Connect with us

RSS

NYC Mayor Adams rejects criticism that his Jewish advisory group isn’t diverse

(New York Jewish Week) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ office is pushing back against criticism that its newly inaugurated Jewish Advisory Council is not diverse enough. 

That charge was aired in a New York Times story published Thursday that quoted liberal rabbis and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler saying the council had too few women and too many Orthodox members. The Times noted that 23 of the 37 members of the council are Orthodox and that only 9 are women. 

Mayor Adams failed to “adequately represent the demographic diversity of Jewish New Yorkers,” Nadler, the Upper West Side Democrat, said in a letter provided to the Times. “I encourage the mayor to work to better account for that diversity with changes to the council’s membership so that it can be balanced appropriately to properly reflect the community’s full range of views and needs.”

Ruth Messinger, the former president of the American Jewish World Service and former Manhattan Borough President, backed Nadler’s statement.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Adams pushed back on the assertion that the council isn’t diverse enough. The spokesperson said that the council “comprises a diverse assembly of Jewish men and women hailing from various religious and cultural backgrounds, including Chabad, Conservative, Hasidic, Non-Denominational, Modern Orthodox, Reform, Sephardic, and Yeshiva Orthodox affiliations.”

The spokesperson added that “lumping these groups together to insinuate that there is either ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’ is a dog whistle that unfortunately resonates with the Jewish people all too well and disrespects the uniqueness and cultural originality of these institutions.”

The city hall spokesperson said that the Jewish Advisory Council was designed to be inclusionary and the mayor is encouraging all who believe they can contribute to apply to join.

Last week, the 37 rabbis, Jewish activists and community leaders gathered at City Hall to meet with Adams for the first meeting of the council, which was assembled to address issues affecting Jewish New Yorkers, including rising anti-semitism and antisemitic hate crimes, education and quality of life. 

Rabbi Rachel Timoner of the Reform Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of the LGBTQ+ synagogue Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan said that the council did not appear to include LBGTQ leaders or Jews of Color.

In a June 28 letter addressed to the mayor, Timoner and Kleinbaum wrote: “We know and admire some of the leaders you’ve selected to serve. However, we are deeply concerned that the makeup of your Advisory Council does not properly reflect the diversity of the community that you yourself said at the time you were committed to fully embracing,”

The letter refers to a May 2022 meeting in which Adams met with 55 women clergy who were concerned that he was only representing the interests and perspectives of male, Orthodox Jews. The meeting was a result of advocacy from the New York Jewish Agenda, a progressive Jewish group founded in 2020. 

“New York Jewish Agenda exists, among other reasons, to achieve recognition by elected officials of the pluralistic, diverse Jewish community of New York, making the case that the majority of Jews in New York are liberal or progressive and often have a different set of priorities than do our haredi brothers or right-leaning siblings,” Timoner, a co-founder of NYJA, told the New York Jewish Week last year.  

At the time, Timoner — who was named one of the New York Jewish Week’s “36 to Watch” in 2022 — said the goal of the meeting was for the mayor to see “that the vast majority of New York’s Jews are liberal and progressive,” because “the concern was that his administration was only consulting haredi leaders, as if they spoke for the whole community.”

In an interview Friday afternoon, Timoner explained that the key issue with the Jewish Advisory Council is not diversity for diversity’s sake; rather, it’s important for the council include liberal and progressive Jewish leaders so their concerns are represented, she said.

“When we went to meet with the mayor [last May], we brought a number of issues that Jews care about deeply — which include Jewish-specific questions like antisemitism, but also include questions that affect all New Yorkers, like affordable housing, health care, mental health care and climate change,”  Timoner said. “The liberal part of the Jewish community sees ourselves as interconnected with other minority communities who are working to make our democracy more inclusive, and more equal, and, and to stand against hate against any group.”

“If the mayor is creating an advisory council that is predominantly composed of Jews who are bringing an agenda that is really only about Jews, that siloing of the Jewish people off from other communities is actually not safe for us, and also not aligned with the priorities and perspective of most Jews in New York,” Timoner added.

Timoner was not included in the Jewish Advisory Council, nor was Kleinbaum, who also helped organize the 2022 meeting. In fact, only one attendee of that May meeting was invited to the first council meeting: Rabbi Diana Gerson, the associate executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis.

“The Advisory Council is tilted so heavily to one part of the community that it reflects a very lopsided view of New York’s Jewish demography and has the potential to make the majority of New York’s Jews feel underrepresented and unheard,” Timoner and Kleinbaum’s letter said. “We hope that this was just an accidental oversight.”

Timoner and Kleinbaum indicated in their letter that they are not interested in joining the council. “This is not about us,” they wrote. “It is, however, about creating an official entity that reflects our mayor’s view of the Jewish people of New York. We hope that you will consider how most Jews will feel seeing this Jewish Advisory Council and reconsider whether it properly reflects your vision of the beautiful mosaic of New York City’s robust Jewish community.”

