May 14, 2021
Tali Farhadian Weinstein, an Iranian Jew by birth, is running in the June Democratic primary to be the district attorney of Manhattan, an office that currently is investigating the financial affairs of former President Donald J. Trump.
It is her first foray into elective politics. And the post she is seeking is perhaps the most important prosecutorial post in the United States.
If she wins, she will be the first woman—not to mention the first Iranian—to hold the post.
The 44-year-old lawyer, who last year left her position in the Brooklyn DA’s office, said she has been contemplating running for some time. “It’s not like a switch flips,” she said. “It’s a gradual process and really an extension of my life’s work.”
She is considered to have a very good chance of winning. As if mid-April, she had raised more money than any of the other Democrats running. But she faces eight opponents, so the outcome is unpredictable, although three of them have no prosecutorial experience at all.
The main criticism of her has been that she has raised much of her money from Wall Street, where her husband has a business. Critics point to that disqualifying because the Manhattan DA’s office handles all cases of Wall Street fraud.
Born in Tehran, she fled the Islamic Republic with her family at the age of four just before the Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho-meini returned. After a 10-month sojourn in Israel, where Farhadian Weinstein’s parents attended university, the family settled in New York and then northern New Jersey.
At first, Farhadian Wein-stein struggled to fit in as an immigrant in a foreign land. “I do remember how disorienting it was to not understand what people were saying,” she recalled. “For any immigrant, that’s just a kind of shock. It’s like turning the TV to a different station in a different language.”
Ultimately, she told the Jewish Insider, she learned to assimilate as a Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jew into the predominantly Ashkenazi (European Jewish) populace of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, but still maintained aspects of her core identity.
Farhadian Weinstein hasn’t been back to Iran since she escaped 40 years ago. “I wish,” she said. “I identify with it very much culturally,” she said of her Persian heritage.
Recently, she has been watching the new Israeli TV show “Tehran,” about a Mossad agent stuck in Iran. “It’s actually really great,” she said, adding that the show is in Hebrew and Farsi, which resonates with her. “It’s interesting for me to see them switching between what I consider two different mother tongues.”
Farhadian Weinstein graduated from Yale University and then won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford, where she reconnected with her roots, at least in a scholarly setting. She studied Arabic, learned how to write Farsi — which had previously only been a spoken language for her — and wrote her thesis on Arab Jewish literature in Israel.
Still, Farhadian Weinstein felt unfulfilled. Though she had imagined she would become an academic, she switched paths after her time in England, returning to the US to get her law degree and scoring two coveted clerkships—with Judge Merrick B. Garland (now the US attorney general) and then former Associate Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
If elected, Farhadian Weinstein said she would work to reform the criminal justice system as mass protests against systemic racism have swept the nation, but she believes that calls to defund the police are misguided. “I don’t like the word ‘defund,’” she said. “I think it’s inflammatory and actually not particularly solution-oriented.”
Farhadian Weinstein said that she plans to build a new bureau to handle “gender-based violence,” focusing on sexual assault, stalking, nonconsensual pornography and domestic violence, which she described as “a pandemic before the pandemic.”
Farhadian Weinstein is in a strong position given that she can self-fund her campaign. She is married to Boaz Weinstein, the wildly successful founder of Saba Capital Management, a hedge fund that has seen high returns amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The pair first met about 12 years ago after attending a book party.
“I went and talked to some people and came home, and then a week later this guy Boaz calls me,” she recalled. “He said that he saw me across the room at this party, and he thought that we made eye contact — I think that he might kill me for telling you this story — and that I smiled when we looked at each other and would I go out on a date with him, and the rest is history.”
The couple now lives on the Upper East Side with their three daughters, who are currently staying in Long Island with Farhadian Weinstein’s parents.
“He’s just always been unbelievably supportive of me,” she said of her husband. “We’re going to start the hashtag #prosecutorhusband instead of #hedgefundwife,” Farhadian Weinstein quipped.
She is going up against a number of formidable candidates including New York Law School professor Alvin Bragg, civil rights lawyer Janos Marton and Eliza Orlins, who recently took a leave of absence from the nonprofit Legal Aid Society to enter the race. The candidate from the far left is Tahanie Aboushi, who wears a headcovering.
The primary is June 22, just four days after Iran’s presidential election.