JNS
Kayla Mamelak Altus told JNS that Eric Adams comforted her after Oct. 7 and empathized with her as a Jew as few others could.
Kayla Mamelak Altus covered Eric Adams’ mayoral campaign for Fox 5 before deciding, after Adams was elected mayor in 2021, that she wanted to join his administration. “When he won and started building his team, I reached out and said, ‘Hey, I really like what you’re doing. I’d be interested in helping,’” she told JNS. “And then I did.”
Mamelak Altus, who stepped down on Monday as Adams’ press secretary, was in the Darién Gap in Colombia with Adams, serving then as his deputy press secretary, on Oct. 7, 2023. When news emerged about the Hamas attack, Adams grasped the gravity of the situation right away and comforted her as she tried frantically to reach her relatives in Israel.
“His ability to stop and not only empathize and hear what I was going through as someone Jewish,” she told JNS, pausing, with emotion. “I don’t think many people who aren’t Jewish realize how impactful that day was. He’s one of the few that did.”
In the days and months that followed, Mamelak Altus said that the mayor’s steadfast support for Jews and his understanding of Israel’s need to defend itself “reinvigorated” her.
“At a time when things were so intense, and it felt depleting a lot of the time to have this job, knowing that I was working for somebody like that—it reinvigorated me and made me realize how lucky I feel to have him as my mayor,” she told JNS.
Mamelak Altus, who has overseen City Hall media strategy for the past year, spoke to JNS in her office on Oct. 24, days before she stepped down. She said publicly on Oct. 17 that she intended to resign. JNS was the first Jewish outlet with which she discussed that decision.
She told JNS that she has weighed stepping down for a few months to spend more time with her young children but “moved that timeline up” after Adams said late last month he would not seek reelection.
“A couple of months ago, I’d already expressed my intention to leave after the election, regardless of what happened, purely because I have two small babies at home,” she said. “They’re only babies for a few years, and I don’t get those years back.” (She noted that Adams hired her as deputy press secretary in 2022 when she was five months pregnant and “one of three women in the room.”)
She told JNS that her final days in the press office have been “bittersweet.
“This job is less of a career and more of a tour of duty,” she said. “You take this job knowing you’re going to be sprinting the whole time. It’s intense, insanely rewarding, but it’s 75 to 85 hour workweeks, easily.”
“Politics sucks, unless you work for a politician you love,” she said. “I really, really love Eric Adams.”
Mamelak Altus said that she couldn’t have served as spokeswoman for a mayor in whom she didn’t believe, or of whom she wasn’t proud.
“I could not have done this job for Zoran Mamdani,” she said. “Some people can separate principle from messaging, but I can’t.”
‘Cautiously optimistic’
Mamelak Altus had been speaking to JNS for about 30 minutes when she admitted being “somewhat concerned” about the city’s future.
“The Jewish community in many ways built New York City. We’re a huge part of its fabric,” she said. “I’m not worried about our safety, but I am worried about the rhetoric.”
She wouldn’t comment on Mamdani directly but said that the “language coming to the forefront is dangerous and is scary for me as a New York mother of two Jewish children.”
Mamelak Altus hopes that the city’s next mayor will “surround himself with the amazing people who’ve worked in city government for so long and will continue to advocate for our community.”
“At the end of the day, I’m cautiously optimistic that Jewish New Yorkers will be safe, because I know so many people in New York politics who will keep advocating for us,” she said. “There are so many people, even if quieter, who are our allies. People who care deeply about our community, about Israel and about what Jews contribute to New York.”
Those people “remain in strong positions and will continue their great work,” she said.
Adams recently endorsed former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent against Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and frontrunner, and the Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa. Mamdani has accused the Jewish state of “genocide” and has said he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he comes to New York City.
Mamelak Altus told JNS that her boss “cares deeply about the future of this city” and believes that Cuomo “is the best vehicle for it, the better option for the city’s future.”
Regardless of the outcome, Adams is “handing the next mayor an amazing baton,” she said. “All they have to do is take it and keep running.”
‘A whole network’
Mamelak Altus told JNS that one thing that might surprise people about the mayor is “how little he cares about bad coverage.”
She took the job after Adams was indicted on federal corruption charges related to campaign fundraising.
“I think where he gets frustrated, and I’ve said this to others before, is not that there’s bad coverage, but ‘Why don’t you also cover our wins?’” she said. “Because we’ve done so much.”
In 2022, New York City was “reeling from COVID, the streets were empty, kids weren’t back in school yet, the economy was tanking, tourism was tanking, people weren’t back in offices,” she said. “Look at where the city is now.”
Mamelak Altus called the City Hall press office the “emergency room of communications.”
“Reporters come in with a story, and we push back on it,” she said. Among the stories that her team placed in the news to show the mayor’s accomplishments, she said, was his recent veto of a bill that would have decriminalized unlicensed vending.
“While to some people it may seem like people shouldn’t go to jail for vending illegally, the messaging behind it was that it isn’t fair to the people who go through the legal process to set up their vending or their storefront businesses,” she said. “Nobody’s getting arrested for these things. This is just a way for the most egregious occasions to push back.”
Mamelak Altus was raised in Los Angeles, some 2,800 miles away from those New York City vendors.
She attended YULA, a modern-Orthodox high school, and spent a gap year in the Michlelet Esther seminary in Jerusalem. She studied broadcast journalism at Boston University and subsequently worked as a broadcast journalist at stations in Somerville and Worcester, Mass., and in New York City, before joining Fox 5.
She and her family are members of Park Avenue Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Manhattan. She told JNS that she and her family are “very proud of their Judaism, unapologetically.”
“Having small children now, there’s something really special about the community,” she said. “Being surrounded by people who share your values and are raising their kids with the same sense of purpose. It’s not just you. It’s a whole network instilling those values.”
Mamelak Altus isn’t sure what she will do next and if she will return to politics. For now, she is focused on “doing mom things” and taking time, she said laughing, to “figure out what the hell just happened.”
“There’s a part of me that will miss the chaos,” she said. “But I know where to find it if I need it.”
