Mark Levine, a term-limited councilman from Manhattan, is battle tested. In his two campaigns for the City Council, Levine, who is Jewish, was subject to vitriolic antisemitic attacks from a primary rival. “I have confronted explicit antisemitism in politics before and I’ve proven that we can beat it,” he said after his re-election. And just as he was preparing to be sworn in as Manhattan Borough President on Saturday, Levine contracted COVID for the second time.
“If I can get hit by Omicron, anyone can,” Levine, who has been vaccinated and received the booster, said in a recent interview. He described his symptoms as “relatively mild” but said that he still felt “knocked down” for a couple of days. “I shudder to think what this would have been like if I hadn’t had the protection of the vaccine.”
It is that fighting spirit that Levine brings to his new position. He pledged to “use every tool at my disposal” to confront some of “the very big challenges ahead” – the city’s recovering from the COVID-19 health crisis and combating a surge in antisemitism.
Levine, 52, has represented New York City’s 7th Council District in northern Manhattan since 2014. In his first term, he served as chair of the New York City Jewish Caucus, a conference founded in 2001 that consists of the Jewish members of the council. Levine used his senior position to increase funding for a program that provided protection to houses of worship and schools, and passed a bill that requires the New York Police Department to include a category for hate crimes in its reporting on neighborhood crime statistics.
He was a lead sponsor of legislation to create the Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, which was opened in the summer of 2019 after a rash of incidents across New York City, and recently called on the city to increase the budget of that office, headed by Deborah Lauter. He also pushed for increased funding for an initiative that benefits Holocaust survivors, known as the “Elie Wiesel Holocaust Survivors Initiative.”
Read the full article HERE.
