With her election as Speaker of the New York City Council on January 7, Julie Menin stepped into a role second only to the mayor in municipal power, making history as the first Jewish person to ever hold the post.
Menin’s story began on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She is the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who fled Hungary and rebuilt their lives in New York.
A serious student, Menin graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University before earning her law degree from Northwestern University School of Law. She began her career as a regulatory attorney in Washington, D.C., and later in New York, gaining an insider’s view of how government works — and how often it struggles to connect with the people it serves.
In 1999, Menin opened a small restaurant and catering business in Lower Manhattan. Becoming a business owner grounded her understanding of the city in lived reality. She dealt with rent, payroll, permits, and the daily anxieties shared by countless New Yorkers. Then came 9/11. Downtown businesses were devastated, and uncertainty spread quickly. Menin did not wait for help to arrive; she organized it.
Out of that crisis, she founded Wall Street Rising, a nonprofit that became a lifeline for tens of thousands of small businesses navigating recovery, insurance disputes, and government aid. What distinguished Menin even then was a trait colleagues still associate with her today: calm persistence. She listened closely, learned systems thoroughly, and pushed steadily — without spectacle — for results.
That approach carried her into deeper civic leadership. As chair of Manhattan Community Board 1, Menin spent years in the demanding, often invisible work of rebuilding neighborhoods and advocating for residents who wanted a voice in decisions shaping their lives.
City Hall soon took notice. Menin went on to serve as Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs, focusing on worker protections and consumer rights, including the implementation of paid sick leave. She later led the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, strengthening New York’s creative economy and restoring the city’s cultural footprint. During the 2020 Census, she was entrusted with one of the city’s most consequential assignments: ensuring New York was fully counted during a time of national tension. Under her leadership, the city succeeded, securing billions in future federal funding and reinforcing her reputation as a steady hand in turbulent moments.
When Menin ran for City Council in 2021, representing the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, she was already known as a serious leader with deep institutional knowledge. Inside the Council, she gravitated toward issues that reflected her own lived experience: small business survival, childcare, healthcare transparency, education, and Holocaust remembrance. She became known not for headline-grabbing speeches, but for doing the work and earning trust across lines.
That reputation mattered when the speakership opened due to term limits. Menin built support the way she always had: quietly and thoughtfully.
For New York’s Jewish community, her election carried special resonance: The granddaughter of refugees, raised in the neighborhood she now represents, entrusted with guiding the legislative body of the city that once gave her family safety.