Barron's Bout with CUNY Board Member

Controversial Councilman Charles Barron is often portrayed as argumentative and controversial. However, his latest dust up with CUNY board member, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld deserves consideration.

JEFFREY WIESENFELD
Appointed: 1999 by Gov. PatakiTerm expires: 2006
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld is a VP with Bernstein Investment Research and Management. After four years with the FBI in its foreign counter-intelligence division, he entered politics as a Democrat, a staffer for Rep. Thomas Manton and Queens Borough President Claire Shulman, and chair of Queens’s First Conservative Democratic Club. He spent four years in the Koch administration, as chief of staff to the City’s Traffic Commissioner, and then his career turned right: Wiesenfeld moved on to work for Senator Al D’Amato and then Governor George Pataki.

Wiesenfeld was D’Amato’s executive assistant for the New York metropolitan area – NYC and three other downstate counties. In 1995, he moved on to take the same job on Pataki’s staff. One of his major portfolios under Pataki was to serve as Jewish community liaison – which involved supporting attempts by the ultra-Orthodox upstate community Kiryas Joel to use public funds for religious schooling.

In 1999, Pataki named Wiesenfeld as the Empire State Development Corporation’s regional director for NYC, a job he left in mid-2000. Pataki also appointed him to the board of the UN Development Corporation, a post that he still holds.
Wiesenfeld is strongly pro-immigrant, once saying “immigrants have always rejuvenated American society.” But when he was nominated to CUNY’s BoT in June 1999, his State Senate confirmation was marked by unusual controversy. During a fractious two-hour hearing, Democratic State Senator Daniel Hevesi grilled Wiesenfeld about whether he had ever called black people “savages” or referred to Hasidic Jews as “thieves,” as Brooklyn Jewish activist Issac Abraham had told the New York Post the week before. Wiesenfeld insisted that Abraham’s charge was “based on a personal vendetta” – but said he would not respond to the allegation and did not explicitly deny it.

Republican Sen. Roy Goodman objected to Hevesi’s questioning, saying, “You shouldn’t base such allegations on something as peculiar as newspaper articles.” But though Abraham had offered the previous week to testify under oath, the committee chose not to call him as a witness.
On March 1 of 2002, Newsday reported that Wiesenfeld had telephoned one of its reporters to brag that he had influenced the redistricting process and helped get Hevesi put in the same district as another incumbent, State Sen. Toby Stavisky. (Hevesi withdrew from the race in April.) “Danny Hevesi was the lone dissenter in the Senate when my confirmation [to CUNY] came up,” Wiesenfeld told Newsday. “I kept quiet. I held my peace. But I remember you, pal, and now I got your number.”

Wiesenfeld has been intolerant of other kinds of dissent as well. He labeled an October 2001 anti-war teach-in at CCNY as “seditious,” claiming it “enticed radicals to come and spew forth their venom toward the United States.”

In the last race for mayor of NYC, Wiesenfeld backed Bloomberg – but also gave support to Peter Vallone’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination.
Born in the Bronx, Wiesenfeld’s BA is from Queens College, where he also did some work towards a graduate degree.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/video?id=7147488