When news arrived that Ronnie Eldridge had passed away at the age of 95, I thought back to the mid-1980’s when I made a number of visits to the apartment on Central Park West that she shared with the legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin and their blended family of six kids. At the time I was doing stories for NPR about Breslin and his passionated denunciation of municipal authorities for their neglect of city’s homeless. Sometimes I’d record Breslin at home.

I couldn’t help noticing that almost every time I was in that apartment, Eldridge was on the phone with an autistic Jewish man named Ralph. I tend to notice things like that because my brother Michael, olav ha sholom, was autistic.

According to Daniel Eldridge, the eldest of the three Eldridge “kids,” his mother met Ralph at a Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign event in 1968. Apparently, a campaign volunteer who was manning the door was giving Ralph a hard time.

Ronnie Eldridge intervened and declared that Ralph, who she had never met before, was her friend and he was to be allowed in. Daniel Eldridge told me his mother spoke with Ralph nearly every day after that.

Because my conversation with Daniel Eldridge was conducted on speakerphone, Eldridge’s granddaughter, Sophie Silberman, piped up.

“She looked after everybody with kindness and devotion,” Silberman said. “She knew that she was significant to Ralph and it didn’t take much to keep that part of his life alive and it meant the world to Ralph.”

Big shoes to fill

That kindness and devotion echoed in several recollections of Eldridge’s public life today.

Ruth Messinger, a former city council member who went on to lead the American Jewish World Service, told me that Eldridge “was very savvy.”

“She was a no-nonsense person,” Messinger said. “If there was an issue, if there was a problem, she would take it on. She was a seriously progressive presence for many, many years. She pursued the issues and stood up for justice.”

“She was just an institution all by herself,” said her successor in the New York City Council, Gale Brewer.

Eldridge represented an Upper West Side district in the Council for 12 years before being term-limited out of office. “Her shoes were very big shoes to fill,” Brewer said.

Eldridge was one of the sponsors of a 1992 law that required cameras be placed in facilities that house automated teller machines. She was motivated to win passage, having been held up using an ATM in her neighborhood.

Brewer is one of many public officials and activists who are remembering Eldridge’s advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society, including the LGBTQ community and women who have been abused by their spouses or boyfriends. She remembers Eldridge visiting incarcerated women who were doing time for crimes linked to their experience as battered women.

“She put that issue on the map,” Brewer told me.

The conscience of the Lindsay administration

Eldridge was one of the anti-war activists in the 1960’s who made mountains move on the national level. During the war in Vietnam she helped found the “Dump Johnson” movement, which in turn sparked President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forego re-election in 1968. That prompted Robert F. Kennedy to enter the race. Eldridge was keen on RFK. She was a young mother in 1964 when she volunteered his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

During the ’68 presidential campaign, RFK said of Eldridge, “Behind that sweet, motherly face, Ronnie Eldridge has one of the toughest political minds in the city, if not the country.” She used the quote on a campaign poster for her unsuccessful bid to become Manhattan Borough President in 1977.

Eldridge’s activism also paid dividends on the local level. She served as the coordinator of Democrats for Lindsay and helped the Republican mayor win re-election in 1969 on the Liberal Party line. She was a political strategist for Lindsay and was known as the conscience of the Lindsay administration.

Around that time, she was part of a group that included the singer Harry Belafonte challenging the license of television station WPIX. The challenge dragged on for nine years but in 1978 an out of court settlement put about $10 million into the entity that challenged the license. I learned about all this when I asked Eldridge how she came to possess that very valuable Central Park West apartment.

A tabloid life

A number of Eldridge’s close friends have remarked that being married to Jimmy Breslin may’ve come with some perks, it must’ve been a challenge as well. For those of us who read Breslin religiously in the New York Daily News and New York Newsday, some of the gruff newspaper columnist’s more entertaining columns chronicled the foibles of the interfaith family’s Upper West Side life together.

This shtick inspired a pilot for a 1989 CBS sitcom about a NYC newspaper columnist and a mayoral aide. American Nuclear was co-written by Breslin but the network ultimately decided not to pick up the series.

In a 2004 for a radio documentary interview about her husband, I asked Ronnie Eldridge about having her domestic life portrayed in a tabloid

“The first time it happened everybody was hysterical,” she said. “I had a daughter in Paris. She called from Paris and was in tears. A daughter at college, she was also in tears. And my son in California said, ‘What’s going on?’ And then Jimmy’s family said, ‘Oh, just don’t pay any attention to it.’”

“When I was in the city council, I would just pretend that I didn’t read the paper. He would write articles. condemning and attacking colleagues of mine. I’d have to go into the city council and, see somebody that he’d just called unmentionable names. So, I just learned to leave it alone.”

A memorial service will be held for Ronnie Eldridge on Wednesday, March 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64^th Street in Manhattan.

The post Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC appeared first on The Forward.

Cornell’s divestment protests continued during the university’s commencement ceremony, May 25, 2024, during which students interrupted a speech by President Martha Pollack with chanting and canvas signs. Photo: Reuters Connect

A newly released research paper is raising fresh legal questions about the wave of campus and institutional campaigns calling for divestment from Israel, arguing that such efforts may violate anti-discrimination laws in the United States.

