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Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it.
NEW YORK (JTA) — Sidney Brustein, Jewish Hamlet?
Anne Kauffman thinks so. She made the comparison in a phone interview about the play she’s directing — a buzzy production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.
“One artistic director who was thinking of doing this [play] was like, ‘You know, it’s not like he’s Hamlet, but…’ And I thought, well, no, actually I think he is like Hamlet!” she said.
She added another take: “I feel like he’s Cary Grant meets Zero Mostel.”
Hansberry saw just two of her works produced on Broadway before her death from cancer at 34 in January 1965. Her first, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which follows a Black family dealing with housing discrimination in Chicago, is widely considered one of the most significant plays of the 20th century. The other, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” ran for a few months in the fall of 1964 until Hansberry’s death and has only been revived a handful of times since, all outside of New York.
Now, the star power of Isaac and Brosnahan is driving renewed interest in the play, which deals with weighty questions about political activism, self-fulfillment in a capitalist world, and racial and ethnic identity — including mid-century Jewish American identity.
The Brustein character, as Kauffman alluded to, is many things. A resident of Greenwich Village deeply embedded in that historic neighborhood’s 1960s activist and artistic circles, he is somewhat of a creative renaissance man. At the start of the play, his club of sorts (“it was not a nightclub” is a running joke) called “Walden Pond” has just shuttered and he has taken over an alternative newspaper. As the script reads, Brustein is an intellectual “in the truest sense of the word” but “does not wear glasses” — the latter description being a possible jab at his macho tendencies. Formerly an ardent leftist activist, he is now weary of the worth of activism and a bit of a nihilist. He’s in his late 30s and is a musician who often picks up a banjo.
Brustein is also a secular Jew, a fact that he telegraphs at certain key emotional and comedic moments. Others, from friends to his casually antisemitic sister-in-law, frequently reference his identity, too.
At the end of the play’s first half, for example, Brustein brings up the heroes of the Hanukkah story in talking about his existential angst — and his stomach ulcer. He has become belligerent to his wife Iris and to a local politician who wants Brustein’s paper’s endorsement.
“How does one confront the thousand nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time? Can a sword pierce it?” Sidney says. “One does not smite evil anymore: one holds one’s gut, thus — and takes a pill. Oh, but to take up the sword of the Maccabees again!”
Hansberry’s decision to center a white Jewish character surprised critics and fans alike in 1964 because many of them expected her to follow “A Raisin in the Sun” with further exploration of issues facing Black Americans, said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust.
“The major attack, both critically and on a popular basis, in regards to the play and to its central character was that Lorraine was out of her lane,” Gresham said. “That not only did she not know what she’s talking about, but that she had the nerve to even examine that subject matter.”
Hansberry’s closest collaborator was her former husband Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish New Yorker whom she had divorced in 1962 but maintained an artistic partnership with. Nemiroff was a bit Brustein-like in his pursuits: he edited books, produced and promoted Hansberry’s work, and even wrote songs (one of which made the couple enough money to allow Hansberry to focus on writing “A Raisin in the Sun”). But Gresham — who is Nemiroff’s stepdaughter through his second marriage, to professor Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff — emphasized that his personality was nothing like Brustein’s. While Brustein is brash and mean to Iris, Nemiroff was undyingly supportive of Hansberry and her work, said Gresham, who lived with him and her mother at Nemiroff’s Croton-on-Hudson home — the one he had formerly shared for a time with Hansberry — from age 10 onward.
Instead, Gresham argued, the Brustein character was the result of Hansberry’s deep engagement with Jewish intellectual thought, in part influenced by her relationship with Nemiroff. The pair met at a protest and would bond over their passion for fighting for social justice, which included combating antisemitism. The night before their wedding, they protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and they would remain highly involved in the wave of activism that blossomed into the Black-Jewish civil rights alliance.
