Uncategorized
‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
—
The post ‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Troy Jackson wins Maine Democratic Senate nomination, keeps mum on Israel, AIPAC
(JTA) — BANGOR, Maine – Troy Jackson accepted the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate race on Saturday with no mention of Israel, sidestepping an issue that has become a focal point for many Maine Jews as they assess the party’s new standard-bearer.
Jackson secured the nomination in a landslide 566 to 5 vote by delegates at the nominating convention. Saundra Pelletier, the only remaining challenger after the rest of the field dropped out in the days leading up to the gathering, picked up the handful of votes that didn’t go to the winner.
While Jackson took several shots during his acceptance address at Sen. Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican he will now face in the general election, it was Pelletier who used her remarks to specifically malign Collins’ voting record on Israel.
“She voted to increase federal funding in defensive arms for Iran, and did not vote to take moderate measures to hold Netanyahu accountable,” Pelletier said, receiving a chorus from the crowd.
The victory for Jackson came after the state’s former Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic, left the race earlier this month amid a sexual assault allegation, which he has denied. The resulting scramble to replace him upended the Democratic primary and prompted fresh scrutiny from Jewish Mainers of Jackson’s recent evolution on Israel.
Jackson, a former state lawmaker and union advocate, had previously said little publicly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his two-decade career in state legislature. However, during the race to replace Platner, he has embraced the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel on his campaign website, both positions championed by Platner before his exit. Jackson also has said he wouldn’t accept any funding from AIPAC.
But on Saturday, as a sea of supporters sporting his campaign’s blue and yellow “Troy Jackson” t-shirts cheered their new nominee, Jackson omitted any mention of Israel from his remarks. Instead, Jackson reaffirmed his commitments to passing Medicare for all, supporting union rights and restoring abortion rights nationwide, among other issues.
During his address following the decisive victory, Jackson also offered a message to Maine voters who remain on the fence:
“Whether you supported me from the beginning, supported another candidate, or are still deciding what you think of this fifth-generation logger from Allagash,” Jackson said. “I’ve always known this, that your trust has to be earned, and so I want you to hear this directly from me. There is a place in this campaign for all of you. There is work for you in this movement, and I will spend every day, now through November, earning that trust because today we turn the page.”
Amy Fried, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Maine who attended Saturday’s conference as an alternate delegate but did not cast a ballot, said that while she believed Jackson had addressed Israel in the lead-up to Saturday because “a lot of people are interested in the topic,” his speech reflected the issues he had been “concerned about his whole political career.”
“Obviously, he’d have to take votes on foreign policy and funding when he’s in the Senate,” Fried said. “But I think that his main interest is always in issues that have to do with housing and healthcare, you know, all of the matters that are sort of more day-to-day kitchen table issues.”
While Jackson avoided revisiting his recent stances on Israel, which have raised concern among some Jewish voters in Maine, about a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the convention hall in support of his candidacy.
“It’s a really positive step that you have nominated Troy Jackson,” one protester shouted through a megaphone. “I think he’s going to be a strong voice for the kind of values that I believe in and the people of Palestine, the children of Iran, and all the other places the U.S. bombed.”
Ronna Lugosch, a 71-year-old Jewish grandmother and delegate from Round Pond, Maine, said that she was “more excited now than I was before” about Jackson’s candidacy.
Lugosch, who supports Jackson’s stances on Israel, said she hadn’t noticed he had left the topic out of his remarks. “Unfortunately, it’s a sensitive topic, so that’s my guess that maybe he didn’t bring that up because it was just too much,” Lugosch said. “You know, he was being careful.”
Still, Lugosch said that she was “really impressed with all his comments about working people and organizing.”
“I’m going to campaign for him because we need to get rid of Susan Collins,” Lugosch said. “Before it was more of a sort of a defensive stance, but now I’m supportive, and so I feel better about going out into the community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Troy Jackson wins Maine Democratic Senate nomination, keeps mum on Israel, AIPAC appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Maine Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson raises eyebrows in the Jewish community
(JTA) — BANGOR, Maine – Throughout his two-decade-long career as a state lawmaker in Maine, Troy Jackson built his political brand around labor and economic issues.
