Julie Menin elected New York City Council’s first Jewish speaker

She has vocally supported Israel, including marching in the city’s most recent Israel Day Parade, and has worked to combat Jew-hatred through efforts such as Holocaust education.

By Andrew Bernard, JNS

The New York City Council unanimously elected councilwoman Julie Menin, a Democrat, as its speaker on Wednesday.

The representative of parts of the Upper East Side is the council’s first Jewish speaker.

She is a moderate Democrat, who has voiced support for Israel, and who could serve as a check on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has said that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested in the city.

Accepting the speakership, Menin credited her upbringing as the child of a Holocaust survivor with instilling her values towards politics.

“The East Side of Manhattan was a community that welcomed my family with open arms, a community that gave them a better life after the horrors that they had been through, and with the beauty of life, brings things full circle,” she said. “I now have the great honor and distinction of representing that neighborhood.”

Menin compared Islamophobia in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks to the “hatred and violence” that are “running rampant across our country and around the world.”

“We live in a day when the first Muslim mayor of New York City and now the first Jewish speaker of the council are serving at the same time,” she said.

“What will write this interfaith leadership into the history books is if it can act as an opportunity for all of us to come together, to calm tensions, to bridge divides and to recognize we are one city, no matter the religion we practice or the language we speak,” she said.

Menin secured 51 votes for her speakership with no opposition.

She has vocally supported Israel, including marching in the city’s most recent Israel Day Parade, and has worked to combat Jew-hatred through efforts like Holocaust education.

In interviews leading up to the speaker vote, Menin said that she would seek common ground with Mamdani, who has emerged as one of the most strident opponents of the Jewish state among major American elected officials and who withdrew all of his predecessor’s executive orders relating to fighting antisemitism on his first day in office.

“I was extremely concerned about the repeal of the executive orders and other matters, and I expressed my concerns to the mayor directly about that,” Menin told the New York Post on Saturday after a phone call with the mayor.

“He indicated that he had issued a new executive order, which continues the Office to Combat Antisemitism and that also directs the police commissioner to look at protests around houses of worship,” she told the paper.

“What I’m focused on with the council is what the council can do to ensure that we are protecting New Yorkers,” she added in the interview.

Several Jewish members of the council applauded Menin as the first Jewish speaker during the vote on Wednesday.

“At a time when antisemitism has entered every corner of our society, it is especially heartening to see Julie Menin, a daughter of Holocaust survivors and an important voice against antisemitism, to be sworn in as our first Jewish speaker today,” said Inna Vernikov, one of five Republicans on the council.

“This body must be a check on the mayor’s radical, Marxist agenda,” Vernikov said, of the council.

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, who gave the invocation before the vote, described how Menin’s name also has a biological meaning.

“In medical terms, the word ‘menin’ is a protein that suppresses disease,” he said.

“We need more Menin to stop the spread of this disease of hatred of the other, whoever the other may be,” Potasnik said. “As Cardinal Dolan said to me recently, antisemitism is anti-Christianity is anti-Islam, and you can reverse that equation any way you want.”