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Jewish sailor Bill Pinkney, first Black person to circle the globe solo, dies at 87
(JTA) — Captain Bill Pinkney, a Jewish sailor who became the first African American to sail around the world solo, died Thursday. He was 87 and had suffered a fall.
Starting in 1990, the Chicagoan’s 22-month, 27,000-mile journey aboard a 47-foot cutter captivated thousands of schoolchildren who followed his trip via an educational television channel. The footage was used in an award-winning documentary, “The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney,” that aired on the Disney Channel, National Geographic and PBS stations.
The former cosmetics executive also wrote a children’s book in 1994, “Captain Bill Pinkney’s Journey.”
A very different journey also captivated readers in 2019, when Pinkney and his former wife, Ina Pinkney, were featured in a New York Times photo essay about their marriage and extremely amicable divorce. Bill, who grew up poor on Chicago’s South Side, and Ina, who grew up Jewish in Brooklyn and Long Island, married in 1965. It was his second marriage.
Ina was 21 years old when she met Bill at a coffee place in Greenwich Village. “As soon as I spotted him across the crowded room, I said to my friend, ‘Susan, I’m going to marry him,’” Ina told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “And I sat down and I talked to him for a little bit, and we went out and we had something to eat. And that was it. It was a done deal for me. And what even helped more is that he was Jewish.”
Yet although Bill considered himself Jewish starting in childhood and converted to Judaism as an adult, her parents broke off contact with the couple and none of her relatives attended the wedding.
According to Ina, Bill was 12 years old when he came home from church with his mother, who divorced his father when Bill was 6. “He said, ‘I can’t go there anymore.’” When his mother asked why, Bill explained, “Because all I hear about is that everything gets better after you die. It can’t be that way.” His mother encouraged him to discover something he could believe in, and after a visit to the library, the preteen announced, “I’m Jewish.”
When Ina, who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home, and Bill were engaged, Bill decided to go through a formal conversion, choosing the Hebrew name “Barak ben Avraham Avinu.” When Ina asked why he felt he needed a formal conversion, Bill explained, “Because without this I could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery next to you.” Ina said that, late in life, Bill would regularly Zoom into services held at the Hebrew Congregation of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and she would occasionally join him online.
The two were married for 36 years. The couple went their separate ways in 2001, when Bill decided to continue to pursue his sailing dreams and Ina her career as a celebrity baker and chef in Chicago.
“My life was on the sea, hers was on the land,” Bill told the New York Times in 2019. According to Ina, Bill would say, “If it doesn’t have a lobby, it would never be her hobby” – that is, she preferred a hotel or a cruise ship over the sail boats he favored. Ina used saltier language to describe how bored she felt on the water.
He later married Migdalia Vachier Pinkney. She survives him, along with his sister, Naomi Pinkney, as do a daughter from his first marriage and two grandchildren.
William Pinkney was born Sept. 15, 1935, in Chicago. After serving eight years in the Navy, he became a makeup artist and designed a line of women’s cosmetics, eventually working as a marketing manager for Revlon and director of cosmetics marketing for Johnson Products Company. He became director of marketing for the Chicago Department of Human Services in 1980, according to the History Makers.
Pinkney first learned how to sail small cargo skiffs while stationed in Puerto Rico with the Navy in the 1950s. He began sailing in earnest on Lake Michigan when working in Chicago.
Pinkney also served, starting in 2000, as the first captain of the reconstructed Amistad, the Spanish schooner whose crew was killed in a revolt by enslaved Africans in 1839. The reconstruction of the ship was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film, “Amistad,” about the revolt; as captain, Pinkney took schoolteachers to Africa on a route tracing the Middle Passage crossing by which enslaved Africans were taken from Senegal to the Americas.
In recent years he ran a charter boat business in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
Pinkney was also a senior advisor for National Geographic. In 2021, he was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame.
Discussing his round-the-world voyage on a boating website, Pinkney said that one of the highlights was sailing past South Africa two weeks after Nelson Mandela had been released after 27 years behind bars. “I sailed past Robben Island, where he’d been imprisoned, flying a red, black, and green spinnaker, the colors of the African liberation movement,” said Pinkney. “As an afterthought, I should’ve put a big yellow Star of David on there as well [laughing], because I’m Jewish.”