But as the former logger and state Senate president now seeks a seat in the U.S. Senate, Jackson has begun staking out positions on something new — Israel.
Facing one of the Democratic Party’s most divisive issues, Jackson has embraced the label “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
“This is unconscionable. Anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza. It has to end, and we as Americans have the power to end it,” Jackson wrote in a post on X on July 9, responding to reports of a Palestinian aid worker killed by Israeli strikes. “When I’m in the U.S. Senate, I’ll never vote in favor of US taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel.”
A week later, Jackson also inveighed against AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby that has become a frequent target of progressives.
“I pledge to lead for Maine voters by rejecting attempts to buy influence through unlimited personal wealth and dark money,” Jackson wrote in a post on X. “That means rejecting all money from corporate PACs, AIPAC, and lobbyists from Big Oil and Big Pharma.”
For some Jews in Maine, Jackson’s emergence has prompted unease. Some worry that his embrace of the term “genocide” reflects a troubling shift in Democratic primaries across the country that many Jews have found alienating. Other Maine Jews, while somewhat hesitant, see the longtime Democrat as a pragmatic choice to represent the state and say they prefer him over Platner.
Jackson’s newfound efforts to speak out forcefully on Israel comes as he is likely to secure the Democratic nomination Saturday to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins in a high-profile race that could determine control of the Senate.
His policy statements and comments about Israel have mirrored the broader evolution of the race since the collapse of Graham Platner’s campaign earlier this month. Platner, a staunch critic of Israel, bowed out of the race earlier this month following a sexual assault allegation that he has since denied. In the days that followed, some of the Democratic candidates who emerged to replace Platner but then dropped out, including Shenna Bellows and Jordan Wood, also began using the term “genocide” for the first time.
Jackson’s campaign did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment about his views on Israel.
For some Jews in Maine, Jackson’s sudden emphasis on Israel has raised questions about whether his positions reflect a deeply held conviction or an effort to win over Platner’s supporters.
“I do think that his rhetoric on Israel has been kind of like a ‘pick me’ appeal to the perception of what the Platner base is feeling about the whole thing,” said Brian Kresge, president of Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor, who said he largely votes for Democrats. “I don’t know whether it’s a closely held position because it’s not something he said much about during the gubernatorial race (Jackson came in third place in the governor’s race). It’s not something I’ve ever heard him talk about in his other forays in politics.”
Rabbi Bill Siemers, the leader of Beth Israel, Maine’s oldest active synagogue, said that he had found “no evidence” in Jackson’s “social media or in his talks that this was an issue for him before very recently, and it’s clear to me and to others that he brought this up so he could be the Senate nominee.”
“Now we know where we are. We know where we stand, that this, at least in the upper levels of the Maine Democratic Party, this is a requirement, and that’s not good,” Siemers said, referring to the label of genocide.
“I don’t think Jews want to have to go to the polls and vote on the basis of that, but they will,” he added.
Jackson’s rhetoric on Gaza earned praise from Our Revolution, the group formed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to advance the progressive movement. Jackson has won endorsements from both Sanders and Our Revolution, as well as left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, California Rep. Ro Khanna and Maine’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter.
“Troy Jackson doesn’t do word salad. He calls a genocide a genocide and says he’ll never vote for taxpayer-funded military aid to fund it,” the group wrote in a Facebook post earlier this month. “That’s what Maine voters delivered a historic win for on June 9, what other contender in Maine will actually say it?”
Jackson, 58, is a fifth-generation logger from northern Maine and first entered politics in 1998 by leading a logging blockade along the Maine-Canada border to protest corporations hiring low-wage foreign workers. In 2000, he launched an unsuccessful Republican bid for the state House before later winning a seat two years later as an independent.
