These are not people who casually overlook demographic categories, because they have built an entire political language around counting race, gender, ethnicity, immigration status, sexual orientation and every other identity marker they believe reveals inequality.

They did not simply forget to notice that there were no Jews in the room.

Jews occupy an inconvenient place in this ideology because the people who insist that every institution must be judged by the demographic makeup of the room are quick to count Jews as a vulnerable minority when an antisemitic attack requires a statement of sympathy, but when their own standards of representation would require including Jews in positions of influence, Jews are reclassified as part of the “white establishment” and our success is used as an excuse to pretend like it doesn’t matter.

That allows an administration to describe an 18 person committee with no Jews as reflective of New York City, while simultaneously rejecting a highly qualified Jewish former judge for having represented an unpopular client. The contradiction only exists if you assume that diversity and due process are being applied as universal principles rather than as political tools that expand or contract depending on who is being discussed.

You can see the same pattern in the way Mamdani talks about Rikers Island compared with the way he talks about Benjamin Netanyahu.

At Rikers, Mamdani emphasizes that many detainees have not been convicted, that the government can abuse its power and that the accused remain human beings whose rights do not disappear because they have been charged with a crime. He talks about dignity, oppressive conditions and the need to remember that an allegation is not the same thing as a conviction, which are all reasonable concerns in any justice system that claims to value restraint.

But when the subject turns to Netanyahu, that caution is suddenly gone.

Mamdani campaigned on a promise to arrest the Israeli prime minister based on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, despite knowing full well that the United States is not a member of the court and New York City has no independent authority to enforce its warrants. His own administration eventually had to publicly acknowledge that reality, but Mamdani continued calling Netanyahu a war criminal and speaking as though the existence of the warrant had already settled the case.

Mamdani has gone even further by repeatedly accusing Netanyahu of genocide and recently calling him “the architect of the genocide” in Gaza. The problem is that the ICC warrant Mamdani constantly invokes doesn’t even accuse Netanyahu of genocide at all. Mamdani is borrowing the authority of the ICC to support a charge that the court itself never included, then presenting his own political accusation as though it were an established judicial finding.

The same guy who insists that people sitting in Rikers deserve the presumption of innocence has no trouble treating an untested international accusation as a final verdict when the target is Netanyahu. The difference has nothing to do with a consistent view of law and everything to do with whether the defendant belongs to a class that progressive politics has chosen to protect or a class it has chosen to condemn.

The committee Mamdani created will help choose the judges who make decisions about bail, sentencing, evidence, family disputes, hate crimes and the freedom of people standing before New York courts. Mamdani says those judges should apply the law universally and without favor, but his administration has already shown that its view of legal principle changes with the identity of the person invoking it.

Either lawyers should be judged by the clients they represent, in which case Ramzi Kassem’s career would raise the same questions Mamdani used against John Leventhal, or legal representation is not an endorsement of the client, in which case the Maxwell explanation was a dishonest excuse to reject a qualified Jewish judge from a committee that already had no Jews on it.

In a city with close to a million Jewish residents, nobody should have to explain why that looks deliberate, especially when it comes from a mayor who has repeatedly refused to condemn Hamas, constantly singles out the Jewish state for demonization and has surrounded himself with people who are openly hate Jews.

When will New Yorkers stand up and say enough is enough?