EXCLUSIVE: 'Money hungry Jews smh': Zohran Mamdani’s Director of Appointments Has Archive Full of Anti-Semitic Posts

Photo courtesy of Zohran Mamdani

EXCLUSIVE — As Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani prepares to staff his administration ahead of his January 1 inauguration, the 34-year-old socialist has tapped as his Director of Appointments a woman with a robust portfolio of anti-semitic tweets.

“Money hungry Jews smh” Mamdani’s Director of Appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, posted on X on January 4, 2011.

“Woo! Promoted to the upstairs office today! Working alongside these rich Jewish peeps.” Da Costa posted on June 22, 2011.

“I always think its (sic) strange that orthodox Jewish women can’t expose their hair so they wear wigs. I guess that it beats wearing a head scarf,” she wrote on July 10, 2012.

“Far Rockaway train is the Jew train,” she wrote on June 27, 2012.

Da Costa worked in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, starting as an intern 2014 and later serving as executive assistant to the mayor. In 2023, Da Costa received a “Diversity Equity and Inclusion Certification” from Cornell University, according to her LinkedIn.

“Welcome to A New Era, Catherine Almonte Da Costa!” Mamdani posted on Instagram yesterday. “Cat’s spent over a decade in public service and personnel management, building strong teams across government.

After The Judge Street Journal sent a request for comment to Mamdani’s transition team, Da Costa deleted her X account.

“The Mayor-elect has made clear that these comments are unacceptable and they absolutely do not represent him or the values of his administration,” spokeswoman Dora Pekec told The Judge Street Journal after this story was published.

““As the mother of two Jewish children, I deeply regret and apologize for these tweets from well over a decade ago,” Da Costa said in a statement to The Judge Street Journal after publication. “These comments do not in any way, shape, or form reflect who I am or my views and beliefs today.”

“This was a harsh blow but it’s not the first time this country has let me down,” Da Costa wrote on November 10, 2016, soon after Donald Trump was elected president. “It’s important that white people feel defeated.”

“For so long power has been in the hands of men and/or white people. It has brought us ruin,” she wrote on January 19, 2020.

In 2020, she quote-tweeted then-Assemblyman Mamdani’s communications director Matthew Thomas, who had previously been caught in 2014 soliciting a 16-year-old for a threesome, but managed to keep it a secret from his boss. Thomas’s post was deleted, so it’s not clear what Da Costa was replying to.

“‘The entire WOC discourse is a scam’ - you might as well say “the entire racism discourse is a scam”. If this is who @ZohranKMamdani has working for him, we need to seriously reconsider who and what he actually stands for.” she posted on November 29, 2020. “White men have been doing this for centuries. This is a white man boiling down the experiences of WOC down to a class issue. Sound familiar? It’s a white dude being a white dude and calling it socialism. But you can’t just put lipstick on pig.”

Mamdani posted on Instagram that Da Costa would be in-charge of bringing “top talent into this administration.”

““When we operate the way White power has operated for generations by opening doors for our own, is it considered nepotism? Or is it just leveling the playing field?” -@ElaineWelteroth” she wrote on July 3, 2019.

This story has been updated to include details about Da Costa’s work in Bill de Blasio’s mayoral administration.

This story has also been updated to include comments from Da Costa and Mamdani’s transition team.