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This Jewish New York City Council candidate has a prolific passion: serial sperm donation
(New York Jewish Week) — Jonathan David Rinaldi, 44, is a Republican who is running to represent New York’s District 24, which encompasses the Queens neighborhoods of Kew Gardens, Fresh Meadows, Briarwood and Jamaica. This week, he made headlines for protesting outside a motel in his district that, he claimed, was housing newly arrived migrants.
But last November, he gained local fame for a different reason. Rinaldi was featured in a post on Humans of New York, the viral social media project in which photographer Brandon Stanton posts portraits of New Yorkers he meets on the street, along with stories they relate in their own voices.
Rinaldi’s story was particularly eyebrow-raising: He said he had fathered at least 12 children over the course of two years through sperm donation — but not via sperm banks that pay donors, vet their health and limit their offspring. And he said he planned to keep going, in part because of his Jewish identity.
He said he was driven in part by his Jewish identity. “I explain to each [woman]: ‘This child will be born into a larger family. I have eighteen other children.’” Rinaldi said in the caption. “I’d like as many as God will give me. Why put your entire bloodline into one child when you can spread it out? Eighteen is a holy number in Judaism. And the next one is 36, so I’ll reassess then.”
In the Humans of New York post, Rinaldi detailed the process (“Fresh is better than frozen”) and said that he’s had sex with some of the women and wants to remain involved in their lives. “I’m what they call a ‘known donor,’” he said. “Everything is kinda handshake. I don’t charge the mothers. And they don’t expect any financial support.”
The post garnered a string of negative reactions from social media users. In response, Stanton wrote on Instagram that “stories from people you may not identify with, or even like, were a common part of HONY pre-pandemic. And will be again now that I’m back on the street.”
The post did not identify Rinaldi, but he confirmed to the New York Jewish Week over the phone that he was the person in the portrait and post. “I was interviewed once,” Rinaldi said. “It was taken out of context. I had a long conversation, a random conversation with somebody on the street.”
Rinaldi also confirmed that he donates his sperm — and has attempted to square that practice with Jewish tradition. He said that he has spoken with a rabbi to “try and figure out how to be as kosher as I possibly can and have as many children as the Bible commands,” and gave the name of a local Chabad rabbi. The rabbi declined to comment about Rinaldi but confirmed their relationship.
“It’s our responsibility as Jews blessed by God to have children,” said Rinaldi, who also has three children from a previous marriage. “Some of us are doing it extremely kosher, the way it’s supposed to be, you have a nice Jewish wife, you go to temple every day. For me, it didn’t work out that way.”
The Torah contains the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply,” which rabbis have traditionally interpreted as an imperative to have children. Rabbis have prohibited sperm donation, however, in part due to prohibitions on masturbation and on having children with an unknown father. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a leading 20th-century authority, wrote that it’s preferable for Jewish women who cannot use their husband’s sperm to use non-Jewish sperm for artificial insemination in order to avoid accidental incest in future generations.
Rinaldi said that he began donating sperm when the city was locked down due to the spread of COVID-19, and that he first donated to a friend. From there, he said, word spread of his donations. Rinaldi is what is called a “known donor,” or someone whose identity is known to the recipient and, potentially, their children. Known donors are legal in the United States, but serial sperm donation is discouraged by many countries, in large part because of the risk of biologically related offspring procreating together in the future. The Netherlands set up systems to curb a serial donor who fathered at least 100 children, while Israel barred an American Jewish man dubbed “the Sperminator” because of his extensive efforts to procreate from impregnating more women there. Ari Nagel’s own progeny tally neared 100 after a prolific pandemic, he revealed in 2021.
Rinaldi, too, said the pandemic had spurred his donations.
“At no point did I ever go to a sperm bank,” Rinaldi said. “At no point did I ever intend to do this. We were all at home, shut down. A lot of people desired families. This is not your typical sperm donor situation. … I was just blessed to even have the opportunity. I didn’t do it for money. I didn’t ask for anything. I just wanted to help families.”
He wouldn’t confirm how many children he has through sperm donation, though in the Humans of New York caption, he’s quoted as saying he had fathered 12 over the previous two years — and, at the time, three more were on the way. In an interview Wednesday with the New York Jewish Week, he responded to a question about how many children he has by repeating an idea he had alluded to in the caption: that according to Jewish tradition, the number 18 represents life.
“Eighteen is a holy number,” Rinaldi said in the interview. “It’s just what God has blessed me with. I’m doing this because I don’t believe in abortion. I am pro-life.”
