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This Jewish radio reporter was ‘the dean of the press corps’

(New York Jewish Week) — Room 9, the compact space designed for journalists inside New York City Hall, has held its share of personalities over the years. But none has spent as much time there as Stan Brooks, a Jewish radioman who reported on the city for five decades, covering six of its mayors and some of its most pivotal moments.

“He was like the dean of the press corps,” longtime colleague and friend Glenn Schuck told the New York Jewish Week about Brooks, who worked at 1010 WINS for almost his entire career. 

“Every mayor kind of revered Stan,” Schuck said. “All the mayors liked him, would call on him, and made sure that Stan was an important part of whatever question and answer session they were having.” 

A few weeks before Brooks’ death from lung cancer at age 86 in December 2013, the city’s outgoing mayor showed up at his bedside in Hell’s Kitchen with cookies. “Mike Bloomberg showed up, went up into his room — Stan was not well, he was very, very sick at that point — he sat with him, held his hand,” Schuck recalled. “That’s how respected Stan was. I mean, he had the ear and attention of a lot of people.” 

And then, just days before Brooks’ passing, Bloomberg renamed the radio room at City Hall the “Stan Brooks Radio Room,” citing Brooks as the “longest-serving member of Room 9.”

That would not be Brooks’ only lasting mark on the city he loved. In 2014, his local city councilman — Corey Johnson, who would go on to become the council’s speaker — spearheaded an effort to rename the corner of West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue, where Brooks and his wife Lynn lived at Manhattan Plaza, Stan Brooks Way.

“He loved that neighborhood,” Shuck said. “His life was that building and that neighborhood that he lived in.”

Schuck recalled how people would always ask Stan, “You’re 80-something years old, don’t you want a house in Florida?” and his response was always no. “He wanted to be in Hell’s Kitchen, in his apartment, on a Saturday, walking through the neighborhood. That was his life,” he said. 

Stanley Bertram Brooks was born Jan. 24, 1927 in the Bronx to Herman and Mildred Brooks. His father was a paper salesman and the president of the Young Friends Association, a Jewish burial organization, and his mother was one of 11 children, coming from a very close family. 

Stan, who grew up in a kosher home and attended a Conservative synagogue, lived on the same block — Walton Avenue — as practically his entire extended family, according to George Brooks, one of his three sons. Stan and Lynn raised raised their family on Long Island where they belonged to Temple Sinai, a Reform synagogue. 

“He was kind of spiritual in nature. I think he felt his connection to Judaism very much through his parents and his family — I would call it a family-based religion,” George said, recalling how his father said Kaddish every morning for the first year after his parents died. 

Brooks went to City College before serving in the army and graduating from Syracuse University. 

Brooks once spoke about being on “Kitchen Patrol” duty while in basic training and seeing stacks of pork chops being fried in lard and going outside and throwing up because he had never encountered pig meat before and was overwhelmed, George said. 

That was the beginning of “opening his mind to the wider world. He really was taken from kind of a sheltered, shtetl-y Bronx upbringing to seeing all kinds of people that he would never have met,” George said of his father’s time in the army. 

Before joining WINS as news director in 1962, Brooks worked for newspapers in Westchester County and was a reporter and editor for Newsday on Long Island for 10 years.

Shortly after he joined 1010 WINS, it became an all-news operation — the first of its kind in New York City and one of the first in the country. He helped lay the groundwork for the station and for all 24-hour news stations to come. 

“Being the first news director of the first all-news station, everyone looked up to Stan, admired Stan. He was, you know, he really was a trailblazer,” Schuck said. “I mean, he set a lot of the things in motion that are now 24-hour news channels, whether it’s TV or radio, are in place today,” Schuck said. 

One reason for hesitancy with 24 hour news channels was the concern that there couldn’t possibly be enough news to fill all that time. But Brooks “knew New York had enough stories to tell and he was just a really, really good storyteller,” Schuck said.

And Brooks certainly found enough to report on. He became a local reporter for 1010 WINS in 1970 and had a full reporting repertoire of 30- to 60-second dispatches. Even at 80, “he would always be the first one to get his stories done,” Schuck said.

“He would bring the story to life. He could go to an endless news conference and somehow he would know what the center of the story was immediately and he’d have the lead written before he got back to the desk,” Rich Lamb, a reporter from WCBS and one of Brooks’ colleagues said after his death

Brooks was a man of routine. For almost 50 years, every morning he drove from Hell’s Kitchen down to City Hall where he parked in the same spot each day. He ate the same cheese sandwich made by his wife at his desk for lunch every day because he wanted to be able to work without pause.

He brought that steadiness to moments of high intensity in the news.

During the 1971 Attica prison revolt — when inmates at the high-security Attica Correctional Facility took control of the prison and kept guards hostage resulting in 39 prisoners and guards killed by law enforcement gunfire — “he was famously on a payphone in the middle of this prison riot and was so calm,” Schuck said. ”Stan made his name for things like that.” 

Then, in 2003, City Councilman James David was killed in City Hall right in front of Schuck and Brooks just seconds after they had just shaken his hand. Brooks delivered a live report on the scene. 

“Because Stan was with me that day, it allowed me to get through something like that, because I felt like, ‘I’m with Stan so I’m good,’” Schuck said. “He was more than a colleague to me, he was a mentor and a friend. Almost like a second father. I just always felt better when he was around and he led by example.”

When Schuck joined 1010 WINS in 2000, Brooks sat down with him to answer all of his questions and would do that for anyone. “He was very welcoming, willing to sit with anybody, even if you had met them for the first time just to kind of, you know, set you on your path,” Schuck said. 

Throughout his career, Brooks frequently shared his wisdom and experience with younger journalists. “He was firm, but never rude. He would teach that to younger journalists, you don’t have to be rude to get your answers. He asked tough questions, but he was always nice about the way he did it. And that’s how he got his answers,” Schuck said. “He always got the answers he wanted, because he had the right tact and the way he handled himself. And if people wanted to tell a story, they wanted to tell it to Stan, I think that was important and he taught journalists by the hundreds how to do that.”

“He never really even saw it as a job,” Schuck added. “He just loved what he did. He wanted everyone to learn how to do the job like he did.”

Not only did he love what he did, but he understood the importance of his work — and did it until just a few weeks before his death, even when he could barely make it up the City Hall steps. 

“I think that he felt very strongly about uplifting the downtrodden, which I think of as tikkun olam, giving people who don’t have a fair shake a fair shake,” George Brooks said. “That’s part of why he was a journalist, to tell the stories of the people who needed to be heard who might not otherwise have a voice.” 

When he wasn’t working, all of Brooks’ time was devoted to his family — his wife Lynn, to whom he was married for 60 years before she died just months before him, and his three sons, George, Rick and Bennet.


The post This Jewish radio reporter was ‘the dean of the press corps’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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