He ran again for re-election in 2004 as a Democrat and won, kicking off a two-decade long career in state politics where he maintained strong union ties and progressive views. Jackson also once voiced opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, both positions he has since reversed.
In 2024, at the Maine State Democratic Convention, Jackson, who served as convention chairman, reportedly attempted to quiet down a small group of pro-Palestinian protesters who called Maine Rep. Jared Golden a “war criminal” during a video celebrating the Jewish congressman.
“I believe in the ability of people to demonstrate and protest,” Jackson said amid the outburst. “There is a time for that.”
Earlier this year, Jackson came in third place in the state’s Democratic primary for governor. During his campaign, he pledged not to take “dark money,” but did not specifically reject AIPAC, which typically spends in federal races.
During Platner’s campaign, Jackson campaigned alongside him and endorsed his candidacy until Platner was accused of sexual assault. Following the allegation, he joined other progressive leaders in calling for Platner to drop out.
Going into Saturday’s nominating convention, Kresge said that there was still a “palpable sense of relief” among the local Jewish community that Platner, whose Nazi-linked tattoo had sparked outcry among Jewish Mainers, was out of the race.
“Troy Jackson may sound alike on a lot of these issues, but he’s not burdened by – well, he is burdened by some accusations and stuff —but he’s not burdened by a Reddit history,” Kresge said. “He has an actual political resume to run on.”
While some Jewish Mainers questioned Jackson’s recent rhetoric on Israel, others said his long record in local government offered some assurances.
“I don’t know Troy Jackson, but I think having a resume to fall back on, and having been in the position where he’s had to make compromises and understand the difference between spouting a popular slogan versus getting things done, I think is a small measure of comfort,” said Matt Tzuker, a Jewish resident of Portland.
Maine State Rep. Laurie Osher, who is Jewish and said she was ready to vote for Jackson, said that she hoped that Jackson would be able to “keep up the momentum” that Platner had gained during his campaign.
“He’s got my vote because I have worked with him,” Osher said. “For every moment that I found him doing something I didn’t think was great, he was also open to me telling him why I didn’t think it was great, and I saw him do better.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine Democratic Senate nominee Troy Jackson raises eyebrows in the Jewish community appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
MAGA influencer Laura Loomer mounts Jewish apology tour in Ukraine, meeting with Zelensky and rabbi
(JTA) — MAGA firebrand Laura Loomer, who is warring with anti-Israel figures on the right, is invoking her Judaism as she pulls an about-face on a former hobbyhorse of hers: Ukraine.
Loomer interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on a visit to the country this week, asking him about his Jewish identity and the country’s antisemitism policies. She also sat down with influential rabbi Moshe Azman as Ukraine’s punishing war with Russia drags into its fourth year.
In a series of tweets, she apologized for her past assertions that Ukraine is “full of Nazi sympathizers,” and that Zelensky was “a self-hating Nazi Jew.”
“I admit it, I fell for Russian propaganda,” Loomer, who wields considerable influence with President Donald Trump, wrote Friday after sharing “a lovely Kosher dinner” with Azman’s family. She also visited a historic Kyiv monastery recently shelled by Russian drones and invited Zelensky to make his case for why supporting Ukraine was “America First.”
Loomer’s Jewish Ukraine tour comes as the American right is splintering, largely between pro- and anti-Israel factions — pitting the likes of Loomer and Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro against those aligned with pundit Tucker Carlson.
Military aid to Ukraine has served as a tension point between the hawks and isolationists since Russia’s invasion in 2022. The two issues have become increasingly intertwined, with the right’s loudest anti-Israel voices opposing the U.S.-Israel war against Iran and also projecting weariness around supporting Ukraine.
Vice President JD Vance, whose language on Israel and Jewish issues has alarmed some Jewish leaders, took credit for halting U.S. aid to Ukraine earlier this year. Vance’s associate Carlson, who has recently turned on Trump and broken with the Republican Party, conducted a softball interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2024. The U.S. Senate will vote on a new joint Russia-Iran sanctions bill next week.