Opposing abortion isn’t the only right-wing position Rinaldi holds. In an interview, he railed against the COVID-19 vaccine and compared vaccine requirements to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, a common line of criticism at the time. “You could have just worn a yellow unvaccinated star on your shirt,” he said, adding, “We were literally one thing away from them coming up to rounding up the unvaccinated.” He also said transgender people are “against Torah principles” and said schools are “not teaching kids God.”
On Tuesday, he and a group of Republican activists showed up at a Kew Gardens motel to protest migrants coming to the city, even though a lawyer for the motel said the owner is “not interested in signing a contract” to house migrants.
In District 24, Rinaldi will run against Democratic Council member Jim Gennaro, who has represented the district for more than a decade.
Rinaldi, who grew up in New York City, said his grandmother escaped Poland to Argentina during World War II. His grandfather also left Moldova at the time. Although both countries were occupied by the Nazis or their allies, Rinaldi said his grandparents were “against the tyranny of the left at that time.”
Rinaldi said he studied for his bar mitzvah at Yeshivas Ohr HaChaim, an Orthodox institution in Kew Gardens, and attended City College of New York in uptown Manhattan where he studied architecture, which is also reflected on a LinkedIn page that appears to belong to him.
He later worked in construction and design for over a decade and appeared on the HGTV reality television show “Million Dollar Contractor.”
When it comes to his sperm donation, however, Rinaldi is less comfortable being in the public eye, despite the Humans of New York post. “My lifestyle is nobody’s business,” he said.
“I am what it looks like when you don’t abort children,” Rinaldi said. “Let’s just focus on the issues if we can. I’m going to do the right thing for the community. My personal business is my personal business.”
Back in the Humans of New York post, Rinaldi suggested that he hoped to expand his personal business. He mused about practices that Jewish tradition has, for the past millennium, frowned upon: “My ultimate goal is to find two or three of the mothers who will be sister wives, because I’m gonna need help with all this,” he said. “But I know one thing: It will never be boring.”
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The post This Jewish New York City Council candidate has a prolific passion: serial sperm donation appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Italy Arrests Nine Over Alleged Hamas Funding Through Charities
President of the Palestinian Association in Italy, Mohammad Hannoun, carries a Palestinian flag during a nationwide strike, called by the USB union, in solidarity with Gaza and against the government and its plan to increase military spending, in Rome, Italy, November 29, 2025. Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said Mohammad Hannoun is among nine people arrested on December 27 on suspicion of financing Hamas through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units. in Italy. REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Italian prosecutors said on Saturday they had arrested nine people on suspicion of financing Hamas through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units.
The suspects are accused of “belonging to and having financed” the Palestinian group, which the European Union designates as a terrorist organization, prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Genoa said in a statement.
Those arrested allegedly diverted to Hamas-linked entities around 7 million euros ($8.24 million) raised over the last two years for ostensibly humanitarian purposes, prosecutors said. Police seized assets worth more than 8 million euros.
The investigation began after suspicious financial transactions were flagged and expanded through cooperation with Dutch authorities and other EU countries, coordinated through the EU judicial agency Eurojust.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni thanked the authorities for “a particularly complex and important operation” which had uncovered financing for Hamas through “so-called charity organizations.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meloni’s support for Israel during its war with Hamas in Gaza has triggered large and repeated street protests in Italy.
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What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum?
What if I told you that this morning, I found the following Truth Social post on my newsfeed?
“THE TRUMP US HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM HONORS will be broadcast tonight, on CBS, and Stream on Paramount+. Tune in at 8 P.M. EST! At the request of the Board, and just about everybody else in America, I am hosting the event. Tell me what you think of my “Master of Ceremony” abilities. If really good, would you like me to leave the Presidency in order to make “hosting” a full time job? We will be honoring true GREATS in the History of the Holocaust, from the Elders of Zion and the NSDAP to John Birchers and Groypers. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.”
If you said this post wasn’t real, you would be right. If you said that I tweaked a recent Truth Social post, swapping the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for the former John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, you would be right about that too.
But if you said that this post was unthinkable, my response would be “Think again.”
The phrase “Thinking the unthinkable” was all the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was an era darkened by the threat of mushroom clouds, the theatrics of Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, and the theories of Herman Kahn, whose notion of the Doomsday Machine features in Kubrick’s masterpiece. Kahn coined the term “unthinkable,” insisting that while “nuclear war may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — it is not impossible.”
To this very day, the threat of a nuclear holocaust remains all too real and thinkable. But it has been sidelined by a different kind of threat, one that has buried the very concept of the unthinkable.
So many words and acts once considered unthinkable have, under the two Trump presidencies, become not just thinkable and not just doable, but also increasingly unremarkable. Is there any word or act we still consider safely and surely unthinkable? Is there anything at all that, to quote Herman Kahn, while it may seem highly unlikely, indeed unthinkable, to many people — is not impossible?