“Bob and Lorraine met and built a life together at a place where there was a very strong Black-Jewish nexus. There was a very strong interplay and interaction,” Gresham said. “I think Lorraine was very influenced by Bob’s family, the Nemiroffs, who were very radical in their politics. And so there was a way in which she was introduced to the base of Jewish intellectualism and Jewish progressive politics, that she took to heart and she was very passionate about.”
Robert Nemiroff and Lorraine Hansberry were married from 1953-62. They are shown here in 1959. (Ben Martin/Getty Images)
Hansberry didn’t hesitate to criticize Jewish writers who said controversial things about Black Americans, either. When Norman Podhoretz wrote “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” an explosive 1963 article in Commentary magazine now widely seen as racist, Hansberry responded with a scathing rebuke. She also sparred with Norman Mailer, who once wrote an essay titled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”
Gresham said Brustein’s nihilism represents what Hansberry saw in a range of Jewish and non-Jewish white writers, whom she hoped could be kickstarted back into activism. But Hansberry also nodded to the reasons why someone like Brustein could feel defeated in the early 1960s, a decade and a half after World War II.
“You mean diddle around with the little things since we can’t do anything about the big ones? Forget about the Holocaust and worry about — reforms in the traffic court or something?” Brustein says at one point in the play to a local politician running as a reformer.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Jewish scholar of literature who has written on Hansberry, said the resulting Brustein character is a very accurate depiction of a secular Jew at the time — both keenly attuned to prejudice in society and also lacking some understanding of the experience of being Black.
“I was just intoxicated that Hansberry could conjure that world, both so affectionately, but also so clear-sidedly that it seems like she can see the limitations of all of the characters’ perspectives,” he said. “But she also represents them with sympathy and humor.”
Kauffman, who also helmed a revival of the play in Chicago in 2016, is impressed with how “fully fledged” the Brustein character is.
“Who are the cultural icons who have sort of articulated the Jew in our culture in the last 50 years or 60 years, you know?” she said. “Brustein is not a caricature of a Woody Allen character, he’s not even ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’ or a Jerry Seinfeld character. He’s a fully drawn character.”
Isaac, who is of mainly Guatemalan and Cuban heritage, has played Jewish characters before, including a formerly Orthodox man in an Israeli director’s remake of the classic film “Scenes From a Marriage.” In the lead-up to this play, he has largely avoided getting caught in headlines focused on the “Jewface” debate, over whether non-Jewish actors should be allowed to play Jewish characters on stage and screen.
But when asked about the responsibility of playing a Jewish character in a New York Times interview, Isaac referenced the fact that he has some Jewish heritage on his father’s side.
“We could play that game: How Jewish are you?” he said to interviewer Alexis Soloski, who is Jewish. “It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.”
When Kauffman directed a version of the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2016, her lead actor had “not a single drop of Jewish heritage…in his blood,” and she said she had to convey “what anger looks like” coming from a Jewish perspective. Working with Isaac has been different — instead of starting at a base of no knowledge, she has been pushing for more of an Ashkenazi sensibility than a Sephardic one.
“I believe that his heritage leans, I’m guessing, more towards Sephardic. And mine is pure Ashkenazi,” she said. “We sort of joke: ‘[The part] is a little bit more Ashkenazi than that, you know what I mean?’ Like, ‘the violence is actually turned towards yourself!’”
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The Mississippi synagogue arson suspect has a Christian fitness site. Here’s what that tell us
Stephen Spencer Pittman, the suspect in a Saturday arson attack at a historic Mississippi synagogue, targeted Beth Israel Congregation because of its “Jewish ties,” according to the FBI. In an interview, he called the shul the “synagogue of Satan,” and his recent social media posts included an antisemitic cartoon.
But on a Christian fitness site registered to Pittman and linked across his social media profiles, Hebrew is liberally sprinkled throughout workout advice and scripture study.
That a man who would burn a synagogue would also be so interested in Hebrew language study, or pepper it throughout his Christian fitness site, may seem surprising. But understanding the reference points of Pittman’s fitness website helps explain the cultural touchstones and media diet he was likely consuming, one that may have influenced his thinking.
