The Jewish NYPD Commissioner Who Haunts Zohran Mamdani’s Coalition

When Zohran Mamdani raised his right hand to become New York City’s mayor on January 1, 2026 he inherited a powder keg wrapped in a political paradox. The Uganda-born, democratic socialist had campaigned as an unflinching voice for Palestinian liberation, promising to treat Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide and vowing to place Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under arrest should he set foot in the city. Yet standing beside him in his administration is Jessica Tisch, a Jewish billionaire heiress whose family fortune exceeds $10 billion and whose personal and institutional ties to Israel run deeper than nearly any public official in America.

Jessica Tisch

The decision to retain Tisch as NYPD Commissioner has transformed what should have been Mamdani’s honeymoon period into a bitter confrontation with his own political base. More than 100 grassroots organizations that supported his insurgent campaign now accuse him of capitulation to the very power structures he promised to dismantle. The controversy exposes a fundamental question about progressive politics in America today. Can a mayor who calls himself a champion of the oppressed govern effectively while empowering someone whose life’s work embodies the surveillance state, whose family bankrolls Zionist causes, and whose professional training included sessions with Israeli military forces?

Jessica Tisch arrived at the NYPD in 2008 as a counterterrorism analyst, but her trajectory through the department reads less like a typical civil servant’s career and more like the strategic deployment of dynastic Jewish wealth into public power. As Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology, she became the architect of the Domain Awareness System, a $3 billion surveillance apparatus that civil liberties advocates describe as Orwellian in scope. The system fuses data from 18,000 CCTV cameras, license plate readers capturing two billion records, 911 emergency calls, arrest records, and criminal databases into a single searchable interface that allows officers to track individuals’ movements across the entire city.

The surveillance network Tisch built extends far beyond catching criminals. Documents obtained by civil liberties organizations reveal that the system has been deployed extensively to monitor mosques, track Muslim community members, and surveil political protesters, particularly those organizing around Palestinian solidarity. In January 2025, training materials Tisch approved instructed NYPD officers to treat keffiyehs and watermelons as potential indicators of antisemitic intent, effectively criminalizing Palestinian cultural symbols and turning everyday items into pretexts for police scrutiny.

Her family background adds another layer of complexity to her role. The Tisch dynasty owns stakes in the New York Giants, has its name emblazoned on buildings across Manhattan including the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and controls Loews Corporation, a conglomerate with interests spanning insurance, hotels, and energy.

The Tisch family’s relationship with Israel transcends typical diaspora support. Jessica’s father, James Tisch, served as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, one of the most powerful organizations promoting Jewish immigration to Israel and settlement expansion. He continues as an honorary board member, maintaining influence over an institution that plays a central role in Israel’s demographic strategy in the occupied territories.

Jessica Tisch herself has cultivated institutional relationships with Israeli security forces that blur the line between municipal policing and international military collaboration. In 2015, while serving as Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology, she traveled to occupied Palestine to train with Israeli military units.

The NYPD maintains an office in Kfar Saba, Israel, a settlement constructed on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Kafr Saba, whose residents were expelled during the 1948 war. This permanent NYPD presence facilitates ongoing intelligence sharing and joint training between New York’s police force and Israeli security services. In November 2024, shortly after becoming Commissioner, Tisch hosted top officials from Israel’s National Police at NYPD headquarters. She marched in the Israel Day Parade in May 2025, a public declaration of solidarity with the Israeli state at a moment when its military campaign in Gaza had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

In October 2025, Tisch delivered a forceful address at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now Summit. Her speech defended Israel’s military operations and made an extraordinary claim. She argued that pro-Palestinian protesters’ “target was not and is not Israeli policy or geopolitics, or even the horrors of war, but the Jewish people themselves.”

The Tisch family’s wealth connects to networks that extend into some of the darkest corners of elite power. As this author has previously noted, Laurence Tisch, Jessica’s grandfather, was a core member of the Mega Group, a secretive circle of approximately 20 of North America’s wealthiest Jewish billionaires. Co-founded in 1991 by Leslie Wexner of Limited Brands and Charles Bronfman of Seagram, the group met privately to strategize how their combined fortunes could reshape Jewish institutional life and strengthen ties between American elites and the Israeli state.

The Mega Group’s strategy was explicit. Use concentrated wealth to place trusted allies in leadership positions at major Jewish organizations, effectively centralizing control over the institutional infrastructure that shapes American policy toward Israel. James Tisch’s trajectory perfectly embodies this approach. He rose to chair both the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Jewish Agency for Israel, positions that gave him extraordinary influence over how American Jewish communities engage with Israeli government policies.

The Mega Group’s connections have drawn scrutiny for more than their political influence. Leslie Wexner’s relationship with deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who managed Wexner’s fortune and allegedly used that relationship to facilitate sex trafficking, has raised questions about the networks of Jewish power and privilege that the Mega Group represented.

