Mamdani defends absence of Jews on judicial committee

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What you need to know today

• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pushing back against criticism after his newly unveiled judicial advisory committee appeared to include no Jews. “Any suggestion that there would be any decision made or motivated by religion, it does bother me,” Mamdani told reporters Wednesday, after a group of Jewish bar associations condemned the absence of Jews in the appointments. Mamdani stood by his rejection of one Jewish applicant, retired Appellate Division Associate Justice John Leventhal, who he said sparked “concern” after becoming aware he had served on Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team. “It’s hypocritical to pick on the Maxwell case when people have other unpopular clients,” Leventhal told The Washington Free Beacon. “The fact that I’m Jewish, it has a stink about it.”

• Mamdani’s top spokesperson, Anna Bahr, accused former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel of fabricating a portion of his conversation with Mamdani in September. Emanuel, who recently critiqued Israel in a Tel Aviv address, told the hosts of the “Unholy” podcast that he had told the mayor: “I said, ‘Look, you are your father’s son. I’m my father’s son. You chant ‘a river to the sea,’ and that means there will never be a Jewish homeland for Jews who have faced the Holocaust,” Emanuel recounted. “And I said, ‘I want you to hear this: over my dead body.’” Bahr pushed back on Emanuel’s account, writing in a post on X, “can confirm this …. did not happen.” An Emanuel spokesperson defended his account in a statement to Politico. Emanuel’s father was a fighter in Israel’s pre-state underground. Mamdani’s father is an anticolonialist academic who has taken anti-Israel positions.

• Dan Sohail, the man who pleaded guilty to driving his truck into Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn in January, was sentenced to six months and a week in jail Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court. While prosecutors sought a heavier sentence, Judge Eric Vitaliano said that jailing Sohail for longer would do nothing to “remove the stain of antisemitism” from New York City, according to The New York Times. Sohail will be released in a week after already serving six months behind bars. He was also ordered to pay more than $19,000 in restitution.

• The American Jewish Committee has named Andrew Gross, the former director of political affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, as its new director for its New York regional office. “I’m honored to lead AJC’s efforts in the city with the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel,” Gross said in a statement. “At a time when antisemitism has risen to alarming levels in New York and around the world, AJC’s advocacy has never been more needed.”

• Summer camp empire collapses: New York Jewish brothers Michael and David Shabsels declared bankruptcy last month, sending the more than 30 summer camps they own in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other parts of the country into a tailspin and leaving thousands of camp families uncertain as their properties head to auction in the middle of the summer season. A number of the camps are Jewish. The collapse of the brothers’ empire has also sparked a Department of Justice investigation and rattled Israel’s bond market, the New York Post reported.