The newly anointed City Council speaker, Julie Menin, is the first Jewish person to hold the position in New York City history. Her elevation marks yet another “first” in a period of city politics filled with new milestones: the first Democratic Socialist mayor, the first Muslim mayor, and the first socialist Tenant tsar to call home ownership “a weapon of white supremacy.”

“I’m incredibly proud to be the first Jewish speaker of the City Council,” Ms. Menin, 58, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said during an interview with Fox 5 New York on Thursday morning. 

“To have the first Muslim mayor and now the first Jewish speaker, I think that’s historic, and I think it’s incumbent upon us to bring communities together at this pivotal and very difficult time for our city,” Ms. Menin added.

Indeed, Ms. Menin, a mother of four who lives on the Upper East Side, will be hard-pressed to balance the ambitions of an ascendant progressive wing in the city council and City Hall with the practicalities of running New York City.  

“​​Mamdani is putting people around him who are either socialist or out-and-out communist. That’s not a good formula for the future of New York City, the capitalist center of the United States,” a former Council Member, Robert Holden, a Democrat from Queens, tells the Sun.

That said, Ms. Menin was “the best choice” for City Council Speaker, Mr. Holden adds. Her colleagues in the city council agreed, voting unanimously in her favor on Wednesday over Mr. Mamdani’s preferred progressive candidate, Council Member Crystal Hudson, an openly gay, black Brooklyn Democrat.

“It’s up to Julie to hold the line. Whether she’ll do that remains to be seen,” Mr. Holden tells the Sun. 

Since securing the speakership on Wednesday, Ms. Menin has laid out her plans to do a “significant number of overrides” of former Mayor Eric Adams’s 19 vetoes, including one on a bill that would have provided victims of sexual abuse an 18-month “lookback” window to file claims against their abusers. Another bill Mr. Adams vetoed — which would have created new ethics rules for the city’s municipal contracting processes — she promised to “absolutely” override.

As for the director of the “revitalized” Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, Cea Weaver, who is facing intense backlash after social media posts from her now-deleted X account called for efforts to “impoverish the white middle class,” among other things, Ms. Menin said she “certainly” did not support Ms. Weaver’s past statements. 

“I don’t agree with them at all,” Ms. Menin told the New York Times on Wednesday.

“I’m not going to comment on every tweet that an appointment of the mayor makes, because I don’t think that that’s particularly productive,” she added.

Mr. Mamdani continues to stand by his tenant tsar amid growing outrage over her inflammatory statements, which included using “massive government interventions to solve gentrification.”  It was later revealed that Ms. Weaver’s mother, a Vanderbilt University professor, owns a $1.6 million home in Nashville. 

On Wednesday, a tearful Ms. Weaver, who is white, was photographed leaving her apartment in Crown Heights. 

During an appearance on New York 1 on Wednesday, Ms. Weaver told host Errol Louis that what she said at the time was “regretful.”

“I think that some of those things are certainly not how I would say things today,” Ms. Weaver told Mr. Louis. “But, you know, I do think my sort of decades of experience fighting for more affordable housing sort of stands on its own.”

“My focus as the mayor of New York City is to deliver stability, and we know one critical pathway to that stability is homeownership,” Mr. Mamdani told reporters during a press conference on Wednesday.

Also this week, the former FTC Commissioner and current advisor to Mr. Mamdani, Lina Khan, has reportedly been interviewing candidates to run the New York Economic Development Corporation. The Mamdani administration has already started discussions with the EDC about the mayor’s long-stated ambition to open at least one city-owned grocery store in all five boroughs. During his mayoral campaign, Mr. Mamdani said he would open each store on city-owned land — thereby avoiding paying rent and property taxes — and sell wholesale groceries at lower price points for city residents.

For Ms. Menin, who secured unanimous support from the city council, the challenge is preventing the city government from veering too far to the left. 

“They all voted for her, so they’re expecting something in return, and that’s where the problems lie,” Mr. Holden tells the Sun. 

“I really think the council will go far left, and I think that’s going to drive the middle class and my constituents out of New York City,” he adds.