Tali Farhadian Weinstein was working on her very first writing assignment as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O\u2019Connor when the justice herself stopped by.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet your shoes on,\u201d she told the recent Yale Law School graduate. \u201cWe\u2019re going to see the Dan Flavin exhibit at the National Gallery.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opinion had to be prepared in time for a deadline, Farhadian Weinstein gently reminded the justice. \u201cWhat would you like me to do?\u201d she asked O\u2019 Connor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want both,\u201d the justice said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s who she was,\u201d said Farhadian Weinstein, 44, in an interview this week. \u201cTo push hard in every direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Farhadian Weinstein started that clerkship in October, 2004. But the exchange has stayed with her, and this week, she resigned her position as general counsel at the Brooklyn district attorney\u2019s office to announce her campaign for Manhattan district attorney.<\/p>\n
\u201cLaunching a campaign during a pandemic was definitely not what I imagined,\u201d Farhadian Weinstein said, sitting down on a park bench next to the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park on a sunny midsummer day. \u201cDid I expect my children to be going to school during the day during the busiest year of their mother\u2019s life? Yes, I did.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 2021 ballot is crowded. She\u2019s running against seven others \u2014 including, presumably, incumbent Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., who has\u00a0not yet announced<\/a>\u00a0his campaign. While Vance successfully got a Supreme Court ruling to support his bid to subpoena President Donald Trump\u2019s tax returns, as well as convicted Harvey Weinstein, critics say he has mishandled sexual assault cases and favored defendants who are wealthy and powerful.<\/p>\n Farhadian Weinstein has been on the hard and fast track ever since she came to this country.<\/p>\n She was born in Tehran where, she recounted, Jews were \u201cafraid to go to work and even to leave the house.\u201d She was four years old when her parents fled Iran, arriving in the United States in 1979.<\/p>\n She grew up in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., attending yeshiva day schools \u2014 Moriah and then Frisch \u2014 before going on to Yale and a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford.<\/p>\n \u201cTali was always very poised, very thoughtful in what she says and how she listens,\u201d said Becky Voorwinde, who first met Farhadian Weinstein as a teenager during a Bronfman Fellowship in Israel in 1997. \u201cI do remember us saying, \u2018Oh Tali, she is going to be a Supreme Court justice one day,\u2019\u201d said Voorwinde, who is now the executive director of the Bronfman Fellowships.<\/p>\n After law school, Farhadian Weinstein went on to clerk for both O\u2019Connor and Merrick Garland in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, served as counsel to Attorney General Eric Holder under the Obama administration and worked as an assistant US Attorney in the Eastern District of New York.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to be of service, in the world, in an active way,\u201d she said. \u201cI knew I wanted to be a public servant. I was always thinking about government and institutions, how to harness power to make things better.\u201d<\/p>\n She spent the majority of her career in the Department of Justice, from 2009 to 2017. It wasn\u2019t easy for a young woman, said Laurie Robinson, a law professor at George Mason University and former assistant attorney general under Eric Holder.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Department of Justice was, and is still, a very male culture,\u201d Robinson said. \u201cTali handled that with skill and with grace. I was extremely impressed by her, a very young, soft-spoken and gentle individual, so incredibly whip-smart and deep in her analysis of things in meetings.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2010, Farhadian Weinstein moved to New York City and\u00a0married<\/a>\u00a0Boaz Weinstein, founder of the $3 billion Saba Capital hedge fund; the couple now has three young daughters, and lives on the Upper East Side.<\/p>\n Over the years, she has served on the board of the New York Public Library and the UJA. Their wealth has provoked pushback from the anti-Wall Street left. Opponent Eliza Orlins described Farhadian Weinstein as \u201canother candidate who is cozy with the rich and powerful and the privileged.\u201d Financial industry site Dealbreaker\u00a0called her<\/a>\u00a0a \u201chedge fund wife.\u201d<\/p>\n But Farhadian Weinstein dismissed those kind of comments as misogyny. \u201cMaybe we should start calling Boaz a prosecutor\u2019s husband,\u201d she said, adding that she has demonstrated both her ability and her progressive priorities.<\/p>\n As counsel to Brooklyn\u2019s district attorney Eric Gonzalez, she led a\u00a0successful federal lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of undocumented immigrants around courthouses. In her campaign, she supports abolishing cash bail and aims to create a prosecution unit focused on gender-based and domestic violence.<\/p>\n \u201cDomestic violence was a pandemic before anyone ever heard of Covid,\u201d she said. \u201cNow, we have to lean in even harder. Economic and emotional distress exacerbates it.\u201d In May, the Weinsteins\u00a0gave<\/a>\u00a0$2 million to non-profits helping domestic violence victims.<\/p>\n Anti-Semitism in New York is another concern for her \u2014 one that hits close to home. \u201cI\u2019m hearing, anecdotally, people telling their boys to wear baseball caps to hide their kippahs,\u201d she said. \u201cWe can\u2019t be complacent about that. This is very much within the DA\u2019s job to prosecute and educate.\u201d She served on the New York State Bar Association\u2019s task force on domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which in June recommended judges to consider imposing education components when prosecuting those who have committed hate crimes. \u201cWe need to learn to see each other differently,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n