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As war splits progressives, a Jewish group and a Black group find common ground on voters’ rights
(New York Jewish Week) — In late 2021, activists from the Workers Circle, a progressive Jewish group, and the voting rights organization Black Voters Matter gathered outside the White House for a protest.
The protesters — who demanded that President Joe Biden call for the elimination of the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation — blocked the sidewalk, singing and chanting, said Noa Baron, who was then a college student activist with the Workers Circle.
“It was one of those things where you feel like and you know you’re doing the right thing,” Baron, now a staffer at the Workers Circle, said of the protest and the then-nascent partnership with Black Voters Matter. “They believe in showing up and we believe in showing up, so all of us have that shared understanding that bringing people and being on the ground is an important part of organizing for democracy.”
Now, even as war between Israel and Hamas has stoked tensions on the left and frayed relationships between some Jews and progressives, the two groups have forged ahead with their partnership. Both feel that their constituencies are threatened by racism and by the prospect of a Donald Trump victory in the 2024 presidential election.
At an annual dinner on Monday night in downtown Manhattan, the Workers Circle honored Black Voters Matter with its Activism Award and announced that the groups were formalizing their partnership. The move will deepen the relationship between the two groups and details will be released next month.
Ann Toback, the Workers Circle CEO, said the strained relationships between different groups due to the war “makes our partnership more important.”
“We need to model to the Jewish community and the Black community that there is so much that still brings us together,” Toback told the New York Jewish Week. “I think there’s a lot of people out there who want to create divisions even when they may or may not exist, and what we’re doing is modeling what it means to be on the ground fighting for something we all believe in.”
Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to the U.S. established the Workers Circle, then called the Workmen’s Circle, in 1900 in New York as a labor and mutual aid organization. The group now runs a robust Yiddish language and culture program, and advocates for progressive causes. In recent years, the group has focused on strengthening democratic and voting rights, Toback said.
As a policy, the national organization stays out of Middle East politics, which has contributed to some friction with other Jewish groups. In August, the Workers Circle left the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations over disagreements about policies in the U.S., discourse on Israel and how to define antisemitism.
And one local affiliate has allied with the left on Israel. In October, the Boston Workers Circle, which is a separate nonprofit, split with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston after joining a rally in support of a Gaza ceasefire.
“We were founded by activists who very much believed that you change the world you live in and we’ve always followed that,” Toback said of the decision to stay away from opining on the conflict. She said her group is focused on the possibility of voting rights being curtailed ahead of Election Day next year.
“Our democracy is under attack right now,” she added. “And it’s so important that the American Jewish community understand that, as much as our hearts may be distracted, we can’t take our eyes off what may happen here in 11 months’ time when millions of people may not be able to vote.”
In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, left-leaning Jews said they felt abandoned by former partners. In the days after Oct. 7, multiple Black Lives Matter chapters appeared to praise or endorse Hamas’ attack. Black Voters Matter is a separate group from Black Lives Matter.
More broadly, polls have also shown a divergence between white Americans and people of color in their views on the war, and between Jewish Americans and non-Jews.
The Workers Circle and Black Voters Matter vowed to press ahead with their work despite the war.
“We’ve had plans on launching this partnership for months and so it’s definitely not a response to current events, but we’re not going to not do it because of current events. We’re going to stay focused on what our mission has been,” said Black Voters Matter’s co-founder, Cliff Albright. “When we come together, Black communities do better and Jewish communities do better.”
The two groups both see themselves as threatened by bigotry and voter suppression, and say they are linked by the history of cooperation between the Black and Jewish communities during the civil rights movement. In an homage to that era, the Workers Circle and Black Voters Matter are planning to march together in November at an annual event in Selma, Alabama, marking the historic march in that city for voting rights in 1965.
The two groups will also organize activists from geographically close Jewish and Black communities, starting in Florida, for discussions on issues including book banning, education and health care, Toback said. The two groups and others are co-sponsoring a virtual discussion on voter suppression on Thursday.
Other initiatives include get-out-the-vote projects, combating voter suppression in North Carolina, a summit to talk about organizing for voting rights and “democracy circles” that bring together small groups of activists around the country to examine topics such as gerrymandering.
Noelle Damico, the Workers Circle’s social justice director, said the group had worked together with Black organizations and leaders, including the civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, since the early 20th century. The Workers Circle supported Randolph’s newspaper, The Messenger, and conducted outreach to Black needleworkers. Randolph helped the group see its labor organizing as a way to advance civil rights, Damico said.
In the civil rights era, Workers Circle members and leaders were deeply active in the movement, she said.
