On Sunday afternoons, a small group of Israeli-led activists gathers in Manhattan’s Union Square to hold signs reading “There is no military solution,” chant “Ceasefire now” and call for the return of Hamas’ hostages and an end to the occupation of the West Bank.
The protesters fill a small, activist niche between American Jewish communal rallies in support of Israel and the crowds of anti-Zionist protesters who have flooded New York City streets since Oct. 7.
One demonstrator who fits squarely into that niche is New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, the city’s highest-ranking Jewish elected official, who regularly attends the rallies.
“That has been a place where I feel both proud to go and have my neshama nourished,” said Lander, using the Hebrew word for “soul,” in an interview last week at his Lower Manhattan office. “People are going to criticize whatever you do. All I can say for sure is, I come by my point of view here honestly. This is who I am Jewishly and politically.”
Throughout his climb up the city’s political ladder, Lander has tried to hew to those left-wing positions and progressive Jewish sentiments. They may soon take center stage in the city’s politics: Lander is weighing a run for mayor, where he would challenge incumbent Eric Adams.
A Lander primary campaign would present a progressive alternative to Adams. It could also split the city’s large population of Jewish Democratic voters at a time when antisemitism has spiked in New York, and when the streets have been filled with protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
In that context, Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime New York City political consultant, said Lander’s association with far-left figures could be a liability.
“The Jews are going to matter and they’re going to vote,” said Sheinkopf, who said Lander is “not a supporter of Israel.” Sheinkopf, who is Jewish, added, “The antisemitism is a serious question. He’s got a problem and a lot of people will make sure that problem is not forgotten.”
Jews in left-leaning spaces say that Lander is an authentic representative of their values. Phylisa Wisdom, the director of New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive group that Lander co-founded, said, “His progressivism and commitment to social justice feels to him deeply connected to and stem from his Judaism.”
Lander is one of several potential challengers to Adams, who has had historically low approval ratings since taking office in 2022. Scott Stringer, who like Lander is Jewish and previously served as comptroller, may run against Adams again after his 2021 primary run was sunk by sexual harassment allegations. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned that office after facing his own sexual misconduct accusations, is also rumored to be eyeing a run.
Lander told the New York Jewish Week that he was thinking about his mayoral candidacy “very seriously,” and that his concerns stem beyond issues particular to the Jewish community. “The city’s not delivering. People are frustrated,” he said.
“I want to see a more affordable, safer, better run city, so I have to decide,” he said. “I feel like we need better leadership at City Hall.”
Lander's origins
Lander, 55, grew up in a Reform Jewish community outside of St. Louis, Missouri. He worked at the Goldman Union Camp Institute, a Reform summer camp popularly known as GUCI, where he recalls singing the Hebrew theme song for Israeli “Artik” popsicles for campers and playing acoustic guitar.
He was also inspired by liberal politics from a young age, and said that campaigns in the late 1980s aimed at fighting hunger, and in support of liberating Soviet Jews, were two formative political experiences. He counts Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the prominent mid-century Jewish scholar and civil rights activist, as an inspiration.
“That combination, you’re organized to stand up for Jews who are facing oppression, and you organize to build a more equal and inclusive society grounded in the idea that everybody’s created in the image of God, to me were profoundly Jewish actions that are very much a part of my identity and my politics,” he said.
Lander moved to New York City in 1992, at age 23, and worked for progressive groups including the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Center for Community Development before being elected to represent the City Council’s 39th District in 2009. He co-founded the council’s progressive caucus and championed issues such as workers’ rights and affordable housing.
His role at City Council also took him outside his progressive milieu. Brooklyn’s 39th District covers liberal bastions such as Park Slope, but also includes part of Borough Park, home to a large haredi Orthodox population. Representing the area was his first time becoming deeply involved with the haredi community, he said. He formed relationships with groups like the Masbia kosher food charity, which have continued since he left the City Council. Masbia did not respond to a request for comment.
“There’s plenty of different forms of observance and different politics, but those relationships I have found just nourishing and enriching and kind of an amazing view of New York Jewish communities,” Lander said.
Lander won the race for city comptroller in 2021, demonstrating his political wingspan in the process. He won the endorsements of progressive stars including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more establishment liberal figures such as Rep. Jerry Nadler. He beat his competitors by a wide margin.
As comptroller, Lander serves as the city’s chief financial officer with duties including auditing city agencies, overseeing the budget, and investigating waste and fraud. He is most proud of his office’s work on pension funds, and with making money through what he terms “responsible investing.” He has also invested in loans for rent stabilized housing, and has scrutinized city contracts to provide services for the influx of migrants.
Lander lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope with his wife Meg Barnette, a nonprofit executive and former longtime leader at Planned Parenthood, and their two children. In his free time, Lander works out at JukeBox NYC, a boxing gym in Brooklyn where he sometimes attends “fight nights” to cheer on his training partners in the ring. Sometimes he runs to work across the Brooklyn Bridge.
His favorite spot to eat Jewish food is Miriam on the Upper West Side, which he called the “best brunch in New York City.”
He says he attends synagogue about once a month, occasionally at the Reform Congregation Beth Elohim and at Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive congregation where he is a member that has a policy of “encouraging and welcoming this diversity of private and public positions among our members” regarding Israel. In October, the synagogue was one of the first Jewish institutions, aside from explicitly non-Zionist or anti-Zionist groups, to call for a ceasefire in the war that had begun with Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack weeks earlier.
