When people think of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for NYC mayor, what first comes to mind is likely his signature red beret, which he’s been wearing since he founded the citizen-patrol group the Guardian Angels back in 1979.
But what people might not realize is that he’s the proud father of two Jewish sons — and in participating in Jewish ritual with them, Sliwa’s beret has taken on a secondary function.
“I have the biggest kippah in the world,” Sliwa joked in a recent sit-down interview. “When I go to a Catholic church — as a Catholic, I know you gotta take your beret off.”
He added, “I’ve never had to worry about that in a shul or a synagogue.”
Sliwa, who is polling ahead of incumbent Eric Adams but behind Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, has appeared in Jewish spaces as a two-time mayoral candidate and a public figure over the years. On Tuesday, for example, his beret doubled as a kippah when he visited Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway to commemorate the anniversary of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, which he dispatched his group to help quell.
But Sliwa, a Catholic of Polish and Italian descent, has entered Jewish spaces in his private life, too — perhaps most significantly for the bar mitzvahs of two of his sons, in 2021 and 2024.
“I liked being with my boys on an important day in their life,” Sliwa said.
The sons’ mother, Melinda Katz, is the district attorney of Queens County; Katz and Sliwa, who lived together but were never married, separated in 2014. (Sliwa, who is married to his fourth wife, has an older son as well.)
“Melinda said, ‘You know I want to raise them Jewish.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with it,’” Sliwa recalled.
Sliwa added that the kids went to a Jewish preschool: “The kids need to know who they are, they’re going to be Jews. There’s no escaping it, their last name is Katz — the tribe of Katz, right?”
Sliwa said the boys were given their mother’s last name to honor her late father, David Katz, who founded the Queens Symphony Orchestra in 1953. Melinda Katz did not respond to a request for comment.
In a mayoral race where antisemitism and Jewish security have been major areas of focus — Adams is seeking to run on an “EndAntiSemitism” ballot line, Cuomo has called antisemitism “the most important issue” of the campaign and Zohran Mamdani has been scrutinized for his views on Israel — the Republican Sliwa appears to be the candidate with the closest familial ties to Jews.
New York City mayoral candidates Scott Stringer, Curtis Sliwa and Brad Lander attend a memorial event for seniors who died during the Covid pandemic in nursing homes, March 23, 2025, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
Sliwa is not the first non-Jewish Republican to have Jewish descendants. President Donald Trump has Jewish grandchildren, a fact that has endeared him to some Jewish Republican voters and at times insulated him from allegations of antisemitism.
Sliwa, too, has faced accusations of antisemitism in the past — and has mentioned his Jewish sons amid the backlash. In a 2018 speech he warned residents of the city’s suburbs that Orthodox Jews were trying to “take over your community” and are a drag on the tax system.
“We’re not talking about poor, impoverished, disabled people who need help. We’re talking about able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day and we subsidize them,” he said. “ll they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow and who’s subsidizing that? We are.”
When Sliwa ran for mayor three years later, the comments resurfaced and drew a backlash. “My two youngest sons have been raised Jewish. They need to read this?” he said in a video in which he did not apologize or disavow the comments but did offer to meet with Orthodox Jewish leaders. “To say to themselves, my father is an antisemite? Come on, even my worst critics out there would recognize that’s a shanda,”
In 2024, he told Haaretz that antisemitism is “in the DNA” of non-Jews. But in his recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Sliwa said he had “used the wrong term” when speaking to Haaretz. In fact, he said, his intention was to say that a “cloud of antisemitism” often gets “fed into the minds of people” who aren’t Jewish — and that he believed it was a regrettable dynamic.
Whether having Jewish children will help Silwa with Jewish voters in November remains to be seen.
“We’re a minority,” said Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads a Modern Orthodox congregation on the Upper West Side. “Any connection to Judaism is good for us.”
But Mintz, who said his congregation includes both Republicans and Democrats, cautioned against attributing too much significance to Sliwa’s Jewish family.
“It’s cool that he’s running for mayor and he has Jewish children. You may say, ‘Maybe he’s more sympathetic’ – you have no idea,” he said. “You’ll never know the true answer to that question, like how you’ll never know how Trump gets along with his Jewish grandchildren.”
Mintz also noted that many Jews from more observant Orthodox communities — those that tend to vote for Republicans more often — are “not going to like blended families.”
Sliwa said he was happy to support his sons being raised Jewish — though when it came time for their bar mitzvahs, there was one problem: Sliwa said that Katz’s Conservative synagogue would not allow him to stand on the bimah as a non-Jew.
“The Conservative rabbi and cantor were very nice about it,” Sliwa said, but he wanted to have a bigger role than sitting in the audience. “So then I had the private conversation with Melinda: ‘I’d really like to be up at the bimah. I don’t know what they’re saying when they’re repeating their lessons, but I’d like to be up there. I think they would like me to be up there, too.’”
A 2019 Queens Jewish Link article said Katz belonged to the Forest Hills Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation. Her father, who died in 1987, is buried in the Forest Hills Jewish Center’s plot of Montefiore Cemetery in Queens.
The Conservative movement has been wracked by tensions over the inclusion of interfaith families, with some congregations barring non-Jewish family members from some forms of ritual participation. FHJC did not respond to questions about its policies. In an email to JTA, FHJC’s executive director, Donna Bartolomeo, wrote, “While we are unable to comment on a particular bar mitzvah, The Forest Hills Jewish Center as a community embraces families of all forms and includes parents of all faith backgrounds in Bnei Mitzvah celebrations.”
In the end, the bar mitzvahs were held at the Reform Temple of Forest Hills in Queens. Melinda Katz is currently a member, according to Rabbi Mark Kaiserman, who presided over both sons’ bar mitzvahs.
At his older son’s bar mitzvah, which was held at the synagogue with a Zoom audience amid COVID-19 restrictions, Sliwa read from the English translation of the service’s Torah portion, Parashat Behar. At his younger son’s bar mitzvah, he opened the ark and was part of the procession that carried the Torah around the sanctuary.
“You know, they pick up on Christianity just because it’s the majority,” Sliwa said of the two sons he shares with Katz. “But they’re proud Jews.”
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