“Some of them were desegregating parks and other public facilities, some of them were involved in the major marches,” including the Selma March and the March on Washington in 1963, Damico said. “It’s been a big part of our history and at this moment it seems really important for us to reclaim that. Not that we forgot it but just to pay special attention at this moment.”
Danielle Brown, the deputy national field director for Black Voters Matter, said the fraught moment was “an opportunity to form bridges.”
“There are so many different things that we could come together around, just in understanding who each other is, understanding each other’s culture, but voting rights is something that’s common,” Brown said. “That’s not a Jewish thing, that’s not a Black thing, that’s something that we need across the board.”
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Antisemitism Continues to Skyrocket in France, With Over 1,500 Incidents Recorded in 2024, New Report Finds
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a new bombshell report.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, on Wednesday released its annual report on antisemitism, which was compiled by the Jewish Community Protection Service using data jointly recorded with the Ministry of the Interior.
The total number of antisemitic outrages last year was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
One such incident occurred in late June, when an elderly Jewish woman was attacked in a Paris suburb by two assailants who punched her in the face, pushed her to the ground, and kicked her while hurling antisemitic slurs, including “dirty Jew, this is what you deserve.”
In another egregious attack that garnered international headlines, a 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped by three Muslim boys in a different Paris suburb on June 15. The child told investigators that the assailants called her a “dirty Jew” and hurled other antisemitic comments at her during the attack. In response to the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing his country.
Comme chaque année, le Crif publie le rapport annuel sur les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France établi par le Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (@SPCJFRANCE) sur la base des chiffres recensés conjointement entre le SPCJ et le ministère de l’Intérieur.
Pour la… pic.twitter.com/VuPwVXvq0f
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) January 22, 2025
Antisemitism skyrocketed in France following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. According to CRIF’s report, the surge continued unabated last year, with over 30 percent of antisemitic incidents, or 43 out of an average of 130 per month, making direct reference to “Palestine.”
In November, for example, a monument honoring victims of the Nazis located in eastern France was vandalized with graffiti reading “Nique Israël,” or “F—k Israel” in English.
On the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, three men brutally attacked a Jewish woman at the entrance to her home in Paris. The victim stated that the assailants threatened her with a box knife, made antisemitic threats, and mentioned the events of last Oct. 7.
In September, a kosher restaurant in Villeurbanne, near the eastern city of Lyon, was defaced with red paint and tagged with the message “Free Gaza.”
CRIF’s latest data also showed that 192 antisemitic acts were committed in schools, which accounted for 12.2 percent of all such incidents recorded last year.
Synagogues were targeted as well. In August, for example, French police arrested a 33-year-old Algerian man suspected of trying to set a synagogue ablaze in the southern French city of la Grande-Motte.
France is one of several countries that has experienced a surge in anti-Jewish hate crimes and demonstrations since Hamas’s invasion of Israel.
According to a report from the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel, there has been a staggering 340 percent increase in antisemitic acts worldwide in 2024 compared to 2022.
The report showed a sharp rise in antisemitic outrages in North America and Europe, with the US up 288 percent, Canada increasing by 562 percent, and Britain seeing a 450 percent spike, with nearly 2,000 incidents recorded in the first half of 2024 in the UK.
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Cornell University Statue Vandalized by Anti-Zionist Activists
Cornell University workers begin the work of cleaning anti-Zionist graffiti off a statue of the school’s co-founder on January 21, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Anti-Zionist agitators at Cornell University kicked off the spring semester with an act of vandalism which defamed Israel as an “occupier” and practitioner of “apartheid.”
“Divest from death,” the students, who have not yet been identified, graffitied on a statue of Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White that is located on the Arts Quad section of campus — as first reported by The Cornell Daily Sun on Tuesday. “Occupation=death.”
Speaking anonymously to The Sun, the university’s official campus newspaper, the students provided an account of their grievances, which addressed what in their view is the insufficiency of the recently negotiated ceasefire between Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, and Israel. In so doing, they put forth the view that all of Israel must be surrendered to the Palestinians, whose leaders have serially rejected viable two-state solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the United Nations voted in 1947, via Resolution 181, to partition what was then known as British Mandatory Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.
“We demand that Cornell divests from the weapons manufacturers that make genocide possible,” they said. “A ceasefire will save lives, and we hope it will be permanent. But a ceasefire is not a free Palestine, and we will organize until we see a liberated Palestine free from genocide, occupation, and apartheid.”
Anonymous collectives of anti-Zionists have vandalized Cornell University property before, and the school as a whole has seen some of the most disturbing incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
In August, a group vandalized the Day Hall administrative building, graffitiing “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” on it and shattering the glazings of its front doors. They justified their actions.
