A New Low for the ADL?

The ADL’s Mamdani Tracking Program Targets Muslim City Officials

The group’s lunge into local politics looks like an anti-Muslim blacklist.

Josh Nathan-Kazis for Jewish Currents

April 1, 2026.

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.”

How Gaza Broke Big Tech’s Campus Pipeline

Big Tech’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza has pushed STEM students to organize for a more ethical tech industry.

April 5, 2026 Khadeejah Khan THE NATION

STEM graduates once clamored for jobs in Big Tech, but not so readily anymore. Since Israel began its genocide in Gaza, it has relied on AI and surveillance systems developed by once-dream-job companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Today, many students and workers, uncomfortable with the prospect of fortifying the Israeli war machine, are engaging in a concerted effort to build alternative futures in technology.

At the center of this organizing are UC Berkeley students, who are just miles away from Silicon Valley. On August 27, 2025, Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences lecturer Peyrin Kao launched an open-ended hunger strike to protest the use of technology in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Read the article here.

Good News!

Gaza universities resume in-person learning, restoring hope amid displacement

Middle East Monitor, March 31

A pilot project to restart in-person university education has begun in a displacement area in southern Gaza, in a move aimed at restoring academic life after a long disruption caused by the war.

The “university campus” has been set up in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis, offering students a chance to return to face-to-face learning after more than two years of relying on online education.

At the site entrance, students showed clear signs of joy, with many saying it felt like their first real university experience.

One student said entering a classroom was an exceptional moment that restored her sense of belonging to university life, away from screens and the difficult conditions of the war, according to Al Jazeera Net.

The project, established on an area of about three dunams within displacement camps, was launched by the organisation Scholars Without Borders. Seven classrooms have been set up using simple structures, providing a basic learning environment with electricity, internet access, desks and teaching boards.

Students from the Islamic University took part in the first day of the trial run. The classrooms are expected to be opened later to students from other universities through a coordinated schedule, in an effort to expand access to the initiative.

Hundreds of university students in the Al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis have begun attending in-person classes for the first time since the start of the conflict, in Gaza City, Palestine, on March 31, 2026. [Screengrab/Anadolu Agency]

With the Death Penalty for Palestinians, Israel Signals: Long Live the Jewish Terrorists

At my high school in Jerusalem in the early 2010s, hearing chants of "death to Arabs" in Hebrew – whether in the back of the bus or on the sports field – was not at all unusual.

On Monday evening, Israel's democratically elected government voted to codify this chant into law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in person to the Knesset to cast his vote for the "Death Penalty for Terrorists" bill, which mandates the execution of Palestinians charged with lethal terrorism while keeping alive Jews charged with the same acts. It was led by the party of Netanyahu's Jewish supremacist ally, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

After the vote, the triumphant minister opened champagne, vowing, "We will put them to death one by one."

Read the entire Haaretz article by David Issacharoff here.