THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE HAS NEVER BEEN A MAJOR PLAYER in local New York politics. But before 9:00 am on the morning after New Yorkers elected Zohran Mamdani mayor late last year, the group announced plans to dedicate significant resources to “monitor” the incoming administration, providing “early-warning research” that ADL said would “protect Jewish residents.”
Nearly five months later, the centerpiece of the ADL’s anti-Mamdani campaign, a website it calls the Mamdani Monitor, is a veritable blacklist of Muslim Mamdani appointees. The ADL has so far posted 30 intelligence-style dossiers on senior Mamdani administration officials, and on members of now-disbanded administration transition committees, each labeled with a rating: “concerning,” “positive,” or “no relevant record.” Among the 22 Mamdani appointees the organization has deemed “concerning,” more than half are Muslim or have roots in the Middle East or South Asia, according to an analysis by Jewish Currents. Jewish Currents could only identify two senior-level Muslim Mamdani appointees who the ADL has not profiled, and only one who was profiled and not labeled “concerning.”
Meanwhile, the organization has awarded a “positive” rating to just one administration official: Jessica Tisch, the billionaire police commissioner, whose immediate and extended family are stalwarts of the city’s Jewish establishment.
The ADL has meddled in New York politics in the past, leading the charge in 2010 against an effort to build a new mosque on Manhattan’s Park Place, which its national director at the time, Abraham Foxman, deemed too close to the site of the September 11th attacks. For the most part, though, it’s left New York politics to other establishment groups. Now, its new emphasis on political work in New York looks to progressive and liberal activists like an anti-Muslim crusade. “They are subjecting any Muslim employees, or prospective Muslim employees, to extra scrutiny because of their faith in an attempt to sideline the Muslim community, and especially to smear Muslim Americans who have been critical of the Israeli government,” says Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group. (The Mamdani Monitor site flags three appointees’ links to CAIR.)
The mayor’s office declined to comment, but an operative close to the mayor called the Mamdani Monitor site “a clearly Islamophobic blacklist.” The ADL, for its part, did not respond to a list of questions about its Mamdani tracking operation.
The lengthy dossiers the ADL has posted on the Mamdani appointees it’s deemed “concerning” rely heavily on guilt by association, harping on tenuous or implied links to individuals or groups the ADL dislikes.
Take the ADL dossier on Bitta Mostofi, a special advisor to the first deputy mayor with an extensive resume in public service, who the ADL tagged as “concerning” in part because she “has been associated” with the prominent Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour. ADL’s evidence for that association is that Mostofi “accepted an award” from Sarsour in 2019, appeared with her on a panel about immigrants in New York in 2017, and spoke at the same protest as her in 2020. “They’re pointing out who in the Mamdani administration is pro-Palestine,” says Sarsour, who is mentioned in six of the dossiers on the ADL site. “That’s what that list is.”
Mostofi and other administration officials didn’t respond to a request for comment submitted through the mayor’s press office.
The dossiers also paint even incidental links to progressive Jewish groups as potentially disqualifying. ADL’s dossier on Faiza Ali, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office on Immigrant Affairs, says Ali was “trained by” the progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc, which it says called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Bend the Arc’s CEO, Jamie Beran, told Jewish Currents, “I think that the Mamdani Monitor is an incendiary and bigoted response that is not in the true interest of American Jews.”
The dossier on Phylisa Wisdom, the progressive Jewish activist appointed in February to lead the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, attempts to make even more attenuated connections. It says Wisdom is “concerning” in part because New York Jewish Agenda, the liberal Jewish group Wisdom formerly ran, works with the leftist Jewish groups Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and IfNotNow, which in turn, the ADL alleges, “work directly” with unnamed groups that “are known to harass Jews.”
Other Mamdani Monitor dossiers imply that mainstream stances taken in defense of Muslim civil rights are radical or extreme. The ADL dossier on Ali says that she organized a petition against the police department’s use of an anti-Muslim film called The Third Jihad as a training tool in 2012, implying that her opposition to the use of the film in police training is among the reasons for tagging her as “concerning.” But at the time of Ali’s petition, the disclosure that police trainees were shown The Third Jihad was a major scandal in New York politics, and the subject of a front-page exposé in The New York Times. Even the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, acknowledged that it had been “terrible judgement” to show the film to police recruits.
Some of the material cited in the dossiers is notably old: It calls Mamdani’s chief counsel, the CUNY law professor Ramzi Kassem, “concerning” based in part on views expressed in articles he published in a student newspaper in the late 1990s. The ADL also cites Kassem’s legal work for two Guantanamo detainees. (The organization did not respond to questions about whether it believes Guantanamo detainees deserve legal representation, or whether attorneys should be judged based on the allegations made against their clients.)
For all the thousands of words the ADL has published on Mamdani appointees on its monitor site, its impact has been slight. The group claims credit for one resignation: Cat Almonte Da Costa, appointed as the mayor’s director of appointments in mid-December, resigned shortly after the ADL unearthed 15-year-old social media posts that appeared to be generally demeaning towards Jews.
What the site has successfully done, however, is position the ADL as an enemy of City Hall, as other Jewish groups are looking to build relationships with the administration. “I just don’t think it’s smart,” says Nancy Kaufman, chair of New York Jewish Agenda’s board and former CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women. “This is our mayor for four years, and we want to work with him. That’s our attitude.”