Pittman’s site, called One Purpose, advertises “scripture-backed fitness.” It refers to its users as “brothers” who are building their “temple” — women are not mentioned and presumably not the target audience. Instead, it pairs a veneer of biblical truth and Christianity with rhetoric about masculinity.
At the top of the homepage is the tetragrammaton in Hebrew, one of the biblical names for God. The site also says that it has modeled its fitness program after the “biblical patriarchs,” listing some of the oldest men in the bible — Adam, Methuselah, Noah, and others — with their Hebrew names. The site also notes several Jewish fast days, including lesser-known days usually only observed by Orthodox Jews, such as the Fast of Daniel and the Fast of Esther, again with their Hebrew names.
A post on Pittman’s Instagram about a “Christian diet/testosterone optimization” advises eating only raw milk and eggs as well as limiting oneself to “God-made fats,” listing the Hebrew words for oil and butter. Clicking through the site’s instructions for its fitness regimen brings the user snippets of Hebrew vocabulary, such as derekh, meaning path in Hebrew, and ma’atzor, meaning obstacle, scattered among copy about striving to live up to one’s true manliness and strength as ordained by God.
But beyond the biblical sheen, the site — which costs $99 a month to access in full, or $599 for the year — is full of the kind of “grindset” hustle culture advice on masculinity, charisma and workouts that regularly populates the so-called manosphere. Advertised among the premium features are training modules for “looks-maxxing,” which promises a “complete aesthetic optimization” and “test-maxxing,” which is not about acing exams but instead about raising testosterone levels.
This rhetoric is common among influencers widely regarded as proponents of toxic masculinity, including self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who was arrested for sex trafficking in Romania; Myron Gaines, who wrote a book titled Women Deserve Less, and even Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a manosphere elder who regularly inveighs against feminism. They often alternate between “negging” — internet slang for insulting — their participants, and pumping them up, promising a whole new life full of sex and money if they follow the advice of these influences. If they don’t, they will be weak “simps” or “cucks.”
One Purpose uses similar tactics at each click, just with a religious overlay. Users are offered the choice to “take up the cross” and “walk in the purpose God created for you,” or else, if they do not sign up for the site’s weight-lifting, diet and prayer program, to “let your temple fall into ruin” and “drift further from God’s purpose.”
Over the past few years, much of the manosphere has increasingly merged with Christian influencers, particularly traditionalist Catholics, or “tradcaths,” and the TheoBros, adherents of Reformed Christian theology. The overlap is borne largely out of shared values over women’s subservience and male dominance — which manosphere leaders such as Tate believe is biological, and TheoBro leaders such as Joel Webbon believe is biblical.
Many of the TheoBros, such as Webbon or Brian Sauvé, run YouTube series and podcasts where they also discuss their lifting routines and beard care, aligning with the manosphere values. And these TheoBros are often openly antisemitic, viewing Jews as Satanists who have rejected Jesus, and endorsing numerous antisemitic conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial. Manosphere leaders including Tate and Gaines have done the same; Webbon and Gaines have also both hosted outspoken antisemite Nick Fuentes on their shows.
This manosphere interest among Christian influencers has grown alongside an increased attention to Jewish practice and the Hebrew Bible among many Christians, who see it as a way to grow closer to Jesus’ own practices and add a sense of mystery and spirituality via Jewish rituals that are unfamiliar, and feel esoteric, to most Christians.
Hebrew, in these contexts, largely serves to add a sense of authenticity to Christian practice — a way to advertise that their version of Christianity is ancient, from the time of Jesus. But it’s a mistake to see this interest in Hebrew and Jewish texts as philosemitism; while it sometimes manifests as friendliness toward Jews, it often has little relationship to Jewish people today.
Pittman’s One Purpose does not contain the overtly antisemitic or misogynist language that many TheoBro and manosphere influencers use. But the rhetoric of his biblical fitness site echoes their content, placing itself firmly in the same ecosystem. Its subtext aligns with a world rife with conspiracy theories about Jewish governmental control and Satanic rituals.
