A new lawsuit from a group of Jewish civil servants in New York City alleges that the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has engaged in systemic discrimination against the employees since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel — a situation the complainants said worsened after Mayor Zohran Mamdani entered office.

Seven employees of the agency, represented by attorney Mark Goldfeder’s National Jewish Advocacy Center, assert their higher-ups barred them from forming an official “Employee Resource Group,” which would have permitted them access to public resources, because agency officials deemed Jewish identity to be a religious rather than ethnic class. This coincided with the department’s leadership enabling other groups to not only obtain the ERG designation and resources but to use city-owned property to delegitimize the State of Israel and Zionism, according to the plaintiffs.

“DOHMH’s leadership and official equity infrastructure have, since October 2023, promoted through official agency channels a one-sided narrative condemning the State of Israel — as a ‘settler colonial’ ‘apartheid’ state committing ‘genocide’ — while tolerating widespread anti-Israel expression by employees in agency space,” reads the complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday. “Jewish employees who identify with Israel reasonably understood these communications as their employer’s statement that their identity is a mark of complicity in ‘genocide,’ and that Jewish grief and fear are suspect.”

The complaint notes that the department has approved ERGs for East Asian, Latino and Arab employees, allowing each group to receive a $5,000 annual budget and an official city email, as well as access to other internal platforms. But the plaintiffs said their bosses repeatedly rejected conferring these privileges on their own organization, named HINENU for the Hebrew word meaning “here we are,” because city rules bar granting ERG status to organizations promoting religious views.

This came despite HINENU’s application explicitly stating that it had formed around “Jewish heritage, not religion.” The brief describes how DOHMH agreed to recognize HINENU as an “affinity group” with no public budget, and briefly provided it with an official email address — which the agency subsequently rescinded.

NJAC wrote that the department took away the account in December 2025, one day after HINENU used it to send an email acknowledging the slaughter of Australian Jews at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach. The message included a quote from Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Manhattan’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, stating that “anti-Zionism kills Jews.”

In addition to the group losing access to its inbox, the filing reads, DOHMH launched an ultimately inconclusive four-month probe of the organization’s founders for “racial and religious discrimination.”

“DOHMH’s investigators interrogated HINENU leaders about their beliefs concerning Zionism, Israel, and the meaning of the slogan ‘globalize the intifada,’” the document alleges, “and suggested that Jews who fear those who chant ‘globalize the intifada’ thereby express hostility to Arabs and Muslims.”

At the conclusion of the inquiry, the department again denied HINENU’s request to participate in the ERG program.

Meanwhile, the agency allegedly allowed the employees of Arab heritage to form an ERG; other staff organizations, including top officials, to share communications on such topics as “the settler colonial establishment of Israel in 1948 and ongoing apartheid” and “challenges of advancing public health in an occupied territory: social and political determinants of health in Palestine”; and to display flyers and other materials denouncing the Jewish state. In lieu of an official email recognizing Jewish grief at the Bondi Beach massacre, as HINENU requested, the complaint states that the department’s chief equity officer sent a message on International Holocaust Remembrance Day stating the department must “confront genocide in the present, in Gaza, Myanmar, Sudan, and beyond.”

Much of the conduct the suit describes took place during the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, a strong public supporter of Israel. However, it asserts that Mamdani’s rhetorical attacks on the Jewish state — including his referring to AIPAC as “monsters” and using official city channels to assail Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and uplift anti-Israel voices — contributed to the hostile work environment.

“Since January 2026, that pattern has been encouraged by the official policy and public statements of the City’s chief executive,” the complaint states, pointing to a controversial gathering at the agency headquarters in January that promoted the notion that Israel had committed genocide in its military campaign against Hamas. “For these six Plaintiffs, identification with the Jewish people’s historic and ancestral connection to the Land of Israel, and support for the continued existence of the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people, are sincerely held components of their Jewish religious belief and ethnic identity.”

Neither DOHMH nor City Hall responded to a request for comment on the lawsuit.