When Julian Gerson ’18 first tried his hand at speechwriting, he was sitting in an English class at Middlebury College, drafting what he imagined might be a hopeful speech in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to President Donald Trump.
Nearly a decade later, Gerson is writing speeches delivered from one of the country’s most prominent political stages: New York City Hall. He now works as the director of speechwriting for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani rose to the mayoralty after several years in state politics. Before becoming mayor, he served as a member of the New York State Assembly, representing the 36th district. During his time in the Assembly, Mamdani built a public profile around housing policy and labor rights, often advocating for policies aimed at addressing the city’s cost-of-living challenges.
Gerson joined Mamdani’s campaign as political director in March 2025. After Mamdani won the Democratic primary in July 2025, defeating former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Gerson transitioned into the role of director of writing for the campaign.
Although the role marked a major step in his political career, Gerson said his interest in politics began much earlier, taking shape during his years at the college.
“A lot of my writing developed at Middlebury, and a lot of my political interest there,” Gerson said in an interview with The Campus. “It was the start of my political reckoning.”
Gerson arrived at Middlebury in 2014 with an early interest in politics and some initial campaign experience. While still in high school, he worked as an intern on the mayoral campaign of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, gaining an early introduction to the dynamics of political campaigns.
At the college, Gerson pursued a major in political science, where he took a number of courses with faculty such as professors Bert Johnson and Matthew Dickinson, both of whom he said played an important role in shaping his academic interests as he began to consider a career in politics.
“I think the first class I took at Middlebury was Intro to American Politics with Professor Johnson,” Gerson said. “It was in the large Gifford classroom, and I remember feeling excited by it — learning how elections work and thinking about the different dynamics at play.”
Johnson recalled Gerson as a student who stood out for his ability to bridge theory and practice.
“Some students know a lot about politics but stumble with academic political science; others are good at political science but don’t know as much about practical politics. Julian excelled at both,” Johnson wrote in an email to the Campus. “He wrote an excellent senior thesis on the role of the White House Chief of Staff that was informative and fun to read – and that I’ve thought about a lot in the years since he graduated, in light of successive Trump, Biden, and Trump White Houses.”
Outside the classroom, Gerson was active in several campus organizations, including serving as editor-in-chief of the now-defunct satirical magazine, The Crampus and communications director for the Middlebury College Democrats (MCD). His time at the college also coincided with the 2016 presidential election, which he said became a formative political moment.
“My junior year was when Trump won his first term, and the campus really felt it,” Gerson said. “It motivated a lot of us to get involved. I knocked on my first doors for Hillary [Clinton’s] campaign with other Middlebury students, met Vermont representatives like Senator [Patrick] Leahy. Vermont is such a great place to develop a political interest because the state is small and politicians are willing to come talk to students.”
Gerson was also active in organizing. After the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, Gerson founded the organization, Middlebury Students Against Gun Violence, in which he helped organize a large student walkout in solidarity with the national movement for gun reform, working alongside students from Middlebury Union High School.
“It was an amazing opportunity to see how organizing actually works — how you can bring people together to speak out about something that matters to them,” Gerson said.
After graduating in 2018, Gerson went on to work in the House Judiciary Committee for a year before transitioning into a full-time career as press secretary and speechwriter for US Congressman Jerry Nadler, another native New Yorker. That path eventually led him to New York City politics, where he worked on Mamdani’s campaign.
After Mamdani won the mayoral election in Nov. 2025, Gerson transitioned into the role of director of speechwriting, helping shape the mayor’s public messaging. The position requires close collaboration between the two, as Gerson states that Mamdani remains deeply involved in crafting the speeches he delivers.
“The first word I would use to describe the work is partnership. We’re very fortunate to have a mayor who cares deeply about the speeches he gives and how he presents himself to the world. He’s very thoughtful and curious about the world around him. He’s also a NESCAC guy, so maybe the liberal arts education has something to do with it — even if he went to the far inferior NESCAC school,” Gerson joked, referring to Mamdani’s alma mater, Bowdoin College.
That partnership, Gerson said, shapes every stage of the speechwriting process. Mamdani delivers remarks frequently as mayor, and for routine speeches, the turnaround can be quick. Gerson and his team typically draft remarks the day before, which Mamdani reviews and revises.
“We’ll write a draft as a team and go through it together,” Gerson said. “He might say, ‘Change this here, add this message there,’ but those tend to be smaller adjustments. For the big speeches, I’ll give him six or seven drafts, and then we read them out loud together.”
Capturing that voice, he said, requires a deep understanding of how Mamdani thinks and communicates.
“As a speechwriter, you get pretty intimately acquainted with somebody’s mind,” Gerson said. “I’ve worked with him for a year now and listened to him talk hundreds of times. Eventually, you start to understand what governs his thought process, and it becomes second nature.”
Gerson said his approach to speechwriting is shaped not only by political experience but also by the interdisciplinary education he received in his undergraduate education.
“I also loved art history, and I took a lot of art history classes,” Gerson said. “Politics is part of everything. You’re studying art history and seeing trends in Dutch painting in the 1600s, the colors, the still lifes, and those reflect economic dynamics at play. A lot of the work we try to do with the mayor is to write different kinds of speeches, ones that speak intimately to what New Yorkers care about and draw on parts of history or the city that others might not invoke.”
Gerson said Mamdani’s speeches resonate in part because of their consistency.
“He has these very clear convictions that haven’t really changed,” Gerson said. “He knows who he is and what he wants to do.”
That clarity, Gerson said, is what makes speechwriting both challenging and meaningful, translating a set of values into language that resonates with thousands of people at once.
Nearly a decade after drafting his first speech in a Middlebury classroom, Gerson now writes speeches delivered from City Hall, drawing on the foundation he built as a student.
Mandy Berghela (she/her) is Editor-in-Chief
Mandy has previously served as the Managing Editor, Senior Local Editor, a Local Section Editor and Staff Writer. She is majoring in Political Science with a minor in History. She is the Co-President for the Southeast Asian Society and an intern with the Conflict Transformation Collaborative. Last summer, Mandy interned with U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and participated in the Bloomberg Journalism Diversity Program.
