The Mamdani-world operative serving as treasurer for a national anti-AIPAC campaign is now running a New York State committee seeking to oust three Republican lawmakers in Brooklyn — two of whom are Jewish.

State Board of Elections records show that attorney and activist Mark Hanna submitted paperwork to establish the Kings County Victory Project committee in late September. The PAC’s stated purpose is to boost the candidacies of three Democrats running against incumbent Republicans in centrist and right-leaning parts of southern Brooklyn: Joey Cohen-Saban, running against Assemblymember Michael Novakhov; Chris McCreight, seeking to unseat Assemblymember Alec Brook-Krasny; and Joyce Xie, vying against Assemblymember Lester Chang.

“I intended for it to be a bit more of a useful thing for the November elections, for any of the Democrats that are running in, like, contested Republican districts, to flip seats,” Hanna told Jewish Insider. 

Novakhov and Brook-Krasny are two of the most prominent elected officials from Brooklyn’s Russian-speaking Jewish community, which has grown increasingly Republican since the early 2010s. Cohen-Saban hails from the borough’s sizeable Syrian Jewish community, which is politically conservative but mostly votes Democratic in local elections.

Hanna worked with now-New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the 2017 City Council campaign of Rev. Khader El-Yateem, an unsuccessful bid backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, a campaign that Mamdani has credited with having “transformed” his political outlook and engaged him in local affairs. More recently, Hanna has served as treasurer of the American Priorities PAC, a self-styled anti-AIPAC effort which has taken in huge sums from Mamdani supporters in the tech sector and spent the funds boosting left-wing critics of Israel. Among the PAC’s most prominent recipients are Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and congressional candidates Adam Hamawy and Rev. Frederick Haynes III in New Jersey and Texas, respectively.

Hanna also ran alongside and served as election attorney for Carmella Charrington, who won a race for Democratic district leader — an unpaid but influential internal party position — as part of a left-wing wave in June. Jewish Insider discovered that Charrington had shared an Instagram post promoting industrialist Henry Ford’s infamous antisemitic tract ‘The International Jew,’ which she described as “the truth.” Hanna condemned Charrington’s comments at the time but declined to call for her resignation.

Hanna’s involvement with the new committee prompted an attack from the embattled Novakhov, who edged out Cohen-Saban in a tight race in 2024.

“I’ve said it before: my opponent keeps very bad company,” the incumbent said in a statement to JI. “Now we know that the same political operative helping oversee the effort to elect Joey Saban is also running the finances of a multimillion-dollar Super PAC working against pro-Israel candidates.”

But Cohen-Saban said he had no knowledge of the Kings County Victory Project’s existence, and did not want its support unless Hanna recanted his stance on Israel and denounced Charrington. 

“I’m a proud supporter of AIPAC, and if there is any organization, PAC, whatever you want to call it, that is trying to get involved in my race, but doesn’t share my values, I don’t welcome their help,” the Democratic challenger told JI, highlighting his family’s ties to Israel, where they lived after fleeing Syria but before coming to Brooklyn. “You need to share my values, and you need to have my interests in order to be able to play any role in my campaign, whether it’s direct or indirect.”

The race between Cohen-Saban and Novakhov has been one of the most closely watched in New York Jewish politics — not only because it pits two of the city’s Jewish immigrant populations against each other, but because a Cohen-Saban victory would add a pro-Israel Democratic to the dominant Assembly majority in a year that has seen a raft of anti-Israel candidates elected to the state legislature.

Cohen-Saban, McCreight and Xie are, like Hanna and Charrington, Democratic district leaders. But recent weeks have found them on opposite sides of an internecine battle for control of the Brooklyn party organization. Hanna, McCreight and Charrington are part of a left-liberal bloc seeking to remove the current centrist leadership, while Cohen-Saban and Xie have backed the present establishment. Cohen-Saban further highlighted that he was among the first district leaders to demand Charrington’s resignation after JI reported her remarks.

Hanna, for his part, argued that he meant for the Kings County Victory Project to overcome these internal divides and focus on dislodging Republican electeds. However, he said that the ongoing legal battle for control of the Brooklyn organization had prevented him from raising meaningful funds for the PAC to date, and he was uncertain how much of a role it could play in next month’s elections. 

Brook-Krasny declined to comment for this article.