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A Florida sheriff is on the warpath against neo-Nazi ‘scumbags’ who want him dead
(JTA) – After hate groups in his county on Florida’s East coast projected antisemitic messages onto the Daytona International Speedway, the local sheriff delivered a press conference with one simple message: He’d had enough.
“We put up their photos, talked about their arrest records, and let everybody know what a bunch of reprehensible thugs were in our community, and what they were up to,” Sheriff Mike Chitwood told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the February press conference. Standing with local Jewish, interfaith and minority group representatives, the sheriff had announced he would be coming after the “scumbags” who did this.
“And after that,” he recalled, “all hell broke loose.”
The group that had made its presence known in Volusia County was the Goyim Defense League, one of the country’s most prominent antisemitic organizations, known for harassing worshippers at synagogues and papering neighborhoods with fliers hawking anti-Jewish conspiracies.
The movement’s leaders recently relocated to the area from California, and they had chosen the Daytona 500, a major NASCAR race that draws more than 100,000 people to the speedway, to make their antisemitic presence known. They didn’t like that the sheriff was now effectively declaring war on them.
Online after the press conference, several men started making death threats against Chitwood, even harassing his daughter and sending SWAT teams to his parents’ house. Antisemitic groups began planning to hold a public demonstration to oppose him specifically, which Chitwood’s intelligence determined was set for this past weekend in Ormond Beach.
So Chitwood fought back. Last week, thanks in part to his corralling, three men in three different states — California, Connecticut and New Jersey — were arrested and charged with making online death threats against him. Two of the three have already been extradited to Volusia County.
Volusia County Sheriff Michael Chitwood (right) thanks residents who turned up to counter-protest a canceled demonstration by a neo-Nazi group in Ormond Beach, Florida, April 22, 2023. (Nadia Zomorodian, courtesy of Volusia County Sheriff)
On Saturday the sheriff went to the airport to personally “welcome” one of the men. He hopes to send a message to hate groups more generally that he intends to “keep up the heat” so that they know they will face resistance from law enforcement if they attempt any public demonstrations: “I think that makes it a little bit harder to peddle your wares.”
Amid a national climate of rising antisemitism, one vexing question has been how to tackle antisemitic activity that is trollish but not violent. While European authorities have prosecuted Holocaust denial and other antisemitic sentiments expressed in social media posts, U.S. law is less expansive about what kind of online posts represent criminal activity. Meanwhile, the Goyim Defense League’s most frequent activities — flier drops, banner displays and public demonstrations — make up the fastest-growing type of antisemitic incidents in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League, but they do not always violate the law. A citation for littering in Wisconsin last year was the first known charge in the United States related to the Goyim Defense League’s distribution of antisemitic materials.
The issue is especially acute in Florida, where the populations of Jews and avowed antisemites are both growing. Chitwood suspects the state’s rising Jewish population is one of the reasons why white supremacists have also flocked to the area, along with Florida’s relaxed gun laws.
In this environment, Chitwood’s outspokenness and forceful commitment to eradicating antisemitism — in a county with a relatively small number of Jews — has set a new tone. Raised in a law-enforcement family in Philadelphia — his father was a prominent police officer whose biography chronicles his own battle against “scumbags” — Chitwood speaks in a tough clip peppered with colorful insults directed at his white supremacist opponents (“these clowns,” “little sissies,” “ugly faces”). His passion on the issue is evident when he talks about his desire to be “standing in for John Q. Citizen,” or “some poor son-of-a-gun that’s going to synagogue.” He’s still green enough on the issue that he frequently confuses the Anti-Defamation League with the “JDL,” or Jewish Defense League — a radical violent splinter group of Jewish extremists.
Chitwood has garnered national attention for his actions, as well as the respect of the Jewish community.
“This sheriff is not like all the others, in a sense,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “He’s taking different methods and putting himself out there and showing what one type of response can be.”
Rob Lennick, director of the Jewish Federation of Volusia and Flagler Counties, is one of Chitwood’s local allies. The federation is known locally for running several charitable programs, including food pantries, meant to reach people in need across the entire community, and Chitwood has a good relationship with them.
Lennick praised Chitwood for taking “a very strong forward position against these neo-Nazis, against these white supremacist groups coming to our community.” (Lennick arrived in Volusia County last year after leaving the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, which collapsed after employees accused him of misconduct.)
Counter-protesters at a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in Ormond Beach, Florida, thank Volusia County Sheriff Michael Chitwood “for standing against antisemitism,” April 22, 2023. Chitwood has had white supremacists who have threatened him online arrested and extradited to his county. (Nadia Zomorodian, courtesy of Volusia County Sheriff)
In the end, the planned neo-Nazi demonstration against Chitwood on Saturday never took place — though a large group of what the sheriff described as “professional counter-protesters” did show up, flying joint American and Israeli flags and thanking him for standing up to antisemitism. Walking among that interfaith crowd, many of whom had traveled from outside the county to be there, was profound for Chitwood. The experience “was very, very humbling,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve wrapped my brain around it yet.”
