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2 of NYC’s 5 public pension funds are vulnerable to a mayor-backed Israel divestment push
The man who is likely to be New York City’s top finance watchdog under Zohran Mamdani — assuming they both win their races on Tuesday — has said he does not believe Mamdani could divest the city’s pension funds of their investments in Israel.
“Just doesn’t have the votes for that,” Mark Levine, the likely next comptroller, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in September.
But in fact, Mamdani would be able to stack the boards of two of the city’s five pension funds such that divestment from Israel could be on the table, according to a JTA analysis — and some of Mamdani’s supporters say they are optimistic.
“We have hope in a Mamdani administration,” said Leah Plasse, a school-based social worker who has been lobbying for two years for the Teachers’ Retirement System to divest from Israeli assets.
As the election draws close and Mamdani maintains his lead in the polls, Jewish New Yorkers are wondering about how a mayor who is a longstanding supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel could enact his vision in New York City.
Mamdani has stated his intention not to invest city funds in Israel bonds, in keeping with the current comptroller’s decision not to reinvest when $39 million in bonds matured in 2023.
But the city’s pension funds hold Israel investments beyond Israel bonds, which are issued by the Israeli government. The BDS movement calls for divesting from “all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid” — expanding targets to include most Israeli companies as well as non-Israeli companies that do business with the Israeli government.
The Teachers’ Retirement System’s Israeli investments include military technology companies — which Plasse and the group NYC Educators for Palestine have honed in on — as well as a variety of businesses like energy companies, food manufacturers and fuel companies.
Altogether, the city’s five public pension funds contain approximately $315 million in Israeli assets, according to the comptroller’s office. Mamdani has not indicated an intention to push for full divestment, but he also has not denied the possibility when asked.
Asked about doing so in a JTA questionnaire last week, Mamdani responded, “I support the approach of the current comptroller, Brad Lander, to end the practice of purchasing Israel bonds in our pension funds, which we do not do for any other nation.” He also did not specifically respond to part of that question which asked how else he might advance the cause of BDS as mayor.
What’s clear is that if Mamdani chose to make divestment a priority, pathways exist within the city’s pension fund management where headway could be possible.
For each of the city’s five pension funds to make any investment decisions, its board of trustees must vote in favor. Those boards vary in size, but typically consist of the comptroller, an appointee by the mayor and a number of labor representatives. Recommendations are made to those boards by the comptroller’s in-house Bureau of Asset Management.
Levine emphasized that a mayor could not “singlehandedly” overrule the comptroller’s recommendations to divest from Israel. But on boards where the mayor has more influence over the makeup of the trustees, the mayor could do so with the help of his or her appointees.
The Board of Education Retirement System, for example, has a 28-person board of trustees — a 15-person majority of whom are appointed by the mayor. Of those 15 mayoral appointees, one is the schools chancellor, one is an independent appointee, and the other 13 are the mayoral appointees on the city’s Panel for Educational Policy. (Mamdani has said he wants to reduce the influence of the mayor on the PEP.) The number of votes required to pass a resolution in the BERS is 15, though that figure must include one of the board’s two employee-elected members.
The board of the Teachers’ Retirement System, meanwhile, consists of seven members, and requires four votes to pass a resolution. Three of the members are mayoral appointees, one represents the city comptroller, and the other three are elected by the teachers on staggered three-year terms.
The three teacher members on the board now are all drawn from the teachers union’s leadership caucus. The union, the United Federation of Teachers, endorsed Mamdani.
The other three pension funds — for police, firefighters and city employees — are less susceptible to mayoral influence because the mayor appoints a smaller proportion of members.
While the movement to boycott Israel has called for divestment since 2005, advocacy has ramped up in many places in the last two years during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In New York City, pro-Palestinian advocacy groups have gained little traction under an Eric Adams mayoral administration that is not sympathetic to their activism.
In fact, the Teachers’ Retirement System board has been resistant to advocacy for divestment, according to Plasse, who noted that the board “voted to close the public comment period after 1.5 years of us coming to speak about divesting our pension.”
Plasse said she was told this change was made for the sake of consistency, as no other pension funds’ board meetings include public comment periods. But she said it felt “quite clear” the real reasoning was to stifle her and her group’s “continued advocacy.”
Indeed, groups such as NYC Educators for Palestine and Workers for Palestine have regularly sent representatives to the public meetings of the pension boards. In public comments, the activists have pointed to examples like the city’s divestment from South African businesses in the 1980s, and more recently, the funds’ unilateral decision to divest from Russian securities in 2022, to show a precedent.
“And just on a personal note, before the holidays, as a Jew, before Hanukkah begins, I truly believe in tikkun olam, which is the repairing of the world,” Plasse said in the public comment period of a December 2024 board meeting of the Teachers’ Retirement System, according to meeting minutes. “We are funding genocide. That is against my faith.”
Any effort to divest from Israel would likely butt up against Levine, who is expected to win the race for comptroller. Levine, who is Jewish, endorsed Mamdani but has said he wants the city to resume investing in Israel bonds. NYC Educators for Palestine joined the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace outside Levine’s office last week for a protest they named “Break the Bonds,” calling his intention to invest in Israel bonds one that puts “deadly politics over the interests of working New Yorkers.”
Levine, however, says he isn’t motivated by pro-Israel sentiment. The investments, he notes, have always been sound for the city. (Levine’s campaign did not respond to requests for a follow-up interview.)
That means the issue of Israeli investments — which, according to Levine, are a sturdy piece of an investment portfolio that serves more than 750,000 New Yorkers — could bring some of Mamdani’s deeply held values into conflict. In response to JTA’s question on divestment, he emphasized the central promises of his campaign.
“My priority as mayor will be to deliver on the affordability agenda I ran on: freezing the rent, universal childcare, and fast and free buses,” Mamdani answered. “That will always be the core of my administration.”
And advocates for divestment say they won’t stop pushing the case before the pension boards. At October’s Teachers’ Retirement System board meeting, Plasse handed out a written statement calling for an investment analysis and declaring that her group would be undeterred by the board’s repeated denials.
“I am more than open to meet with anyone about anything that has been discussed here today,” the statement read. “But please know, we are only becoming more embolden [sic] to demand this change. This is our money and the time will come.”
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.