Trump himself exhibited closeness with Putin during his first term and, together with Vance, chastised Zelensky during a White House meeting last year. But his administration has indicated a recent willingness to try to end the war on terms sympathetic to Ukraine, and the two leaders are scheduled to meet in the White House next week.
Loomer, too, formerly exhibited pro-Russia tendencies, including writing for the Russian-owned English-language outlet RT. More recently, she has feuded with other right-wing media figures, including Carlson, Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, often citing her pro-Israel views as the reason for the falling-out. Unlike a growing number of pundits on the right, she has also continued to cheer on the war with Iran even as its support has sunk across party lines and other commentators have sought to cast blame onto Israel.
Loomer has also used inflammatory rhetoric toward Muslims, calling on Trump to pass “a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be” after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” earlier this week.
In her Zelensky interview, filmed at the Ukrainian presidential palace and released in full on Friday, Loomer tried to play partisan politics. She unsuccessfully urged him to call Trump the best president in history and told him that his 2024 visit to a Pennsylvania munitions factory alongside Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro was “one of the reasons why a lot of Americans came to dislike you.” (Shapiro, who is also Jewish, was at the time a prominent campaign surrogate for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running for president.)
Loomer sought a Jewish connection with the president, telling him, “I’m Jewish, you’re Jewish. We share that in common.” Zelensky, who rarely publicly comments on his Jewish heritage, highlighted that Ukraine earlier this year passed a law criminalizing antisemitism.
“It’s illegal, antisemitism. We did it during my presidency,” he said. The new law, a strengthening of a 2021 law, institutes fines and possible prison terms for those found guilty of hatred or discrimination on the basis of Jewish identity.
Zelensky, who has long enjoyed largely unqualified support among Democrats and liberal Americans, praised Loomer’s visit and change of heart. He, Azman and other Ukrainian figures who met with Loomer have sought to cultivate increased favor with Trump during a particularly uncertain phase of the war.
Loomer told the president her main goal was to counter “Russian propaganda” she believed was prominent among American podcasters, including allegations of links between Ukraine’s military and Naziism.
“I really opposed sending my taxpayer dollars to Ukraine because I really believed that you had an army, the Azov Battalion, full of Nazis,” she told Zelensky, referencing an infamous Ukrainian military wing that has continued to attract scrutiny, both before and after the 2022 invasion, for its links to neo-Nazis and other extremists.
“We are not Nazis,” Zelensky told her, later urging her to visit Babyn Yar, the memorial to the “Holocaust by bullets” perpetrated by Nazis on Ukrainian soil with the help of local collaborators in 1941. In 2022, shortly after the invasion, a Russian bombing near the memorial prompted Zelensky to make an appeal to the global Jewish community for support.
Loomer, who is notorious for credulously reporting explosive allegations against her political enemies, said she accepted Ukraine’s claims to now be Nazi-free. One of the deciding factors, she said, was meeting with Azman, the Chabad-affiliated rabbi who holds the disputed title of chief rabbi of Ukraine and whose son was killed in battle with Russia in 2024.
“The Rabbi told me his dead Jewish son didn’t fight alongside Nazis,” Loomer tweeted, adding, “I can assure Amercians [sic] that Jews are safer in Ukraine than they are in Mamdani’s New York City!” (Azman has also praised the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riots by Trump supporters, celebrating them for “protesting mass election fraud” and comparing them to the Maidan, the 2014 Ukrainian protest movement that ousted a pro-Russia president.)
Most diaspora Jews and Jewish organizations have backed Ukraine since the invasion and have decried Putin’s initial assertion that his invasion was intended to “denazify” the country. Loomer has now joined their ranks, hoping to marry that support to her own ideological identity as a Jewish right-winger in an era where the president she has long championed is losing some influence.
“We won’t have Trump forever,” she wrote Tuesday, “and the axis of evil is moving fast.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post MAGA influencer Laura Loomer mounts Jewish apology tour in Ukraine, meeting with Zelensky and rabbi appeared first on The Forward.