Zohran Mamdani built his political career as an unapologetic opponent of the systems Jessica Tisch represents. As a three-term state assemblyman and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he championed progressive reforms such as fare-free buses, universal childcare, rent freezes, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030.

On Palestine, Mamdani staked out positions that placed him far outside the American political mainstream. He calls Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide. He refuses to endorse Israel as a Jewish state, instead advocating for a secular democracy with equal rights for all inhabitants regardless of religion or ethnicity. He supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to economically pressure Israel to end the occupation. Most dramatically, he pledged to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli Prime Minister visits New York, citing International Criminal Court warrants for war crimes, though legal experts say he lacks authority to do so.

When Mamdani announced in November 2025 that Tisch would remain as his police commissioner, the decision landed like a betrayal. More than 100 grassroots organizations that had mobilized voters for his campaign issued a joint statement of condemnation. The coalition included Within Our Lifetime, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters across the city, and the Black Alliance for Peace.

Their statement pulled no punches. “Retaining Tisch represents a political alignment with the NYPD’s legacy of racialized policing, surveillance, and repression, and a retreat from the values of justice and liberation that Mamdani’s campaign claimed to champion. … These connections place Tisch at the intersection of the billionaire class, the NYPD’s global footprint, and Zionism.”

The timing carried symbolic weight. On the same day Mamdani announced Tisch’s retention, 28 Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Activists pointed to the contradiction between Mamdani’s campaign promise to arrest Netanyahu and his decision to keep as police commissioner a member of the family that hosts Netanyahu at their Loews Regency Hotel when he visits New York.

Mamdani defended his choice by citing Tisch’s record on reducing crime and rooting out corruption in the Adams administration. He argued that effective governance requires working with people across ideological divides. Tisch, for her part, acknowledged their differences while emphasizing shared goals. “Do the mayor-elect and I agree on everything? No, we don’t.”

The fragile détente between Mamdani and Tisch nearly collapsed in early December 2025. At the Met Council’s annual holiday gala, Jessica Tisch’s younger brother Benjamin, who serves as CEO of Loews Corporation, publicly called Mamdani an enemy of the Jewish people during his remarks to the assembled donors and dignitaries.

Jessica Tisch moved quickly to contain the damage, personally apologizing to Mamdani’s team for her brother’s comments. The incident exposed the tensions simmering beneath the surface of their professional partnership. It also highlighted the complex dynamics within the Tisch family itself. During the mayoral campaign, Tisch family members excluding Jessica had donated over $1.3 million to super PACs working to defeat Mamdani.

Another flashpoint emerged in November 2025 when approximately 200 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue. The synagogue was hosting an event by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a Zionist organization that promotes and facilitates Jewish immigration to Israel, including settlements in the occupied West Bank. Protesters chanted “Globalize the intifada.”

The NYPD’s response became controversial from both directions. Tisch later apologized to the synagogue congregation during Shabbat services, admitting that police had failed to establish an adequate security perimeter and allowed “turmoil” at the entrance. Jewish organizations criticized the police response as inadequate protection for a vulnerable community. But Mamdani’s office took a sharply different stance. His team issued a statement suggesting the Nefesh B’Nefesh event may have violated international law by promoting settlement activity, which is considered illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. President Donald Trump’s praise for Mamdani’s decision to keep Tisch particularly alarmed progressives. Trump called her “a great police commissioner,” an endorsement that suggested to many activists that Mamdani had moved too far toward the establishment center.

Mamdani’s first days in office have already demonstrated the impossibility of straddling his contradictions indefinitely. On January 1, 2026, he signed executive orders revoking two key policies established by previous mayors. He repealed the executive order prohibiting the city from contracting with companies that boycott Israel, effectively legalizing BDS activity in city business. He also rescinded the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which includes denial of Jewish self-determination as an example of antisemitic speech.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry reacted furiously, accusing Mamdani of “pouring antisemitic gasoline” on the city. Zionist organizations called the move evidence of the mayor’s fundamental hostility to Jewish communal safety. But Palestinian solidarity activists criticized the orders as insufficient, noting that Mamdani left in place the very police commissioner whose department treats Palestinian cultural expression as a security threat.

The executive orders signal that Mamdani intends to advance his pro-Palestinian agenda despite keeping Tisch. But this creates an untenable dynamic where the mayor’s policy directives may directly contradict his police commissioner’s institutional priorities and personal commitments. How does a police force led by someone who trains with Israeli military units and views pro-Palestinian activism as inherently threatening implement policies from a mayor who describes Israel’s actions as genocidal?

Ultimately, this paradox reveals a deeper national sickness where Jewish institutional power consistently corrupts governance from within, creating an unbridgeable chasm between campaign rhetoric and administrative reality. Mamdani’s capitulation to Tisch demonstrates that genuine national renewal is impossible until the pervasive influence of ethnocentric Jewish networks is confronted and dismantled. The core challenge facing both left and right is not merely ideological, but the entrenched power of a hostile elite whose loyalty lies with a foreign nation-state rather than the American people.