MEET ZOHRAN MAMDANI'S INNER CIRCLE

MORE THAN 400 PEOPLE ARE ON HIS RADICAL, BUREAUCRATIC TRANSITION TEAM.

- KELLY JANE TORRANCE

“PERSONNEL IS POLICY,” as the Reagan-eraslogan had it, so Zohran Mamdani’s 400-person transition team tells us a lot about how he’ll run a city with an already-bloated $115 billion budget and 300,000 municipal workers. He’s cleaning house, demanding 179 Mayor Eric Adams staffers resign before he takes control of New York City—far more and far faster than the norm.

The 17 transition committees include some familiar and experienced names, including former Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, City University of New York Chancellor Félix Matos Rodriguez, and outgoing business-oriented Partnership for New York leader Kathryn Wylde (of whom one Gothamite in the know declares, “What a shameless sellout!”). In other words, a man who's never run anything but a failed rap career is putting some establishment tokens on his team. Look at the 400 names together, though, and a very different picture emerges.

Mamdani tried to sell himself as the race’s most philosemitic candidate, declaring in the first debate that he “will be the mayor who doesn’t just protect Jewish New Yorkers but also celebrates and cherishes them.” But here is Jenna Hamed, a “curator and bookmaker” on the Committee on Arts & Culture, who wrote a few days after the massacre of October 7, 2023, that she supported “all measures taken” in the Palestinian cause: “It’s not up to you (I’m talking to YOU, my non-Palestinian friends in the US and otherwise) to determine what that process looks like.” Tamika Mallory of the Committee on Community Safety has said Jews “uphold white supremacy” and praised noted antisemite Louis Farrakhan as “the GOAT.” The Committee on Community Organizing’s Lumumba Bandele expressed solidarity while the October 7 killings were still in progress.