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The post Jewish sailor Bill Pinkney, first Black person to circle the globe solo, dies at 87 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Experts, Lawmakers Suggest Same Hateful Ideology That Motivated New Orleans Attack Also Behind Pro-Hamas NYC March
Palestinian Youth Movement protesters speaking in Times Square, New York City, NY, USA on Jan. 1, 2025. Photo: Ethan Johnson/SIPA USA via Reuters Connect
Some experts and lawmakers are drawing a link between the Islamist ideology that seemingly motivated the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans and the pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City that took place hours later.
On Wednesday, hours after a US Army veteran who pledged allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS) drove a truck into a crowd of New Year’s Day revelers in New Orleans and killed at least 14 people, protesters marched through New York City, chanting slogans condemning both America and Israel.
Hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators descended upon the streets of Manhattan, sporting signs calling to “End Zionism,” “End all US aid to Israel,” and for “No War With Iran.” Many of these activists also carried Palestinian flags and bellowed slogans such as “intifada revolution!” — a slogan that many consider to be a call for violence against Israelis, Jews, and Westerners more broadly.
“We’re sending you back to Europe, you white b–ches,” a protester yelled at participants of a pro-Israel counter-demonstration. “Go back to Europe! Go back to Europe!”
The demonstration was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a group that plans anti-Israel demonstrations across the United States. PYM has repeatedly praised Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
US lawmakers were quick to slam the anti-Israel demonstrations, accusing them of fomenting unwarranted hatred toward the United States and the Jewish state.
“These protesters in New York City are marching not to condemn the ISIS terrorist attack against their own country but to falsely accuse their own country, as well as Israel, of terrorism,” wrote Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), one of the most strident allies of Israel in the US Congress.
“The hatred for America and Israel far exceeds the hatred for actual terror, apartheid, and genocide in the world,” Torres continued. “For an ideologue, ideology has more reality than reality itself.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), another stalwart ally of Israel, also linked the New Orleans terror attack to the New York City demonstrations, saying that “hours after a jihadist sympathizer killed 10 Americans, pro-Hamas agitators are marching through New York City calling for a global intifada.”
“The governor and the mayor must put an end to this nonsense — now,” Lawler added. “Silence is not an option.”
Israeli diplomat Yaki Lopez similarly linked the two incidents, posting on social media that “pro-Hamas demonstrators chanted ‘intifada revolution’ in New York City while jihadist terrorists carried out a deadly attack in New Orleans, killing over a dozen Americans.”
“There’s little distinction between the actions of [the suspect in] New Orleans, who used a truck as a weapon and terrorist attacks in the West Bank where cars are used to run over Israelis,” added Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of its Long War Journal. “It’s terrorism, yet there are people in this country who support ‘resistance’ and ‘intifada.’”
US federal agencies have established a link between domestic anti-Israel protests and foreign actors. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said in July that the Iranian regime has organized “influence efforts” to undermine trust in American institutions, adding that “actors tied to Iran’s government” have encouraged and provided financial support to rampant anti-Israel demonstrations. Haines also said that Iran has weaponized social media against the Jewish state and America, spreading misleading propaganda regarding the ongoing war in Gaza.
Meanwhile, experts have warned of a rising global terror threat in the year following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities. Last May, experts explained to The Algemeiner that “lone wolf” terrorists inspired by ISIS and al Qaeda could carry out attacks on US soil, incensed by the ongoing war in Gaza and inspired by terrorist violence abroad.
“As I look back over my career in law enforcement, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a time when I’ve seen so many different threats, all elevated, all at the same time,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in April.
The post Experts, Lawmakers Suggest Same Hateful Ideology That Motivated New Orleans Attack Also Behind Pro-Hamas NYC March first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Florida Man Arrested for Alleged Plot to Attack AIPAC Office
The 2018 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC. Photo: Guatemala Presidency / Handout via Reuters.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stopped an apparent plot to attack an office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Plantation, FL, according to court documents filed earlier this week.
Law enforcement apprehended Forrest Kendall Pemberton, a 26-year-old resident of Gainesville, FL, on Dec. 25, the first night of Hanukkah, after he traveled to Plantation in search of the local AIPAC office, local and national media outlets reported.
Prosecutors alleged in their filings that Pemberton was in a rideshare vehicle carrying multiple firearms, including an AR-15 rifle, and ammunition when law enforcement officers stopped and arrested him.
AIPAIC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US, seeks to foster bipartisan support for a stronger US-Israel relationship.
The court documents reportedly did not specifically name AIPAC as the target. However, an FBI affidavit described an organization with the same mission statement as AIPAC and referenced identical language from the group’s website. The suspect’s search engine history also included queries for AIPAC and its former Plantation office, believing it was the current local office.