We don’t know yet exactly what Pittman’s media diet was. But his biblical fitness site’s imitation of Christian masculinity influencers indicates he likely consumed a lot of content that, alongside lifting routines or nutrition advice, contained antisemitic conspiracy theories. On his Instagram, he follows numerous accounts that describe themselves as a “soldier of Christ” or a “watchman for Christ,” some of which also contain conspiracy theories. When the beliefs on what it means to be a “real man” and a good Christian combine, they paint a vision of Christian masculinity that requires defeating Satan — and Satan, in this case, is the Jews. As Pittman said, according to an affidavit, he was due for a “homerun.”
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Oklahoma board to vote on application for religious Jewish charter school, teeing up potential battle
(JTA) — A Jewish education group seeking to create the nation’s first publicly funded religious Jewish charter school took its case to Oklahoma’s charter school board Monday, reviving a high-stakes constitutional battle over whether government money can be used to run faith-based public schools.
The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, founded by Peter Deutsch, a former Florida Democratic congressmember known for endorsing Donald Trump in 2024, has applied to open a statewide virtual Jewish charter school serving grades K-12 beginning in the 2026-27 school year.
The proposal would integrate Oklahoma academic standards with daily Jewish religious instruction, including Hebrew, Jewish texts, holidays and religious practice.
The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board did not vote Monday but is expected to decide as early as next month whether the school can move forward.
Supporters say approval would give families a religious values-based option within the public school system. Critics argue it would violate the legal principle separating church and state and set a precedent that could reshape public education nationwide.
The proposal comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 in a case involving another Oklahoma religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. That tie left in place an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately run — are “state actors” and therefore must remain secular. (The deadlock resulted from a recusal by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who had ties to the Catholic charter school.)
Ben Gamla and its lawyers at Becket, a conservative religious-liberty firm, are seeking to reopen that fight.
“The opportunity is probably the best in Oklahoma of any state in the United States of America today,” Deutsch, who was wearing a kippah, told board members Monday. “And that’s really related to your statute and the implementation of that statute.”
Becket said in a statement after the meeting that Oklahoma is wrongly excluding religious schools from its charter program.
“Religious schools cannot be shut out of state programs just because they are religious,” said Eric Baxter, a senior counsel at Becket who represents Ben Gamla.
Deutsch, who founded a network of Hebrew-English charter schools in Florida nearly two decades ago, told the board that his schools have consistently ranked among the top public schools in that state. Those Florida schools, however, operate as strictly secular charters, teaching Hebrew language and Jewish culture without religious instruction.
The Oklahoma proposal is different.
Ben Gamla’s application describes the school as being organized “for educational, charitable, and religious purposes” and calls for daily Jewish religious studies alongside secular coursework.Teachers and staff would be expected to uphold Jewish religious standards in their professional conduct, with an additional expectation placed on those who are Jewish.
“Employees who are Jewish are expected to be faithful to the Jewish community and adhere to the teachings of the people and to the Torah in their lives,” the application submitted by Ben Gamla says.
Deutsch said that while Oklahoma has a relatively small Jewish population, many families — Jewish and non-Jewish — are seeking a values-based education.
“There are a lot of parents that are looking for a sort of a faith-based, rigorous academic program,” he told the board. “But there was nothing there.”
He said he had previously explored opening a physical Jewish charter school in Oklahoma but concluded that the numbers would not work. A virtual model, he said, would allow the school to operate with as few as 30 or 40 students and reach families across the state.
Board members asked Deutsch how the new Oklahoma nonprofit would relate to his Florida charter network. Deutsch said the two entities are legally separate but linked through him.
“They are separate corporations. They’re separate 501(c)(3)s,” he said. “The link is me.”
Deutsch, who his is one of the three directors currently serving on the board of Ben Gamla. The other two are Brett Farley, who was a member of St. Isidore’s board of directors, and Ezra Husney, a New York lawyer.
