In New York City’s Washington Square Park, a crowd of dozens gathered for a vigil organized by several left-wing groups to mourn the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader who was killed last week on the first day of the war between Iran, the U.S., and Israel.

Mourners waved flags bearing the leader’s face, chanted “marg barg Amrika” (“death to America”). One participant performed a Nazi salute.

Across a police-lined metal barricade stood a slightly larger crowd of about 60 counterprotesters carrying the pre-Revolutionary Iranian flag, as well as American and Israeli flags. Some Iranian counterprotesters articulated an explicit solidarity with Jews and Israelis, finding parallels between participants of this vigil and protesters who expressed support for Hamas after Oct. 7.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had served as Iran’s supreme leader since 1989. Under his leadership, Iran became widely regarded by U.S. officials as the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, supporting regional militant groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Iran has long funded, armed, and trained Hamas, including ahead of the Oct. 7 attacks, which Khamenei praised. He was also well known for enforcing strict Sharia law in Iran and brutalizing dissenters within the country, most recently during a crackdown earlier this year on anti-regime protesters, thousands of whom were killed.

Vigil participants made speeches memorializing Ali Khamenei — but they were hard to hear over the din of counter-protesters.

Larry Holmes, a speaker at the vigil and a member of the Workers World Party, a communist organization, told the Forward that he had come to “commemorate the martyrs that have been killed by the U.S. Israeli attack, first and foremost, Ayatollah Khamenei,” whom he called “a man of social justice” and “a man of peace based on his statements about Palestine.” He also hoped to commemorate “the children who have been killed.”

Counterprotesters jeered at the participants, calling them “terrorists.” They also chanted “Khamenei kotlet” (the Farsi word for ground beef), along with “Trump, Trump, thank you,” and “Bibi, thank you,” and did the wave with their flags, joyously screaming “Khamenei mard!” (Khamenei is dead). At one point, an Iranian counterprotester opened a Tupperware container of brownies and began sharing them with those on her side of the barricade.

Several counterprotestors held signs with pictures of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah, who has positioned himself as a possible transitional leader and is known for his support of Israel.

At one point, a group of counterprotesters chanted “terrorist” at a vigil attendee, prompting him to give a “Heil Hitler” salute in response.

Most of the counterprotesters interviewed by the Forward were Iranian expatriates, and many said their anger was not only about repression inside Iran, but also about the regime’s support for militant groups across the Middle East.

“These guys, who are not even Iranians, are holding a vigil for a murderous man who killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, and burned down to ashes at least five, six different countries in the region,” said Shokran Rahiminezhad, an Iranian-born political geographer who was exiled from Iran by the regime. “We are furious that they are holding a vigil for him while we Iranians are absolutely happy.
I haven’t experienced life without him ruling my life and my country. I’m having the best day of my life.”

Another Iranian counterprotester, Adele Shahi, said the demonstration was about more than changing Iran’s government. “We are not protesting only to change our regime,” she said. “This is not only a government, it’s a terrorist system that hijacked not only Iran but Middle Eastern countries.” She added that the regime had also severed Iran’s historic ties with its neighbors. “In our history, we had ties to Israel and to the rest of the Middle East. That terrorist network destroyed that.”

Solidarity between Iranians and Jews

The gathering took place during Shabbat, far from the New York area’s hubs of Iranian Jewish life, and few Jews were among the Iranian counterprotesters.

Yet among the non-Jewish Iranians, Khamenei’s connection to Oct. 7 was central to why the vigil felt so offensive to them, they said.

Counterprotester Rad, who moved to the U.S. from Iran three years ago, requested that his last name not be published because of threats to his family in Iran after he was previously quoted in news coverage. He spoke of solidarity between opponents of the Iranian regime and Jews in Israel. “October 7th was orchestrated by the Islamic Republic, ordered directly by Ali Khamenei, and October 7th is the new version of the Holocaust,” he said. “We believe it was orchestrated to push Jewish people out of the Middle East.”

He added, “Without Jewish people, no Iranian has security and safety. We need Iranian Jews; we need the state of Israel allied with Iran to have a Middle East with peace and prosperity.”

Rahiminezhad echoed that view.