“We had to accept that the only way to make ourselves heard is by targeting the only thing the university administration really cares about: property,” the students told The Sun. “With the start of this new academic year, the Cornell administration is trying desperately to upkeep a facade of normalcy knowing that, since last semester, they have been working tirelessly to uphold Cornell’s function as a fascist, classist, imperial machine.”
Anti-Zionists convulsed Cornell University’s campus during the 2023-2024 academic year, engaging in activities that are without precedent in the school’s 159-year history. Three weeks after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel, now-former student Patrick Dai threatened to perpetrate heinous crimes against members of the school’s Jewish community, including mass murder and rape. Cornell students also occupied an administrative building and held a “mock trial” in which they convicted school president Martha Pollack of complicity in “apartheid” and “genocide against Palestinian civilians.” Meanwhile, history professor Russell Rickford called Hamas’s barbarity on Oct. 7 “exhilarating” and “energizing” at a pro-Palestinian rally held on campus.
By the end of the year, Pollack announced her resignation as president of the university, which followed the installment of an illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the campus in which pro-Hamas students had lived and protested the university’s investments in companies linked to Israel.
Cornell now has a new interim president, Michael Kotlikoff, and his administration has vowed to punish and deter criminal behavior undertaken in the name of anti-Zionist activism.
“Acts of violence, extended occupations of buildings, or destruction of property (including graffiti), will not be tolerated and will be subject to immediate public safety response,” he said in August. “We will enforce these policies consistently, for every group or activity, on any issue or subject …We urge all members of the community to express their views in a manner that respects the rights of others. One voice may never stifle another. There is a time, place, and manner for all to speak and all to be heard.”
So far, Kotlikoff’s administration has executed its zero-tolerance policy, pursuing criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened on Sept. 24 when a mass of students disrupted a career fair because it was attended by Boeing and L3Harris, an American defense contractor. The incident resulted in three arrests, and, later, severe disciplinary sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.” However, the university did downgrade sanctions levied against a doctoral student after his supporters decried that dis-enrolling him as a student would lead inexorably to his deportation from the US.
Regarding this latest incident, Cornell has vowed to bring the vandals to justice.
“Vandalism violates our code of conduct and the law,” the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD) told The Sun. “Graffiti is property damage, which is a crime. We are committed to identifying the perpetrators responsible.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Trump Fires Head of Terrorist-Linked World Central Kitchen From President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, Nutrition
World Central Kitchen (WCK) barge loaded with food arrives off the Gaza coast, in this handout image released March 15, 2024. Photo: Israel Defense Forces/Handout via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced the firing of celebrity chef Jose Andres, founder of the controversial World Central Kitchen (WCK), from the president’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, claiming that the restaurateur and humanitarian is “not aligned with” the current White House’s mission.
Trump shared the news of Andres’s departure in an “Official Notice of Dismissal” on social media. The statement explained that his administration is currently in the process of “identifying and removing over a thousand presidential appointees from the previous administration, who are not aligned with our vision to Make America Great Again.”
Over the past year, Andres has found himself embroiled in controversy regarding the alleged conduct of WCK employees in Gaza. WCK, a US-based NGO founded by Andres to help feed needy people caught in disasters or conflict zones, has been operating with roughly 500 employees in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. The charity has often engaged in heated public disputes with the Jewish state, accusing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of purposefully targeting its workers with airstrikes — allegations that Jerusalem has adamantly rejected.
In April 2024, the IDF came under fire after it conducted airstrikes on a WCK vehicle convoy, killing seven employees of the charity. Israel acknowledged responsibility for the incident and insisted that the airstrikes violated internal protocol, subsequently dismissing two senior officers over the botched military operation.
Israel has accused WCK of insufficiently vetting its workforce and employing terrorist members within its ranks.
Last month, WCK fired at least 62 of its staff members in Gaza after Israel said they had “affiliations and direct connections” with terrorist groups. Israel conducted an investigation into the backgrounds of the charity’s employees after the Jewish state discovered that a WCK employee named Ahed Azmi Qdeih took part in the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Qdeih was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Nov. 30. At the time, WCK said it had no knowledge of an employee involved in the Oct. 7 onslaught, in which Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped over 250 hostages during their rampage in southern Israel.
Israel has long insisted that Hamas and similar terrorist groups have infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. In August 2024, the United Nations admitted that nine employees of UNRWA, the controversial United Nations agency responsible for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, were fired over their alleged involvement in the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel.
Andres responded to Trump’s statement on X/Twitter, claiming that he had already resigned.
“I submitted my resignation last week … my 2 year term was already up,” Andres wrote.
“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members — unpaid volunteers like me — were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day. I’m proud of what we accomplished on behalf of the American people,” he added.
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