Voter turnout in New York City elections is generally abysmal and City Council races are especially notorious generators of indifference. In one district, two years ago, the eventual winner took the seat with only 1.45 percent of all voting-age residents going to the polls. It is hard enough to get people invested in the elections that will directly affect whether their neighborhoods receive better rat patrol or fewer street fairs. It is nearly uncanny when a race churns up the interest of out-of-ZIP-code power brokers and billionaires.
But the race in Brooklyn’s 39th Council District, an area that includes Park Slope and a constellation of surrounding neighborhoods, has attracted precisely that sort of attention. The focus has had less to do with championing a new political voice — someone, for example, with an inventive plan to introduce hundreds of low-equity co-ops — than about extinguishing the existing one. In this case, the relevant voice belongs to Shahana Hanif, a child of Bangladeshi immigrants who, four years ago, was elected as the first Muslim woman on the City Council, where she has served as co-chair of the Progressive Caucus.
Ms. Hanif, 34, is a district native, having grown up in Kensington, sometimes called “Little Bangladesh.” She has been an outspoken advocate of the Palestinian cause and last year joined campus protests at Columbia to stand in solidarity with students supporting Gaza, to the displeasure of some of her constituents.
Her positions on policing have also rattled some residents in and out of the district. David Yassky, a former city councilman who lives elsewhere in Brooklyn and runs a private foundation, is among those supporting her opponent, Maya Kornberg, a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. A progressive, Mr. Yassky was taken aback when Ms. Hanif and her office did not seem to treat as an urgent criminal issue the fatal beating of a golden retriever mix early one morning in Prospect Park three years ago. The dog was attacked in front of its owner by a man roaming the park, who was muttering about immigrants, throwing bottled urine around and seemingly under the spell of severe mental illness.
Even before anyone had emerged to challenge Ms. Hanif, a political action committee called Brooklyn BridgeBuilders had organized to defeat her. In its online literature, the group describes District 39 as a place where “most voters identify as progressive but feel let down by performative politics.” Ramon Maislen, the founder, explained the origins of his mission more specifically to me. “Most of our members voted for Hanif, the first time around,” he said. But after Oct. 7, Jewish leaders met with her and went away disappointed.
“I think there was a sense among people of a rising fear of antisemitism,” he said, and some constituents felt “abandoned.” In January, the windows of Miriam, a popular Israeli restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, were defaced with graffiti denouncing Israel and “genocide cuisine.” In an Instagram post, Ms. Hanif condemned the “vandalism” and “acts of hate,” but the comments were filled with replies from people who faulted her for not calling out the writing as antisemitic.
In advance of next month’s Democratic primary, thousands of dollars have been funneled into the race through Brooklyn BridgeBuilders as well as a group called the Coalition to Restore New York, which is tied to Madison Square Entertainment. The money is coming from, among others, Wall Street and Big Real Estate — from well-known figures like Tom Tisch and Daniel Loeb, both supporters of Jewish causes, as well as Douglas Durst the real estate developer and investor. One particularly controversial contribution landed from a Soviet-born billionaire named Len Blavatnik, among the cohort that you are unlikely to run into inspecting the garlic scapes at the Grand Army Plaza farmers’ market on a Saturday morning.
Mr. Blavatnik, who donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural fund, would seem to have the most direct connection to Ms. Kornberg, a 33-year-old political scientist and Park Slope parent with degrees from Stanford, Columbia and Oxford, whose lineage includes two Nobel Prize-winning scientists — her father, Roger Kornberg, and grandfather Arthur Kornberg. In an open letter two months ago, Indivisible Brooklyn, a group supporting Ms. Hanif, demanded that Ms. Kornberg give the Blavatnik donation back, expressing outrage over the receipt of the billionaire’s money, just as members of the Council on Foreign Relations had six years ago, when the think tank accepted a $12 million gift from him.
Indivisible also claimed that Ms. Kornberg lied in an interview with City & State when she said she had “no relationship” with Mr. Blavatnik. In an email, she called this accusation “a classic oppo hit,” reiterating that she did not have a relationship with Mr. Blavatnik but rather that, “he’s an investor in a company my dad founded, which I am not involved in (and never have been).”
Ms. Hanif looks at the drive to get rid of her as entirely the result of her “stance on Israel and Palestine,” she told me. She had fully expected to be challenged in the election. “I know that constituents decide, and it holds me accountable to be better. I find it very healthy.” But, she joked, “of course it is annoying.”
Such is the nature of a political contest in many quarters of Brooklyn, that the two candidates have similar views on many issues. They both support better and cheaper child care, immigrant rights and more affordable housing. Ms. Kornberg is also marketing herself as a progressive, and to an extent the race has found resonance as a debate about what the term means in the current discourse.
When New Yorkers are surveyed by pollsters they typically tell them that housing affordability is their top-of-mind issue. A few months ago, Ms. Hanif accomplished a major success in that domain. After a long fight over the rezoning of the Arrow Linen Supply Company in Windsor Terrace, she negotiated a deal in which residents wound up with more affordable apartments than originally planned, all in shorter buildings than her constituents had asked for, to maintain the neighborhood’s architectural synchronicity.
If all politics are local, as former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, it also feels true that local politics have become increasingly global. When we talked, Ms. Kornberg mentioned that she spoke Arabic and Hebrew. She described herself as “a democracy advocate.” She talked about the work she did with the United Nations Development Programme on political and economic institution-building in the West Bank and the engagement she had with parliamentarians around the world about their response to Covid.
When I caught up with Ms. Hanif this week, she had just left a community board Zoom meeting about a concrete recycling plant that was relocated last year to the Columbia Street Waterfront, a neighborhood in her district. Those living nearby were angry about the accompanying dust and health risks, and she was very much on the side of those demanding that the city move the facility somewhere else.
Regardless of the rhetoric of electoral campaigns, this is the actual work of collaborative municipal governance — the daily communications with constituents worried about pollutants or empty storefronts or wanting more crosswalks or trash cans or bookstores. A casualty of the current political moment is the freedom that local politicians once enjoyed to keep from staking out ideological or foreign policy positions. It was enough to do the big work, which looked at from the wrong angle might appear small. But now that seems like just another luxury we have lost to our divisions.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
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