Dalya Attar

Dalya Attar (born October 17, 1990) is an American politician who has served as a member of the Maryland Senate representing the 41st district since 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously represented the district in the Maryland House of Delegates from 2019 to 2025.

Attar was born fourth of six children to an Iranian-Jewish father and a Moroccan-Jewish mother. She was raised as a Sephardi Orthodox Jew in Baltimore, where she attended the Bais Yaakov School for Girls. Attar later graduated from the University of Baltimore, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in criminal justice in 2011, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, where she earned her Juris Doctor degree in 2014.

While attending the University of Baltimore, Attar worked as a paralegal for Greenspan, Hitzel & Schrader until 2015, when she became a trial attorney for the firm. In the same year, she also began working as an assistant state's attorney in the Baltimore State's Attorney office, prosecuting narcotics and firearms cases.

Attar developed an interest in criminal justice while in middle school, and became interested in politics in high school. She has cited Joe Lieberman, Sarah Schenirer, and Karen Chaya Friedman, the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve as a judge in Maryland, as her role models.

On June 9, 2017, Attar announced that she would run for the Maryland House of Delegates in District 41. During the Democratic primary, she ran on a platform of spurring development, improving schools, and reforming the juvenile justice system. Attar won the Democratic primary in June 2018, defeating incumbents Angela Gibson and Bilal Ali.

Attar was sworn into the Maryland House of Delegates on January 9, 2019. She is the first Orthodox Jew elected to the Maryland General Assembly and the highest-ranking Orthodox Jewish woman in American history. Attar served on the Environment and Transportation Committee from 2019 to 2020, afterwards serving as a member of the Ways and Means Committee until 2025.

In January 2025, after state senator Jill P. Carter resigned following her nomination to the Maryland State Board of Contract Appeals, Attar applied to fill the remainder of Carter's term in the Maryland Senate. The Baltimore City Democratic Central Committee voted 5–3 to nominate Attar to the seat later that month. She was appointed to the seat by Governor Wes Moore and sworn in on January 24, 2025, and is the youngest member of the Maryland Senate as of 2025.

In October 2025, a motion to unseal and make public a federal indictment against Attar was granted. The indictment charged her with extortion and conspiracy in connection to an alleged effort in which she, her brother, and a Baltimore Police officer tried to blackmail a political consultant who worked on Attar's 2018 House of Delegates campaign along with a second person with whom the consultant was allegedly having an affair from speaking out against Attar during the 2022 election. After her charges were made public, Attar released a statement in which she described the consultant as a "disgruntled woman" whom she fired from her 2018 campaign "for cause" and admitted to some of the conduct alleged by federal prosecutors, including having the consultant followed and having her family capture a video of the consultant, but maintained that what she did was legal. She also rejected the federal blackmail charges, instead claiming that the consultant was extorting, harassing, threatening, and stalking her and people close to her for the next six years after her firing.