To find an answer, it helps to suggest a limiting case on our government’s effort to make all things thinkable, and thus acceptable, even normal. Consider the fake post with which I began this column — namely, that Donald Trump would one day plaster his name on the building that houses the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Can there be anything more unthinkable than Trump stamping his name on the USHMM, the very institution that is dedicated to reminding the world of the consequences of acting on the unthinkable?
In his reflections on life under totalitarian rule, The Captive Mind, Polish poet and Nobel Prize Laureate Czeslaw Milosz observed that all “concepts men live by are a product of the historic formation in which they find themselves. Fluidity and constant change are the characteristics of phenomena. And man is so plastic a being that one can even conceive of the day when a thoroughly self-respecting citizen will crawl about on all fours, sporting a tail of brightly colored feathers as a sign of conformity to the order he lives in.”
We see such plasticity on the sets of Fox News, the corridors of Congress and in the board rooms of media, legal, and tech titans where talking heads, politicians and CEOs happily crawl about with many-colored tails of feathers. This is also true in the board rooms of the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. (The names of these sites must be written in full to fully grasp the absurd character of this era.)
But the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will always be exempt from this creeping rot of the absurd, right?
Wrong.
In early May, the USHMM, which like the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts is both privately and federally funded, announced an overhaul of its board. Nearly all its Biden-appointed members were fired, replaced by a choice assortment of Trump appointees. They include Sid Rosenberg, a conservative talk-show host who spoke at a Trump rally last year, denouncing the Democrats as “a bunch of degenerates.”
Another Trump appointee, Martin Oliner, published an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post earlier this year in which he called for the forcible removal from Gaza of Palestinians, whom he described as “fundamentally evil.” In another piece, titled “Make the Holocaust Memorial Council Great Again,” he warned that the USHMM was not meeting its “important role.”
Equally troubling was this fall’s temporary closing until next February of the museum exhibit dedicated to America’s wartime response to the Holocaust. The ostensible reason was to “upgrade the exhibit,” an Orwellian phrase that some staffers fear means the blurring the historical record, one that includes the disinterest of the White House, the fecklessness of most Jewish leaders, and the polite, yet potent antisemitism at the State Department.
In his landmark work The Abandonment of the Jews, the historian David Wyman offers a similar conclusion on the American public’s response to the Holocaust: “Few American non-Jews recognized that the plight of the European Jews was their plight too. Most were either unaware, did not care, or saw the European Jewish catastrophe as a Jewish problem, one for Jews to deal with. That explains, in part, why the United States did so little to help.”
Is it possible that because too many of us remain unaware of or indifferent to the Trump administration’s abandonment of the unthinkable, we have invited the catastrophe now enveloping our nation? A catastrophe that already announces itself in the mass and often violent arrests and deportations of men and women because of their skin color? In the lawless killing of civilians in international waters? In the unconstitutional deployment of the National Guard in our cities? For those who do not yet have an answer, it is worth giving the matter a bit of thought — even if you find those thoughts unthinkable.
The post What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia
Israel became the first country to formally recognize Somaliland, a self-declared sovereign state in the Horn of Africa, in a decision that was immediately condemned by Somalia and other nations.
“The Prime Minister announced today the official recognition of the Republic of Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state,” wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office in a post on X. “The State of Israel plans to immediately expand its relations with the Republic of Somaliland through extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology, and economy.”
Somaliland’s president welcomed the announcement from Netanyahu in a post on X, adding that he affirmed the region’s “readiness to join the Abraham Accords,” the normalization agreements between Israel and a handful of Arab states that was brokered during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Somaliland proclaimed independence from Somalia in 1991 during the country’s civil war, but has failed to receive recognition from the international community in part due to Somalia’s opposition to its secession. Somalia officially rejects ties with Israel, and has consistently refused to recognize the state of Israel since 1960. Somalia and Somaliland are overwhelmingly Muslim.
“The ministers affirmed their total rejection and condemnation of Israel’s recognition of the Somaliland region, stressing their full support for the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia,” Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement following a phone call between Egypt’s foreign minister and his Somali, Turkish and Djiboutian counterparts, according to Reuters.
In November, the Israeli think tank Institute for National Security Studies argued in a report that recognizing Somaliland could be in Israel’s strategic interest.
“Somaliland’s territory could serve as a forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis,” the report read.
It is unclear if the United States will follow suit. In August, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz wrote to Trump urging him to recognize Somaliland.
“Somaliland has emerged as a critical security and diplomatic partner for the United States, helping America advance our national security interests in the Horn of Africa and beyond,” wrote Cruz.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel becomes first country to recognize Somaliland, drawing condemnation from Egypt, Turkey and Somalia appeared first on The Forward.