He also said a nonprofit backer has committed to cover any startup deficits and that he plans to seek federal charter-school startup grants.
He didn’t name the nonprofit, but Ben Gamla’s application includes a letter pledging financial support signed by Rabbi Raphael Butler, president of the Afikim Foundation, a New York based nonprofit aiming to “innovate and implement high impact global Jewish projects.” Butler is also president of Olami, a global Orthodox Jewish outreach group.
In a press release issued after the meeting, Becket framed the case as one of religious discrimination, saying the state is required under the U.S. Constitution to treat religious and secular schools equally in public programs.
Last year’s Supreme Court deadlock in the Catholic case left the constitutional question unresolved. Conservative justices have signaled sympathy for the idea that states may not exclude religious organizations from generally available public benefits — a line of reasoning Becket hopes to extend to charter schools.
“Our goal is to win here at the board, and if that doesn’t happen, we will bring a case in federal court,” Baxter told local media after the meeting.
Church-state separation advocates say the plan would cross a clear constitutional line.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which led the legal fight against the Catholic school, has already filed public-records requests seeking communications between Ben Gamla and the charter board and has signaled it is prepared to sue.
“Despite their loss earlier this year in the U.S. Supreme Court, religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, the group’s president, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in November.
In Oklahoma, home to fewer than 9,000 Jews, the proposal has drawn skepticism from local Jewish leaders, some of whom say they learned about it from reporters rather than organizers. Rabbi Daniel Kaiman of Congregation B’nai Emunah in Tulsa told JTA last month that no one in the community had been consulted. “I was surprised to be learning about it through a reporter,” he said.
Kaiman said he worries about a national legal fight being waged through a tiny Jewish community with delicate interfaith and political relationships. Oklahoma already has Jewish day schools and synagogue programs, he added. “I don’t know who this new proposal is for,” he said.
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A century before Trump targeted Somalis, Jews faced the politics of blame
(JTA) — As President Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Somali immigrants in Minnesota and ordered a surge in immigration enforcement because Somalis took part in a social-service fraud scheme, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pushed back.
“’When a fraud takes place, when a crime takes place, you investigate it, you prosecute it, you charge it. You arrest the person that did the fraud or the crime, you put him in jail as an individual,” Frey told NPR. “You get held accountable as an individual. That’s how this works in America.
“You do not, however, hold an entire community accountable for the crimes of one.”
Frey’s remarks were echoed by other state and national figures. “We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, who herself immigrated from Somalia to the United States as a child.
Frey, who is Jewish, didn’t mention his own background in standing up for Somalis, a community of whom Trump has said, “And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you.”
But had Frey turned to Jewish history, he may well have cited another instance in which a powerful political figure blamed an immigrant community for the crimes of a few, and an ethnic group was targeted by nativists who pinned the country’s ills on immigrants.
Frey might have reached back to 1908, when New York City Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham leveled what at the time was the most explicit, highest profile accusation of Jewish criminality made by a major American official since Gen. Ulysses Grant expelled all Jews from his military district to combat allegations of cotton smuggling and corruption.
That year, in an article in the North American Review, Bingham claimed Jews accounted for half of New York’s crimes, especially picking pockets, fencing stolen goods, arson and operating gambling and vice operations.
“It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one quarter of its population), perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider the ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor,” Bingham wrote with the stilted prose of a bureaucrat and the dubious authority of the then popular pseudoscience of eugenics.
Bingham buttressed his accusation with statistics: “Forty per cent of the boys at the House of Refuge and twenty per cent of those arraigned in the Children’s Court” are Jews, he claimed. “The percentage of Hebrew children in the truant schools is also higher than that of any other.”
Jewish leaders saw Bingham’s accusations as all the more dangerous because they were based on a shred of truth: “They knew, for one thing, that there was a crime problem on the East Side, not so lurid as Bingham had painted, but serious enough,” wrote Irving Howe in his history of the period, “World of Our Fathers.”