Segal declined to comment on the degree to which Chitwood’s office has liaised with the ADL. But he praised Chitwood’s outspokenness, and said he considered it a form of “allyship.”
“It’s easy to speak out against something that breaks the law. It’s not always easy to speak out against something that breaks the value of our communities because it’s hateful, because it scares people, because it makes people feel unsafe,” Segal said. He mused that the fact that so many neo-Nazis now have Chitwood in their crosshairs “creates an inadvertent bond between law enforcement and the Jewish community, that they’re both being harassed by antisemites.”
Lennick had advised local Jews not to attend the site of the protests, not even to participate in the counter-protests. “You’re walking a fine line,” he said. “You don’t want to fuel the bad guys.”
Chitwood, though, has made a point out of naming and shaming the antisemites in his midst, believing that the increased media attention will expose further misdeeds and make it harder for them to hold down employment.
“There is now a national spotlight on these GDL punks,” Chitwood said. “Sooner or later, they’re going to stub their toe. And you have all these entities looking at you.”
The sheriff wants to go further in his crusade. He has pushed for a bill in the Florida legislature that would allow him and other law enforcement in the state to charge people with felonies for distributing fliers and broadcasting messages of “ethnic intimidation” on private property.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shows off after signing a bill making “ethnic intimidation” displays a felony in his state, during a ceremony at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem, April 27, 2023. Randy Fine, a Jewish Republican lawmaker from Florida who authored the bill, stands at left. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
On Thursday, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the bill into law during a ceremony in Jerusalem after Randy Fine, the Jewish Republican state representative who authored it, delivered it to him there. (DeSantis last year called Nazis rallying in his state “jackasses” but drew criticism for not condemning them more forcefully.) The law was written specifically to address the kinds of activities the Goyim Defense League regularly engages in, including the Daytona message that spurred Chitwood to address the problem head-on, and enjoyed unanimous support from legislators of both parties.
“I guess we need to thank our scumbag Neo-Nazi invaders for uniting our community and the entire state of Florida against hate,” Chitwood tweeted after the signing.
“I see it as another tool in the toolbox,” Chitwood told JTA about his support of the bill. “You go onto private property and drop these leaflets on somebody’s doorstep or in their driveway, that’s now a felony trespass.”
Chitwood acknowledges that law enforcement can often be slow to respond to crimes of ethnic intimidation, and particularly online harassment, which hinders their ability to organize against a common threat. “We are very reactive,” he said. “No matter what it is, even a car break trend, sometimes you have to break into 20 or 30 cars before we detect a trend to go and do what needs to be done.”
He’s frank about the police’s shortcomings when it comes to dealing with such behavior. The fact that he is a sheriff, he said, meant that it was easier to bring the perpetrators of out-of-state online death threats to justice. And, he said, broad coordination across different law enforcement entities for the specific addressing of antisemitism in the state does not yet exist: Apart from communication with some neighboring county sheriffs and the FBI, efforts to collaborate with the broader law enforcement community have been slow.
But, he said, he remains committed to trying to fight antisemitism in his own backyard at the very least. “It is personal,” Chitwood said. “This is my community.”
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A ‘deficit of courage’ killed the free press in Germany. Will American journalists find the courage to thwart Trump?
Paul Reusch was managing director of a major German industrial conglomerate known as GHH, whose holdings included Bavaria’s largest newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten.
After two meetings with Adolf Hitler early in 1932, Reusch signed an agreement that the Munich broadsheet would refrain from “all unwarranted and personal attacks against Hitler and individual National Socialist leaders.”
One year later, Hitler lackeys were calling the shots in the newsroom, Jewish journalists had been forced out, and the newspaper was spewing hate propaganda.
The Third Reich brutally smashed free speech. Nearly a century later, it’s America’s Fourth Estate that is getting battered — by Donald Trump’s drive to muzzle his critics by exploiting the greed and hunger for power of corporate media executives.
Scott Pelley’s firing and the turmoil at CBS News are the freshest manifestations of this threat. But it’s been going on since the start of Trump’s second term — witness the craven settlements by ABC News and CBS News of frivolous lawsuits brought by Trump last year, his favored treatment of MAGA-aligned outlets, and his dehumanization of actual journalists.
“The news executives are acting as though, (if) we just placate Donald Trump we’ll get through this,” veteran TV journalist Jim Acosta said the other day in an interview on MS Now. “We have a deficit of courage and honor in this country right now and we need to get back to it.”