The mayor’s spokesperson also provided a statement on behalf of the council itself, reiterating City Hall’s claims that the group is composed of diverse Jewish leaders.

“Hailing from all five boroughs, we collectively bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to the Adams administration regarding the issues that affect New York City’s Jewish community and our city as a whole,” the statement said. “Our group has a dynamic blend of expertise in various sectors, ranging from social services and food pantries like Commonpoint, Met Council, and Masbia; to public safety organizations; to educational experts, particularly for children with special needs; and cultural institutions such as the Jewish Heritage Museum and the Jewish Children’s Museum. These organizations serve all New Yorkers.”

In a 2011 study, 40 percent of Jews in the city identified as Orthodox. The same study said that about 28% identified as Reform, 8% as Conservative, 25% as “nondenominational” and 22% as secular. 

Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, a member of the council and executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, told the New York Times that he planned to meet with the mayor’s senior adviser, Joel Eisdorfer — who was also one of our 2022 “36 to Watch” honorees —  to discuss adding members to the council. 

“We’re not going to be fully effective if we’re not fully representative,” Potasnik told the Times.

In a phone call prior to the first meeting of the Jewish Advisory Council, Rachel Ain, a Conservative rabbi, told the New York Jewish Week that the Council was “a wonderful step towards expanding the voices at the table.” 

“By the creation of the council and reaching out to people of all denominations, both within the synagogue-affiliated organizations and beyond, there is a commitment to understanding the New York City Jewish community,” she said.


The post NYC Mayor Adams rejects criticism that his Jewish advisory group isn’t diverse appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

RSS

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US

International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

The United States has imposed sanctions on International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan in accordance with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump, the US Treasury Department confirmed on Thursday.

Khan was sanctioned by the US after spearheading the ICC’s issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders over their role in the ongoing war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

The White House announced on Monday that Khan would be the first member of the ICC to be issued personal sanctions, and both the White House and Treasury Department noted on Thursday that he has been added to the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.

Khan’s assets in the United States are now frozen, and he is banned from entering the country. The announcement came on the heels of Trump’s executive order last week to punish members of the ICC for targeting Israel.

Trump’s order lambasted the ICC for its “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel.” Trump stated that the ICC “abused its power” to pursue an unsubstantiated and politically motivated criminal case against Israeli leaders. 

The ICC responded to Trump with a forceful condemnation, stressing that the court produces “independent and impartial” work. 

“The court stands firmly by its personnel and pledges to continue providing justice and hope to millions of innocent victims of atrocities across the world,” the ICC said.

Trump signed the executive order after Senate Democrats blocked legislation to sanction the ICC in January. The bill ultimately failed by a vote of 54-45, with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) being the sole Democrat to vote in favor of punishing the ICC. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) criticized the bill as “poorly drafted and deeply problematic.” The House had passed the legislation.

In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.

US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.

The post ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Officially Sanctioned by Trump Admin, Banned From Entering US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer

Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand With Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

A Boston Municipal Court judge has dismissed hate crime charges against two Harvard University graduate students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student at the school in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Harvard Crimson reported on Wednesday.

As previously reported, an anti-Israel demonstration escalated to apparent harassment when Ibrahim Bharmal, former editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo were filmed encircling a Jewish student with a mob that screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at him while he desperately attempted to free himself from the mass of bodies.

Antisemitism on Harvard’s campus skyrocketed after the Oct. 7 atrocities. Harvard stood out as a hub of pro-Hamas support for the terrorist group’s massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in the deadliest single-day attack on Jews since the Holocaust. While Hamas’s brutal treatment of civilians — which included rape, torture, and beheading of children — shocked the world and led to international condemnation, it emboldened pro-Hamas Harvard students, and later, Harvard faculty to target Jewish and pro-Israel members of the campus community with harassment and intimidation.

Following the Oct. 2023 mobbing of a Jewish student, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged by the local district attorney with assault, battery, and violations of the Massachusetts Civil Rights Acts, a hate crime statute that forbids the obstruction of “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” — to which they pleaded not guilty.

The hate crime charge was dismissed on Monday by Judge Stephen McClenon. The students will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, Bharmal has been continuously rewarded with new and better opportunities since allegedly assaulting the Jewish student. Harvard neither disciplined him nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.”

Antisemitism in the US surged to catastrophic and unprecedented levels in 2023 — the year in which Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo’s alleged crimes took place — rising a harrowing 140 percent, according to a 2024 audit conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The ADL recorded 8,873 incidents in 2023 — an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.

The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Hamas terroistr group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.

Such incidents occurred throughout the US. In California, an elderly Jewish man was killed when an anti-Zionist professor employed by a local community college allegedly pushed him during an argument. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.

