Mamdani Appointee Resigns After Decade-Old Antisemitic Posts Re-emerge

Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned from her just-announced post as Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s director of appointments after the Anti-Defamation League resurfaced the comments.

The day after Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani tapped Catherine Almonte Da Costa to be his director of appointments, she resigned amid an uproar over antisemitic social media posts from her youth.

The Mamdani transition announced her resignation hours after the Anti-Defamation League resurfaced the comments by Ms. Da Costa, posted more than a decade ago, in which she denigrated Jews.

“I spoke with the mayor-elect this afternoon, apologized, and expressed my deep regret for my past statements,” Ms. Da Costa said in a statement provided by the transition. “These statements are not indicative of who I am. As the mother of Jewish children, I feel a profound sense of sadness and remorse at the harm these words have caused. As this has become a distraction from the work at hand, I have offered my resignation.”

In a separate statement, Mr. Mamdani said, “Catherine expressed her deep remorse over her past statements and tendered her resignation, and I accepted.” As the director of appointments, Ms. Da Costa would have been responsible for recruiting people to work at City Hall.

The social media posts in question, which were reported by the Judge Street Journal newsletter after the Anti-Defamation League publicized them, date back to her teenage years.

“Money hungry Jews smh,” she wrote in one 2011 post, when she was 18, using an abbreviation for “shaking my head.”

“Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” she wrote in another post the next year.

Ms. Da Costa, now 33, is married to a deputy city comptroller who is Jewish.

She did not immediately respond to requests for further comment.

The resurfacing of the tweets comes at a sensitive time for Mr. Mamdani, who is poised to become New York’s first Muslim mayor, and who came of age in the pro-Palestinian movement. He has struggled to build ties with some New York Jews who are wary of some of his stances, including his reluctance to embrace the existence of Israel as an officially Jewish state. The New York City area is home to the largest concentration of Jews outside of Israel.

Recent events have only brought his relationship with Jewish New Yorkers into sharper focus. In November, after a crowd of protesters chanted “Death to the I.D.F.” and “Globalize the intifada” in front of a New York synagogue that was hosting an informational session about immigration to Israel and to settlements in the occupied West Bank, Mr. Mamdani’s response seemed to further inflame tensions.

While discouraging the language used by the protesters and affirming Jews’ right to enter religious spaces without intimidation, he also chastised the synagogue, saying through his spokeswoman that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

Days later, he offered a more forceful denunciation of the protesters’ language. And he continued to reach out. In December, he met with the New York Board of Rabbis, whose membership includes several Mamdani skeptics, and he committed to more such meetings.

After gunmen massacred Jews celebrating Hanukkah at a Chabad event in Sydney, Australia, this month, Mr. Mamdani issued a statement of unequivocal sadness and disgust.

“The attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney today was a vile act of antisemitic terror,” he said at the time. “I mourn those who were murdered and will be keeping their families, the Jewish community, and the Chabad movement in my prayers.”

He promised to “work every day to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe — on our streets, our subways, at shul, in every moment of every day.”

On Monday, Mr. Mamdani donned a skullcap and visited the gravesite of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s leaders.

Lincoln Restler, a Jewish councilman from Brooklyn, said he first met Ms. Da Costa more than a decade ago, when they were both working on Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s transition.

“She is a profoundly decent and good person and demonstrated poor judgment as a teenager,” Mr. Restler said. “These tweets are so totally disconnected from the person I know.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in the early 20th century to fight antisemitism and other prejudice, has taken an increasingly aggressive stance toward critics of Israel, including Mr. Mamdani.

His ascension prompted the organization to create a tracker to keep tabs on City Hall initiatives affecting Jewish New Yorkers.

Todd Gutnick, a spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League, referred The New York Times to the organization’s statement on social media.

“We appreciate Da Costa has relationships with members of the Jewish community, but her posts require immediate explanation — not just from Ms. Da Costa, but also from the Mayor-Elect,” the statement reads.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani said the mayor-elect was unaware of the posts when he decided to hire Ms. Da Costa, and that the transition’s vetting process had not uncovered them.

The mayor-elect is racing to staff up his administration ahead of his Jan. 1 inauguration. Ms. Da Costa was one of two appointments announced on Wednesday.

“Cat will oversee our talent recruitment efforts and help us build a team as hardworking as the city we are seeking to represent,” Mr. Mamdani said at the time.

During her remarks, Ms. Da Costa said that she was committed to building a mission-driven government that reflects “the rich diversity of race, faith, geography, language and ethnicity that defines the city.”

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