The report, published by Northwestern Law School professor Max M. Schanzenbach and Harvard Law School professor Robert H. Sitkoff, examines the growing push by activists affiliated with the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), which urges governments, universities, and companies to cut economic ties with Israel in the first step to the Jewish state’s eradication.

According to the paper, divestment campaigns that single out Israeli institutions or businesses could potentially run afoul of state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin.

BDS advocates argue that their campaign is a form of political protest designed to pressure Israel to change its policies. The movement, formally launched by anti-Israel activists in the mid-2000s, has called for boycotts of Israeli goods, divestment from companies linked to Israel, and government sanctions.

But the new analysis contends that when governments or public institutions adopt such policies, the underlying legality could be questionable. The authors argue that targeting Israel specifically for economic exclusion could conflict with existing anti-discrimination statutes or state laws aimed at preventing boycotts of Israel.

More than half of US states have enacted legislation limiting participation in BDS-related boycotts or requiring government contractors to certify that they are not boycotting Israel. In some states, including California, laws restrict the awarding of public contracts or funding to organizations that participate in boycotts targeting the country.

The paper also challenges the argument frequently made by BDS supporters that such boycotts are protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. While individuals may advocate for boycotts as political speech, the authors argue that institutional policies, particularly those adopted by government bodies or public universities, could still violate anti-discrimination or procurement laws depending on how they are implemented.

The paper raises potential anti-discrimination concerns surrounding divestment campaigns that target Israeli companies. The authors argue that some boycott or divestment proposals could expose universities or public institutions to legal vulnerability if investment decisions are based primarily on a company’s Israeli national origin rather than specific conduct. Under certain US civil rights laws and state policies governing public institutions, actions that single out individuals or entities because of national origin may trigger discrimination claims. The paper suggests that if divestment policies are framed broadly against Israeli businesses as a category, rather than tied to particular corporate activities, institutions implementing them could face legal challenges alleging unequal treatment.

The analysis argues that modern divestment campaigns targeting Israel differ significantly from the anti-apartheid divestment movement against South Africa. The paper contends that while many universities in the 1980s adopted selective restrictions on companies directly tied to South Africa’s apartheid system, often aligned with international sanctions and corporate conduct codes, the current iteration of the BDS campaign against Israel frequently calls for broader exclusions based on a company’s ties to Israel itself, potentially creating legal risks such as national-origin discrimination issues.

Divestment campaigns have become especially prominent in recent years on US college campuses, where student groups have pushed universities to withdraw endowment investments from companies tied to Israel or its military. Critics, however, argue the campaigns unfairly single out the world’s only Jewish state and risk creating discriminatory policies against Israeli businesses or academics.

In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, campus activists have intensified efforts to implement divestment policies on university campuses. While universities have mostly resisted these efforts, federal lawmakers have advanced legislation to truncate divestment initiatives before they gain traction. For instance, in 2024, Congress introduced “The Protect Economic Freedom Act,” which would render universities that participate in the BDS movement against Israel ineligible for federal funding under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, prohibiting them from receiving federal student aid. The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities submit evidence that they are not participating in commercial boycotts against the Jewish state.

Director General of MI5 Ken McCallum delivers the annual Director General’s Speech at Thames House, the headquarters of the UK’s Security Service, in London, Britain, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Brady/Pool via REUTERS

British police arrested four men on Friday on suspicion of helping Iran’s intelligence services carry out surveillance of people and locations linked to the Jewish community in London.

Detectives said one of the men was Iranian, while three had dual British-Iranian nationality. The arrests were part of a “long-running investigation,” police added, indicating the men‘s alleged activities pre-dated the US and Israeli bombardment of Iran, which started last Saturday.

British lawmakers and the domestic spy agency MI5 have long warned of threats posed to Britain by Iran. Three Iranians were charged with offenses under Britain’s National Security Act relating to assisting a foreign intelligence service last May.

In a separate investigation last year, police arrested five men, four of them Iranian, over a suspected plot to target specific premises, which British media said was the Israeli embassy. They were later released without charge.

“The Jewish community and the wider public will understandably be concerned by today’s arrests. We continue to monitor the situation closely,” interior minister Shabana Mahmood said on X.

Police said the four detained men were aged between 22 and 55. Six others were also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender, and police said searches were ongoing.

Speaking about the current Iranian conflict on Thursday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that people would use it to divide the country.

“The government is reaching out to communities across the United Kingdom – Jewish and Muslim alike – making sure communities and places of worship have appropriate, protective security in place,” he told a press conference.

Illustrating the threat from Iran, Britain’s MI5 spy boss said that over two years from 2022-2024, his service and British police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who were regarded by Tehran as a threat.

Britain also recorded a 4% rise in antisemitic incidents in 2025, making it the second-worst year on record, a charity said. Two men were killed last October during an attack on a synagogue in the northern English city of Manchester.