Jack Lester, a New York City attorney who runs an eponymous firm, plans to sue Zohran Mamdani, the city mayor, on Thursday, he told JNS.
Lester, who has also sued the city over congestion pricing, told JNS that the forthcoming suit is an effort to compel City Hall to release emails and other documents about Mamdani’s executive orders in the early hours of his mayorship that revoked his predecessor’s policies protecting Jews and barring boycotts of Israel.
On Jan. 12, Lester filed a Freedom of Information Law request—New York’s version of the Freedom of Information Act—to obtain the records. By state law, the city must acknowledge receipt of such a request within five days and provide the information, with certain exceptions, within 20 work days.
Mandani’s office denied the request and said that it needed to be directed to the city’s law department. Lester filed an appeal, which was quickly denied. (JNS sought comment from Mamdani’s office.)
Five members of the New York City Council and 28 private citizens have signed onto the suit that he intends to file tomorrow in New York State Supreme Court.
Mamdani’s first executive order, which revoked all of his predecessor’s orders in the prior 15 months axed the city’s recognition of the widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of Jew-hatred and its ban on boycotting Israel.
Lester told JNS that the mayor did so “in a vacuum without any rationale, studies or impact statements.”
“We’d like to know what public policies will result, what impacts on the purchase of Israeli bonds there will be, educational policies, and public safety policies,” he said. “There is a broad area of impacts that have been left without any sort of comment.”
“What exactly are his objectives?” Lester said.
The City Council members who signed on, all Republicans, are Joann Ariola, David Carr, Frank Morano, Inna Vernikov and Vickie Paladino.
The private citizens include attorneys, finance professionals, therapists and an investigative reporter, and they hold a range of political views and affiliations.
Retired wealth manager Jeffrey Weisenfeld previously worked in city government under Democratic mayor Ed Koch, in state government under Republican governor George Pataki and with Republican senator Al D’Amato.
He feels clear about what the mayor’s objectives were in immediately reversing the city policies relating to Jews.
“He sent a signal” to anti-Zionists and antisemites, Weisenfeld told JNS.
Mamdani’s “bifurcation of Jews from Israel is a very dangerous thing. For most of us Judaism is both the covenant and the land” of Israel, he said. “It’s not for him to define Judaism, just as we don’t define Islam.” (The Uganda-born mayor is Muslim.)
The lack of substantive response to the FOIL request shows that “there must be something there,” Weisenfeld told JNS.
He thinks communications between Mamdani and campaign and administration staff will show his motivation for cancelling those city policies relating to Jews.
“I’m pleased it’s getting to a formalized lawsuit that highlights protections that he’s not providing for Jews,” he said.
Kevin Goldberg, vice president of the non-partisan Freedom Forum in Washington and an expert on the First Amendment, told JNS that Freedom of Information Law requests don’t apply to campaign records.
“I’m glad they’re taking up this challenge,” he said. “Even if it doesn’t result in all of the records being released, it often results in some of them being released.”
People don’t exercise their rights under the First Amendment to petition the government “often enough, because it takes time and money, and people often feel it’s not worth going through the effort,” he said.
In practice, FOIL “often falls short of expectations, and it becomes a very challenging, uphill process to get this done,” Goldberg told JNS.
The lawsuit “will put the Mamdani administration on notice early on that they will be scrutinized, which everyone wants of every government agency,” he said.
Lester told JNS that he is working on the case pro bono, because he felt angered by Mamdani’s first action as mayor.
“I’m familiar with his background and statements and public career. He falls on the extreme side of this issue,” he said.
“The fact that he did it as his first act as mayor was a slap in the face to the entire Jewish community,” Lester told JNS.
An earlier version of this article stated that Dan Singer, cantor at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, was among those who signed onto the lawsuit. After JNS published, it learned that Lester intended to remove Singer’s name from the filing.