Like Somali-Americans in Minnesota, the Jews of the era were on the cusp — with one foot in the poverty of the tenements and the other in the growing prosperity of a rising working and business-owning class. But the Eastern European Jewish newcomers also had an important lever: the German Jews who had arrived earlier and established positions of power in finance and politics.
Jacob Schiff, the powerful banker and philanthropist, became one of the most forceful critics of Bingham’s article, publicly denouncing it as reckless and un-American. Joseph Seligman, founder of the investment bank J. & W. Seligman & Co., similarly condemned Bingham, insisting that crime was a function of poverty and dislocation, not religion or ethnicity, and pointing out the danger of a police commissioner racializing crime. Both men brought their own statistics and experts to show Bingham had exaggerated Jewish involvement.
The grassroots response was just as strong, with letters to the Yiddish and general newspapers, mass protests and heated sermons.
“Mr. Bingham has been indulging in mere generalities and he should be forced to give facts, including the names, residences, in fact the exact figures of any one week or month, to prove his statements, or else he will be asked to make a public retraction and apologize to the race he has injured,” fumed Rabbi Joseph A. Silverman of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El.
Bingham was, and he did. “By mid-September,” Howe writes, “under severe pressure, Bingham retracted his charges ‘frankly and without reservation.’” He subsequently lost the support of Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. and was forced to resign in July 1909.
Bingham wasn’t the only figure to hold the entire Jewish community responsible for the crimes committed by its members. Eleven years earlier, police commissioner Frank Moss argued in his book “The American Metropolis” that “criminal instincts… are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jews.” Between 1907 and 1909, McClure’s Magazine published articles by the muckraking journalist George Kibbe Turner claiming extensive Jewish involvement in the “white slave trade” — what today we would call human trafficking. While courts found little evidence of a wide-spead Jewish conspiracy to traffic women, “McClure’s used the white slavery investigation and grand jury to stoke anti-immigration and anti-Semitic fears throughout the city,” historian Mia Brett wrote in a paper for the Gotham Center at CUNY.
The Jewish elite counted Bingham’s retraction as a victory, but the incident left many with the impression that the Jewish community needed a better mechanism for organizing around the fight against antisemitism. In New York, that meant the formation of the Kehillah, an ambitious experiment to create a unified Jewish communal organization. The Kehillah included educational and political committees, as well as a “Bureau of Social Morals” — a sort of self-policing body meant to help law enforcement root out crime among Jews. When it sank in that the bureau was only reinforcing an impression that the Kehillah had been formed to dispel, the bureau was scrapped.
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, when it disbanded over — spoiler alert — ideological disagreements among its constituent groups. But it created a precedent for centralized communal organizations to come, including UJA-Federation of New York.
In Minnesota too there are signs that the president’s attacks are strengthening the Somali community by sparking solidarity and organizing.“I think it’s giving us a chance for many Americans to learn about the Somali community, and not only that, but also to see the resilience,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, told CNN. “Also, it’s giving Somali Americans a chance to own their American identity and fight for it.”
When the Bingham incident is remembered, it is often to illustrate how officials trade on xenophobic fears over facts — and why such scapegoating, once unleashed, can do profound damage to both the targeted community and the civic fabric.
“We know that when a few people commit crimes, it does not implicate an entire community and to say so is racist, is xenophobic and just wrong,” Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker of Mount Zion Temple in St Paul told Fox 9 in Minneapolis last month.Meanwhile, the current police chief in Minneapolis, Brian O’Hara, has taken the very un-Bingham-like position that the “real problem” of social service fraud in the state doesn’t justify the “largely political” reaction of the federal government, especially immigration authorities.
“I had not known any Somali Americans until I moved to Minnesota,” O’Hara said Monday on “The Daily” podcast. “The Somali Americans that I have met here, including many of whom are police officers in this city, have been incredibly welcoming of me. From a personal perspective, [the immigration crackdown on Somalis] was just bizarre because I’m also aware that the overwhelming majority of people from that community are American citizens.”
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