“Khamenei hijacked the Palestinian cause and turned it into a Shia axis of resistance,” he said. “He supported and planned for October 7, and this is not something that one can forgive. This is his legacy.”

Some counterprotesters said that watching people mourn Khamenei reminded them of how Jews and Israelis had watched crowds celebrate the Oct. 7 attacks.

Rahiminezhad said the moment had created an unexpected sense of mutual support.

“We supported Jews after October 7; they are supporting us here. We feel for each other, of course.”

On the other side of the barricade, the atmosphere was very different.

A shrine displayed photos of Ali Khamenei alongside flowers, candles, and images of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Malcolm X. The shrine also displayed informational pamphlets, including “Zionism and Racist Landlords: Abuse From Hasidic Sects in Brooklyn” and “From South Africa to Gaza, How the Islamic Republic of Iran Supports People’s Liberation Everywhere.”

One vigil organizer struggled to continue his prepared remarks as counterprotestors danced and made Middle Eastern ululations of joy called zaghrouta to celebrate Khamenei’s death. He paused to say, “I am feeling very invalidated tonight.”

Later in the evening, pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist Jake Lang arrived in a U-Haul, simulated a sex act on a live goat, and shouted an Islamophobic tirade. Police quickly closed the truck door, and he sped off.

Several people were arrested after a counterprotester attempted to tear down a photo of Khamenei. He was beaten by vigil participants before the NYPD intervened, handcuffing those involved.

Watching the vigil, counterprotester Adele Shahi became emotional thinking about the Iranians who died last month at the hands of the ayatollah during the brutal crackdown on anti-regime protestors. “The IRGC killed a child named Ali Mohammad Sadeghi. That person was 2 years old. Was he a protester?” she asked. “No. What’s the difference between that kid and the children in Israel, and the children in Gaza? You cannot have a double standard.”

The post Confronting a Khamenei vigil in NYC, Iranian protesters declare solidarity with Jews appeared first on The Forward.

For five years after Adolf Hitler came to power, attorney Ernst Fraenkel did something almost unimaginable: He stood in German courtrooms defending anti-Nazi dissidents and trade unionists — and sometimes even won. Even more remarkable, Fraenkel was Jewish. The Nazis tolerated him only because he had served in the German army during World War I, a temporary shield he knew would not last. In 1938, after learning from a sympathetic official that he was on a Gestapo arrest list, he fled to the United States.

Three years later, Fraenkel published a book: The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Many assume that Nazi rule instantly swept aside all “normal” legal standards. Fraenkel showed otherwise. In the early years of the Third Reich, he wrote, Germany lived under two systems at once — a functioning legal order and a parallel, lawless realm of political power.

Lately, a number of legal scholars have been warning that the American legal system under Trump shows troubling similarities to the “dual state” Fraenkel described. They point to federal agents using lethal force against protesters, arrests and detentions of immigrants based on appearance or perceived foreignness, the exclusion of state and local law enforcement from federal investigations, and the use of the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s perceived enemies.

Trump’s massive air assault on Iran has brought more accusations that he has put himself above the law. Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, called the strikes “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.”

America in 2026 is not Nazi Germany. But Fraenkel’s observations confront us with a question for our times: Can a democracy like ours drift toward a dual system of its own — one legal, one ruled by authoritarian prerogative — without fully realizing it?

A young German Jew, wounded in World War I, returns from fighting for the Kaiser, earns his law degree, becomes a rising figure in the anti-Nazi Social Democratic Party, defends trade unionists as counsel for a metalworkers union, continues representing dissidents after Hitler’s rise, and escapes with his life as the Nazis purge Jewish lawyers and Germany marches toward the Holocaust. It sounds like the outline of an epic film. But it was Ernst Fraenkel’s life.

It is striking that Fraenkel has not been recognized more widely for the hero he was. And it has taken his 1941 book on the legal structures of Nazi Germany — combined with Trump’s assaults on American democracy — for Fraenkel to receive the broader attention he deserves.

“When I first read about him, I thought it was astounding: Here was a Jewish Social Democratic lawyer representing political defendants effectively,” while at the same time anonymously writing anti-Hitler pamphlets, said Douglas G. Morris, a retired criminal defense lawyer for indigent clients and author of Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany.

