A panel with a conspicuously absent group

Brooklyn: To Mayor Mamdani: Recently, you made the shocking decision to appoint an 18-member judicial screening panel without a single Jewish lawyer. This is especially shocking in a city where many estimate that more than 40% of lawyers are Jewish. Assume for the sake of argument that 40% of the qualified candidate pool was Jewish. The probability of selecting 18 lawyers and none who are Jewish is a chance of roughly 1 in 9,840.

The statistics strongly show that you were either intentionally antisemitic or suffering from significant unconscious bias. What’s worse is that it’s clear that you cared about balance in some areas but not others. There are exactly nine women and nine men on the panel. Given that you intentionally sought to balance the panel’s composition, the complete omission of Jewish lawyers is particularly striking. Now reverse the identities. Imagine a profession in which Black professionals made up 40% of the qualified pool, and a mayor appointed 18 people to an influential panel without selecting a single Black member. It’s difficult to imagine that outcome being dismissed as a coincidence. The same standard should apply to Jews.

I urge you to demonstrate that your administration is committed to equal treatment for all New Yorkers by participating in training on prejudice, implicit bias and fair public appointment practices. Jews deserve to be treated as equal New Yorkers.

Flushing: Who cares how high the rents are in Manhattan? They are high because people can and will pay to live in Manhattan, where the action is, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you........

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