According to law enforcement, Pemberton initially scoped out the premises of the Florida site for entry and exit points before later attempting to return with weapons.
Suspicions first arose surrounding Pemberton’s whereabouts after his father reported him missing to the police on Dec. 23. The father said he found a “concerning” note in his son’s backpack that “espoused anti-authority sentiments.” His father added that Pemberton often “espoused antisemitic views.”
An AIPAC spokesperson issued an identical statement to multiple outlets thanking the FBI for its work and saying the pro-Israel organization will not be intimidated.
“We take these threats very seriously and we are working closely with law enforcement concerning this matter,” the spokesperson said. “We will not be deterred by extremists in pursuing our mission to strengthen the relationship with America’s valued ally, Israel. We are deeply appreciative of the FBI’s work to stop this individual.”
Pemberton faces a federal stalking charge and is accused of traveling to AIPAC with the intent of “killing, injuring, harassing, and intimidating” people with the organization.
The post Florida Man Arrested for Alleged Plot to Attack AIPAC Office first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Antisemitic Hate Crimes in Massachusetts Reach Eight-Year High
The Boston skyline stands behind the Tobin Bridge and the city of Chelsea as seen from Everett, Massachusetts, US. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect.
The US state of Massachusetts saw more antisemitic hate crimes in 2023 than at any time since government officials began tracking such data eight years ago, according to a report issued by its Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS).
A striking 119 antisemitic hate crimes were reported to law enforcement agencies, EOPSS said, a total which, in addition to eclipsing 2015’s total of 56 incidents, amounts to a 70 percent increase over the previous year. Antisemitic hate crimes also constituted 18.8 percent of all hate crimes reported in 2023, a figure which trails only behind the percentage of hate crimes which targeted African Americans.
The report added that 68.9 percent of the antisemitic incidents involved property destruction or vandalism, a total of 82, while another 19 percent involved intimidation. Some physical assaults, six, were recorded or reported to the police.
EOPSS’s numbers fall somewhat below other figures reported by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in spring 2024, when the civil rights group said 440 antisemitic incidents occurred in the state in 2023, a 189 percent increase over the previous year. However, the discrepancy may be due to differences in methodology, as ADL reports include all antisemitic incidents, while EOPSS’s tally considers those which fit the legal definition of a crime and were brought to the attention of law enforcement.
The ADL has said, however, that their numbers and EOPSS’s are mutually inclusive.
“This report mirrors what sadly we’ve been tracking and responding to on a daily basis. There has been a marked increase in antisemitic hate incidents in the Bay State and in fact across the country,” Peggy Shukur, vice president of the ADL’s East Division, told The Algemeiner on Thursday. “The local increase reflects national trends. Our data showed that over 10,000 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the US since Oct. 7, 2023, an over 200 percent increase compared to incidents reported to us during the same period a year before.”
She added, “Behind every one of these numbers are people who have experienced the harm, fear, intimidation, and pain that reverberates from each of these incidents. The fact that numbers increase by 70 percent is a grim reminder that antisemitism continues to infect our communities in real and pervasive ways.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, antisemitism in Massachusetts has been an acute problem on college campuses, one to which school officials have allegedly hesitated to respond.
“I’ve become traumatized,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Talia Khan told members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce in March. “MIT has become overrun by terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews on our campus. Members of the anti-Israel club on our campus have stated that violence against Jews who support Israel, including women and children, is acceptable. When this was reported to president [Sally] Kornbluth and senior MIT administration, the issue was never dealt with. Then, administrators pleaded ignorance when we reminded them that no action had been taken, saying that they either forgot about it or missed the email.”
Allegations of neglect have prompted civil lawsuits, including one against Harvard University which was recently cleared to proceed to discovery. Filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (Brandeis Center), the suit centers on several incidents involving Harvard Kennedy School professor Marshall Ganz during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Ganz allegedly refused to accept a group project submitted by Israeli students for his course, titled “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” because they described Israel as a “liberal Jewish democracy.” He castigated the students over their premise, the Brandeis Center says, accusing them of “white supremacy” and denying them the chance to defend themselves. Later, Ganz allegedly forced the Israeli students to attend “a class exercise on Palestinian solidarity” and the taking of a class photograph in which their classmates and teaching fellows “wore ‘keffiyehs’ as a symbol of Palestinian support.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Antisemitic Hate Crimes in Massachusetts Reach Eight-Year High first appeared on Algemeiner.com.