Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

De Blasio appoints Jewish Brooklynite as new transportation head

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed longtime Brooklyn Heights resident Henry Gutman as the city’s new commissioner for the Department of Transportation on Wednesday.

Gutman, who is known as Hank, was raised in New Jersey, and has lived since 1975 in Brooklyn Heights, where he and his wife, Karoly, are longtime members of the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue.

Gutman, 70, whose first job after law school was as a clerk in the federal court on Cadman Plaza, spent his career on Wall Street as an intellectual property attorney. He was chairman of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the city’s largest industrial park, and was also involved in the creation of Brooklyn Bridge Park, having served on the park’s local development corporation board since 1998. In recent years, he also sat on the mayor’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway panel.

Gutman has been a significant donor to Democratic politicians, including de Blasio.

In 2018, Gutman was one of 10 community members who were inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame, which the Brooklyn Jewish Historical Initiative created “to tell the extraordinary story of the Jewish community of Brooklyn.”

In a conversation with City Councilman Stephen Levin of Brooklyn at the ceremony, Gutman said the Jewish values he was raised with shaped his passion for public service. “The values I learned from my parents – and they learned it from their parents — that we have an obligation, if we can, to give back to the community,” he said. “It’s all part of the tradition that I have always identified as Jewish.”

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.