By: Tzirel Rosenblatt

As New York City prepares to usher in its next mayor, what should have been a moment of pageantry and political renewal has instead devolved into a bitter public reckoning. According to a report that appeared on Saturday in The New York Post, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s inaugural committee — a body intended to symbolize unity, civic pride and the promise of a new administration — has become a lightning rod for controversy over the inclusion of figures who have publicly expressed virulent anti-Israel views, and in some cases statements widely condemned as antisemitic.

At the epicenter of the uproar is Alvaro Lopez, a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) electoral organizer whom Mamdani has selected to help shape the festivities surrounding his swearing-in. As The New York Post detailed in its report, Lopez once described two women who were filmed tearing down posters of Israeli hostages in Manhattan as “heroes,” even as one of the women shouted profanities at a passerby and cursed Israel.

“All I see are heroes,” Lopez wrote on X in November 2023, responding to a New York Post cover story that exposed the pair who were captured on video ripping down posters of abducted Israelis on the Upper West Side. The women were widely criticized for mocking grieving families whose relatives had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.

The revelation that such a figure now sits on Mamdani’s inaugural committee has stunned Jewish leaders and civic watchdogs alike — and reopened a broader debate about the ideological character of the mayor-elect’s inner circle.

According to the information provided in The New York Post report, Lopez’s comment was not an isolated lapse in judgment. In October 2023, just days after Hamas terrorists murdered approximately 1,200 Israelis in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust, Lopez turned his ire toward Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat known for his pro-Israel stance.

“You have Palestinian children’s blood on your hands,” Lopez wrote in a post that the New York Post says was still publicly visible months later. He went on to ask Torres what his “asking price” was from AIPAC — misspelling the influential pro-Israel advocacy group while implying corruption.

To critics, the language mirrored long-standing antisemitic tropes: allegations of blood guilt and insinuations that Jewish-aligned politicians are secretly bought and sold.

When The New York Post reached Lopez for comment, he claimed not to remember writing the “heroes” post and suggested vaguely that he might have been referring to the people pictured on the posters, rather than those ripping them down. After being shown a screenshot and a link to his own words, Lopez declined to elaborate further.

Mamdani himself is no stranger to controversy on Israel. As The New York Post has repeatedly noted, the mayor-elect is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America — an organization that drew fierce condemnation after promoting a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square just one day after the October 7 atrocities. That rally, which included chants widely perceived as glorifying violence, was the first in a series of demonstrations organized by DSA-aligned activists in the wake of the Hamas attack.

The optics of celebrating “liberation” while Israeli families were still identifying the bodies of their murdered relatives set off alarms across New York’s Jewish community, which constitutes the largest Jewish population of any city in the world outside Israel.

Now, with Mamdani appointing DSA figures such as Lopez to prominent ceremonial roles, The New York Post reported that fears are resurfacing that City Hall’s new leadership may be indifferent — or even hostile — to Jewish concerns.

Lopez is not the only appointee raising eyebrows. The New York Post revealed that Mamdani has also enlisted Rachel “Ms. Rachel” Griffin-Accurso, a wildly popular children’s entertainer whose online videos are viewed by millions of toddlers worldwide.

Accurso has drawn intense criticism for previously collaborating with Motaz Azzaiz, a Palestinian activist who posted “May God curse the Jews themselves” on social media. Jewish watchdog groups argue that the pairing effectively sanitized or ignored such rhetoric, exposing children to political narratives that they are too young to critically assess.

Ms. Rachel has also been accused of amplifying Hamas-aligned talking points in her educational content, all while rarely addressing the trauma suffered by Israeli children who were kidnapped, orphaned or murdered during the October 7 attack.

The inclusion of a children’s figure with such a polarizing political footprint on a mayoral inaugural committee has alarmed parents who expect City Hall to be scrupulously neutral in matters involving youth education and cultural programming.

Also tapped by Mamdani is Beth Miller, political director of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Despite its name, JVP has long been criticized by mainstream Jewish groups for rejecting Zionism and for defending or minimizing violent actions taken against Israel.

The New York Post reported that Miller accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “pledging to commit war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza” following his government’s declaration that Hamas would be dismantled after October 7. For many Jewish New Yorkers, the remark crossed a line from criticism into delegitimization, framing Israel’s right of self-defense as inherently criminal.

Perhaps the most dramatic development came last week, when Mamdani’s own head of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, was forced to step down after a trove of antisemitic tweets surfaced. Among them were comments deriding “money hungry Jews,” rhetoric that The New York Post says shocked even some of Mamdani’s ideological allies.

Her resignation was swift, but critics say it exposed a deeper vetting failure inside the transition team — one that allowed someone with a public history of hateful remarks to oversee sensitive staffing decisions for the incoming administration.

New York’s Jewish community, still reeling from a record surge in antisemitic incidents since October 7, has watched these revelations with mounting unease. According to the report in The New York Post, multiple synagogue leaders privately described Mamdani’s inaugural slate as “a slap in the face” at a moment when Jewish New Yorkers are pleading for solidarity, not scorn.

The timing could not be more fraught. New York police statistics show that antisemitic hate crimes have skyrocketed over the past year, with assaults, vandalism and harassment becoming grimly routine. Against this backdrop, the appointment of individuals who have praised the defacement of hostage posters or accused Jewish leaders of bloodshed feels, to many, like a repudiation of the city’s moral responsibilities.

Mamdani has not directly addressed the Lopez controversy beyond brief statements reaffirming his commitment to inclusion. But The New York Post report noted that he has also declined to distance himself from the DSA’s post-October 7 rally or from the more incendiary remarks of his committee members.

For his critics, that silence speaks volumes.

“An inaugural committee is not just a planning body,” one Jewish civic leader told The New York Post on condition of anonymity. “It is a declaration of values. And the values being declared right now are deeply troubling.”

The furor over Mamdani’s committee is not merely a clash of personalities; it is a referendum on how America’s largest city negotiates the fault lines of a global conflict that has landed with brutal intimacy on its own streets.

The New York Post’s reporting has transformed what might have been dismissed as social-media noise into a sustained civic debate about where political activism ends and prejudice begins — and whether a mayor can credibly promise to protect Jewish New Yorkers while surrounding himself with individuals who have publicly demeaned their suffering.

As inauguration day approaches, Mamdani’s team will doubtless insist that the committee reflects the city’s diversity and progressive spirit. Yet for thousands of Jewish residents, the question lingers: when hostage posters are ripped down, when children’s entertainers consort with voices that curse Jews, and when ideological allies mock victims of terror — who, exactly, is City Hall standing with?

It is a question that may well define the earliest days of the Mamdani administration.