Lander first called for a humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in November, shortly before there was a weeklong truce. He kept up the ceasefire calls after that, when such positions were still uncommon among even progressive Jewish officials.
More broadly, Lander has kept up his connections to the Jewish left. In the mid-1990s he joined the board of Jews for Economic and Racial Justice, a progressive activist group. Audrey Sasson, JFREJ’s current executive director, said Lander’s longtime involvement with the group and support for its agenda demonstrated his commitment to its causes. Lander has remained involved with JFREJ even as taking a more centrist tack may have aided his career, said Sasson, who has known Lander for more than a decade.
She cited his early call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.
“He could have dropped his accountability towards the more left factions of the progressive Jewish world. He hasn’t. He maintains those relationships,” Sasson said. “He has taken positions that are unpopular in the wider mainstream but that have been the principled positions to take.”
While JFREJ has aligned itself with non-Zionist groups in protesting Israel’s military campaign as a “genocide,” Lander says the Oct. 7 attack and ensuing war in Gaza have not fundamentally changed his positions on the conflict.
He has shown up at left-wing rallies co-organized by non-Zionist and anti-Zionist groups, but says he has staked out a progressive Zionist position. He called the Oct. 7 attack “heartbreaking,” and has met with the families of hostages and victims of the Hamas invasion.
“I was before and am now a liberal Zionist who fiercely opposes the occupation,” he said, voicing support for a “Jewish democratic Israel that’s both the homeland for the Jewish people, but grants full and equal social and political rights to people regardless of their religion.”
Lander, who most recently visited Israel in 2015, added, “That was hard before October 7, it seems excruciatingly hard now. But fundamentally, I still think it’s true.”
Lander has also made a point in the past of calling for greater acceptance of non-Zionist Jews in Jewish spaces.
“Jews who don’t consider themselves Zionists and who love our people but whose passion for human rights and freedom takes them to a different place,” he said in a 2022 speech at the Jewish Theological Seminary. “Those are folks that need to be inside the boundaries of our community.”
Lander’s progressive positions and ties to hardline left-wing politicians have drawn fire from Jews to his right. Lander has backed harsh critics of Israel who have voiced support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, including Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Rashida Tlaib, pro-Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour, and Shahana Hanif, who replaced him on the New York City Council.
Several of his critics questioned or disputed his self-identification as a Zionist supporter of Israel.
“There are evil antisemites in politics and he has never failed to associate himself with them,” said Brooklyn Councilman Kalman Yeger, a Jewish member of the council’s conservative Common Sense Caucus who got to know Lander while sitting close to him in the City Council.
“It doesn’t matter if he’s Jewish or not, it matters who he associates with and amplifies their voices,” Yeger said.
Throughout his tenure as mayor — including since Oct. 7 — Adams has been vocally supportive of Israel and outspoken against antisemitism, in line with New York’s Democratic Party mainstream. Lander has also spoken out on those issues and his positions have been more to the left. He took Adams to task for the NYPD arrest of Columbia students who had illegally occupied a campus building in protest of Israel, as well as of students at City College.
“Woke up to the disturbing news of the NYPD arresting student protestors at Columbia and City College last night,” he wrote on X. “Feeling both sad & angry that step after step, escalation by those who are supposed to lead took things in the wrong direction.”
He added, “Mayor Adams’ inflammatory rhetoric of infiltration & pressure on Columbia for more aggressive policing consistently made things worse.”
More generally, Adams and Lander have had an adversarial relationship, with Adams in June mocking Lander as “the loudest person in the city” and imitating his voice. Lander has especially taken issue with Adams’ treatment of migrants and asylum seekers in the city. “Not only are the Adams Administration’s shelter limit policies cruel and poorly implemented, but they come with hard costs,” he tweeted in May. “Our City can do so much better.”
Lander said he and Adams have effectively collaborated on some issues, such as accelerating contract processing for nonprofits, despite the tensions.
“You can do work together. I didn’t appreciate when the mayor did an impression of me, but I did not respond in kind. I do think we need better management at City Hall. That is no secret,” Lander said. “The mayor ran on getting things done and things are not getting done.”
Sheinkopf said that in addition to his stance on Israel and connections with non-Zionists, there were other obstacles to Lander’s candidacy, such as the challenge of facing an incumbent, difficulties securing donors, winning over voters in Manhattan and Black communities, and other candidates on the left vying for progressive votes.
“People are not going to forget that, especially after Oct. 7,” Sheinkopf said of Lander’s ties to harsh critics of Israel. “Can he win anyway? Sure, the city has moved to the left. Anything’s possible.”
Lander said he hoped Jewish New Yorkers and others would judge him by his track record in the city, and understand that his feelings about Israel come from a sincere place.
“My hope is that people Jewish and non-Jewish, but especially Jewish New Yorkers, will see that I am being my authentic Jewish self. I’m a proud, active Jewish New Yorker who has a strong point of view on issues but loves cousins who have very different points of view,” he said.
“The things that matter most to New Yorkers are, can we make the city safer and more affordable and better run?” he continued. “That’s the case that I’ll make to people if I run, but I have to let people judge for themselves.”