After Hitler came to power, he quickly moved to purge the civil service of employees deemed disloyal or who were Jewish, including attorneys. But the Nazis granted exemptions for Jewish civil servants who had served in World War I — the Frontkämpferprivileg. Fraenkel hadn’t just served; he had been severely injured.

Even as the Nazis rounded up political opponents and sent them to early concentration camps like Dachau, pockets of resistance remained. As a Social Democrat and attorney, Fraenkel had contacts with dissidents and took many on as clients.

He understood something essential about the new regime: To protect his clients — and himself — he had to avoid provoking the Nazis or drawing the attention of the Gestapo. So he presented cases as if the normal legal system still existed — and in some ways it did. This required discipline, given his opposition to the regime. But the strategy worked. If he couldn’t win an acquittal, he could sometimes secure a light prison sentence.

At the same time, Fraenkel was secretly writing pamphlets for the anti-Nazi resistance. He wrote five in total, Morris told me in an interview, including “The Point of Illegal Work,” which argued that Germans should resist the regime through various means. He was also quietly drafting the manuscript that became The Dual State.

Fraenkel knew about the torture and punishments used in the camps. But as brutal as the Nazis were toward their enemies, the regime initially did not view attorneys — Jewish or otherwise — as a significant threat, according to Morris. That blind spot allowed Fraenkel not only to write anti-Nazi pamphlets but also to serve as a conduit for dissidents to exchange information.

From his courtroom experience, Fraenkel observed how the Nazis handled the pre-1933 legal system. They did not abolish it outright. Instead, they created a parallel system to dish out especially harsh punishments to those deemed in violation of the regime’s political edicts. Fraenkel called the pre-Nazi system the “normative state,” and the Nazi-controlled system the “prerogative state.” Thus, a dual state. The two systems were never equal, Morris notes: “The prerogative state — exercising its arbitrary power through intimidation and violence — always maintained control.”

On Sept. 20, 1938, Fraenkel received a warning that he was about to be arrested. He fled Germany, traveling to London, then New York, and finally Chicago. A French diplomat had smuggled his manuscript out of Germany. After arriving in the U.S., Fraenkel earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and published The Dual State. He returned to Germany in 1951, became a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, and died in 1975.

A growing number of legal analysts argue that the United States is developing its own version of a dual state — one that persecutes, demonizes or sidelines those who oppose MAGA ideology or threaten the fantasies of white-superiority advocates.

On his first day in office, Trump issued a mass pardon to some 1,500 insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to keep Trump in power despite his election loss. During the following months Trump granted clemency to 100 more convicted criminals, who included prominent business figures, high-profile MAGA supporters, and allies connected to Trump’s political and fundraising networks.

Masked and dressed for combat, ICE and CBP now act like the muscle for a parallel legal state — imprisoning foreigners whose only offense is entering the country illegally, dragging people from their homes in front of their children, and assaulting citizens who try to shield immigrants from unjustified arrest, killing two so far. The administration’s arbitrary decree that immigration agents no longer need judge-signed warrants to force their way into homes is another expression of what Fraenkel called the prerogative state.

Trump’s perceived and real political foes are being swept into a legal system built for his benefit, targeted by a Justice Department that now functions as an instrument of presidential power. In Trump’s America, Democrats, non-MAGA members of the press, and anyone who disagrees with him are denounced as mortal threats to the nation. Administration officials deemed insufficiently loyal are purged from their jobs.

This parallel system is colliding with legal traditions dating to the country’s founding, and courts have so far slowed the slide into full autocracy with rulings blocking Trump’s most aggressive edicts. Trump responds by attacking the judges who rule against him.

The Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to Trump’s parallel legal system when it struck down his tariffs. But this is the same court that nearly two years ago granted presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.

Fraenkel showed how a democracy can lose its bearings long before it loses its laws. As the United States nears its 250th year, the question is no longer whether a dual state can take root here. It is whether we will recognize it in time.

The post During WWII, a heroic Jewish lawyer warned against the dangers of a dual state — is it coming true in Trump’s America? appeared first on The Forward.

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.