In July, New York City’s mayor spent several weeks insisting he could have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant if he set foot in Manhattan for the U.N. General Assembly in September. He couldn’t. Washington isn’t a member of the ICC, and City Hall has no mechanism to enforce a warrant the United States itself doesn’t recognize. Zohran Mamdani eventually admitted as much — then posted a video anyway, calling Netanyahu a “war criminal” and declaring him “not welcome” in a city he has no legal power to keep him out of.
That was the theater. Power, as usual, moved somewhere quieter.
A week earlier, Mamdani’s office had quietly finalized an 18-member committee tasked with screening every candidate for a New York City judgeship before his desk ever sees the name. Eighteen lawyers, judges, and law professors, drawn from CUNY to the Ivy League. Zero of them Jewish — in a city where Jews make up roughly 12% of the population, according to UJA-Federation’s 2023 community study, and where the legal profession has long been understood to skew considerably higher than that.
MAMDANI’S TOUGH TALK EXPOSED AS DECEPTIVE VIRTUE SIGNALING
Every mayor since 1978 has appointed at least some Jewish members to this committee, says Elizabeth Forspan, president of the Queens Brandeis Association bar group. Mamdani is the first not to. He personally appoints nine of the 18 members, including the chair. The other nine are recommended by sitting judges and law school deans, though his office signs off on every name.
Four Jewish bar associations wrote to City Hall demanding an explanation. Mamdani’s spokesman said any suggestion that religion factored into the selections was false, and noted the mayor has separately appointed Jewish judges. Both things can be true — the committee can be religiously blind and still produce this result, or it can not be, and produce the same result. That’s the actual argument, and it was never about anyone’s motive. Mamdani’s own January executive order required the committee to publish demographic data on the judges it screens; it set no such requirement for how the committee itself gets built. New York now has an unelected panel deciding who becomes a judge, operating through a process that is largely opaque to the public, with no way to know how it reaches the results it does. An opaque institution doesn’t need bad intent to cause damage. It only needs to stay opaque.
I spent a career in a security service built on the wreckage of a Soviet one, and years reading the archives the old service left behind. Joseph Stalin’s own former personal secretary, Boris Bazhanov, who defected to the West in 1928, later wrote that Stalin considered it far less important who voted than who counted the votes.
Historians still argue over how precisely Bazhanov remembered the phrasing decades on, but the mechanism needs no exact quote to recognize: You don’t need to rewrite the law if you control who interprets it. You don’t need a purge if you have a committee — an “advisory” one, insulated from accountability, that filters the field before voters ever see a name. The mechanism is ideology-agnostic. It works the same whether the committee was stacked by design or simply never has to answer for itself.
The bar associations also pointed to a pattern predating the committee: an administration map of the city’s immigrant and ethnic enclaves that omitted Jewish neighborhoods, and a decision to drop the definition of antisemitism the city had previously used to guide its own civil rights enforcement. Neither alone proves anything. Together, they’re the kind of pattern that used to get called, in the archives I read, “an emerging line” — not yet policy, already useful.
Mamdani’s defenders will say this is a diverse committee that happens to lack one category, in a city with dozens of categories to balance. Maybe. But “happens to lack one category” is precisely the sentence every gatekeeping committee in history has offered when asked. It was true just often enough to keep working.
Here is the part that should worry New Yorkers more than the Netanyahu theater ever could: the arrest threat was symbolic from the start. City Hall was never going to detain a sitting Israeli prime minister, and everyone involved knew it. The judicial committee is not symbolic. It will help decide who sits on the family court bench that rules on your custody case, the criminal court that sets your bail, the civil court that hears your lawsuit. That power doesn’t need a press conference. It doesn’t need a viral video. It needs 18 names nobody outside the legal profession had heard of until a bar association counted them.
MAMDANI HATES EVERYBODY — WHICH IS WHY HIS MAYORALTY IS DOOMED
Judges interpret statutes, and those interpretations become precedent — legal reality that outlives whichever mayor happened to appoint the committee that seated them.
Mamdani cannot arrest Netanyahu. He can, for the next four years, quietly decide who screens the people who decide what the law means for 8 million New Yorkers. One of those powers made headlines for two weeks. The other will still be shaping the bench in 2030. The loudest power is rarely the most dangerous. The quietest usually lasts the longest.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations; a former chief of Georgia’s military police; and a former member of Parliament representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the U.S. in 2012.