Other outrages were expressive but subtle. In November, large numbers of people traveling to attend the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC either could not show up or were forced to scramble last second and final alternative transportation because numerous bus drivers allegedly refused to transport them there. Hundreds of American Jews from Detroit, for example, were left stranded at Dulles Airport, according to multiple reports.

In another case at Yale University, a campus newspaper came under fire for removing from a student’s column what it called “unsubstantiated claims” of Hamas raping Israeli women, marking a rare occasion in which the publication openly doubted reports of sexual assault.

Harvard University recently agreed, on paper, to be part of the solution for eradicating antisemitism from its own campus.

Last month, it settled two antisemitism lawsuits, which were merged by a federal judge in November 2024, that accused school officials of refusing to discipline perpetrators of antisemitic conduct. Legal counsel for the university initially discredited the students who brought the legal actions, attempting to have their allegations thrown out of court on the grounds that they “lacked standing” and “legally cognizable claim” even as it proclaimed “the importance of the need to address antisemitism at the university,” according to court documents.

With the settlement, which came one day after the inauguration of President US Donald Trump — who has vowed to tax the endowments of universities where antisemitism is rampant — Harvard avoided a lengthy legal fight that could have been interpreted by the Jewish community as a willful refusal to acknowledge the discrimination to which Jewish students are subjected.

“Today’s settlement reflects Harvard’s enduring commitment to ensuring our Jewish students, faculty, and staff are embraced, respected, and supported,” Harvard said in a press release. “We will continue to strengthen our policies, systems, and operations to combat antisemitism and all forms of hate and ensure all members of the Harvard community have the support they need to pursue their academic, research, and professional work and feel they belong on our campus and in our classrooms.”

Per the agreement, the university will apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to its non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies (NDAB), recognize the centrality of Zionism to Jewish identity, and explicitly state that targeting and individual on the basis of their Zionism constitutes a violation of school rules.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Boston Judge Dismisses Hate Crime Charges Against Harvard Students for Assault of Jewish Peer first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

RSS

US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll

Voters line up for the US Senate run-off election, at a polling location in Marietta, Georgia, US, January 5, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar.

Democrats in the US widely sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, according to a new poll.

The Economist/YouGov poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9-11, found that 35 percent of Democrats indicate their sympathies “are more with” Palestinians, and only 9 percent say they are more sympathetic toward Israelis. Meanwhile, 32 percent of Democrats responded that their sympathies are “about equal” between both Palestinians and Israelis, and another 24 percent were not sure.

Notably, Democratic “sympathies” toward Israelis have dramatically declined in the past two months, coinciding with the transition of the Trump administration into the White House. On Dec. 21, according to the poll, 21 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israelis and 25 percent sympathized more with Palestinians. On Jan. 18, two days before US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Democratic sympathy for Palestinians climbed to 27 percent. During that same timeframe, sympathies for Israelis plunged to 18 percent among Democrats. 

Republicans are far more sympathetic toward Israel than Democrats are, the poll found. Sixty percent of Republicans expressed sympathy with Israelis this month, while 6 percent expressed more sympathy toward Palestinians.

In October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, 73 percent of Republicans indicated more sympathy for Israelis and 3 percent indicated more sympathy for Palestinians. As for Democrats, 34 percent had more sympathy for Israelis immediately following the Oct. 7 massacre, and 16 percent had more sympathy for the Palestinians.

Overall, although a plurality of Americans still supports Israel, sympathy for the Palestinians seems to be gaining steam. American sympathy for Israelis remained virtually unchanged from Jan. 18 to Feb. 8, dropping slightly from 32 percent to 31 percent. However, sympathy for Palestinians spiked from 15 percent to 21 percent within the same three-week span. According to the poll, American support for Palestinians has climbed to its highest level since 2017. 

Trump’s recent proposal to vacate Palestinians from Gaza and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” is unpopular with the American public, according to the poll. Only 19 percent of Americans support the plan, the poll found. The policy proposal suffers from weak support among American liberals, with only 6 percent of Democrats supporting it and 74 percent opposing it. In contrast, Trump’s suggestion to relocate Palestinians into neighboring Arab states enjoys substantially greater support among Republicans, with 39 percent agreeing with Trump’s proposal and 33 percent disagreeing with it. 

The growing partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a major flashpoint in the 16 months following the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Democratic lawmakers have become increasingly critical of Israel’s approach to the Gaza war, potentially reflecting shifting opinions of the Democratic electorate regarding the Jewish state. Although Democrats have repeatedly reiterated that Israel has a right to “defend itself,” many have raised concerns over the Jewish state’s conduct in the war in Gaza, reportedly exerting private pressure on former US President Joe Biden to adopt a more adversarial stance against Israel and display more public sympathy for the Palestinians. In November, 17 Democratic senators voted to impose a partial arms embargo on Israel, sparking outrage among supporters of the Jewish state.

The post US Democratic Voters Overwhelmingly Sympathize With Palestinians Over Israelis: Poll first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News