It was a deficit of courage that killed the free press in Weimar Germany. And like Paul Reusch, German media baron Alfred Hugenberg is a case study in corporate submission to authoritarianism.
Hugenberg was a steel executive, ultra-nationalist politician, and owner of some 50 provincial newspapers, of the Telegraph-Union wire service, as well as Ufa, the Third Reich’s largest producer of movies and newsreels. The Great Depression hollowed out Germany’s newspaper market, allowing Hugenberg to use his considerable capital to buy distressed papers and blanket the market with articles calling for an end to democracy.
Hitler’s Nazis and Hugenberg’s German National Peoples’ Party joined forces in 1931 in the Harzburg Front, an attempt to topple Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Although the alliance ultimately unraveled, it brought huge financial contributions to the Nazis from German industrialists.
After Hitler came to power he struck rapidly to muzzle any dissent, either shutting down newspapers or taking them over to serve as cogs in the Nazis’ propaganda apparatus.
As America nears its 250th birthday, media turmoil is playing into the hands of Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
Trump’s obsession with silencing truth-writing journalists kicked into overdrive early in his second term, with his banning of The Associated Press, my former employer, from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, the Trump administration dictating who gets to be in the White House press pool, and giving preferential treatment to journalists who ask softball questions or can be relied on to make fawning statements about Trump’s grandiose ideas, as Trump’s personal insults toward journalists — mainly women — pile up in number and in viciousness.
What’s been happening at CBS News and Scott Pelley’s firing are warning signs of moves by Trump to take control of news media and suppress criticism of him. The drama started last summer with CBS’ parent company — Paramount — agreeing to pay Trump $16 million to settle a toothless lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. And then came approval by the FCC — led by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr — of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. No quid pro quo here!
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, hired Bari Weiss to lead CBS News. After firing a half-dozen top people at 60 Minutes, Weiss was accused by Pelley of “murdering” the vaunted TV news program and doing Trump’s bidding.
“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president,” Pelley said in an interview with The New York Times published this past Sunday.
Weiss and CBS News have denied Pelley’s allegations.
There’s more turmoil on the horizon — and more reason to fear the Trump administration will seek to deepen its influence on news operations.
This past February, Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery signed an agreement for Paramount to acquire WBD for $110.9 billion, and WBD shareholders approved the merger. Whether the deal goes through is up to regulators. The Trump administration is eager to see Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO and Trump buddy Larry Ellison, calling the shots for CNN. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a few months ago: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison has said “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained” at CNN. But the purges at 60 Minutes are hardly reassuring. Jim Acosta maintains that the media conglomerate resulting from the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery “will essentially act like a state media organization in support of Donald Trump.”
There are calls among journalists to show more support for each other, and to stand up to Trump when he personally attacks them. The optics at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner weren’t great, with journalists giving a warm welcome to a man who regularly calls them “stupid,” “fake news,” “horrible,” “terrible,” among other insults. I wonder how they would have responded had a gunman not interrupted the proceedings and Trump gave a scathing speech about the assembled members of the Fourth Estate.
Acosta and other journalists are urging their colleagues — as well as news executives — to show more backbone.
“They (the Trump administration) are trying to put together a state-dominated media system in this country. And it has to be stopped,” Acosta said.
“There are a lot of journalists who can do something about it, and a lot of corporate executives who can do something about it. “
Acosta is not wrong.
Journalists working in the Third Reich were a mixed bag of Nazi fanatics, sycophants, opportunists, and career professionals who may have felt queasy about collaborating with the Nazis but kept quiet about it.
Resistance could have fatal consequences. Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Munich-based newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), was murdered at Dachau. Erwein von Aretin, political editor at the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, was also hauled off to Dachau, but survived. Editors and reporters at the Münchener Post, a pro-democracy newspaper owned by the Social Democrats, were rounded up, jailed, and after their release ostracized and forced to live in penury, a story I tell in my book Enemy of The People: The Munich Post and The Journalists Who Opposed Hitler.
German journalists never put up any serious resistance to Hitler’s suppression of the free press at least partly because most of the populace had turned against democracy.
American journalists are in a different situation, one far less perilous than that of their German colleagues. They might lose access to administration officials by standing up to Trump, perhaps forfeit their seat at press conferences to MAGA media, be banished from Air Force One, suffer juvenile insults from Trump, or anger their corporate bosses.
But today’s journalists need to ask themselves this: Isn’t standing up for democracy worth more than a seat in the briefing room?
While interviewing Trump on Meet The Press this past Sunday, Kristen Welker showed how it should be done, persisting in holding Trump to account. When Welker challenged Trump’s claims of election rigging by Democrats, he exploded.
“We’re like a Third World country,” he yelled at Welker. “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” Red-faced, Trump stood up and stormed out
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YiddishPOP can bring more diversity to American Jewish education
Every Sunday morning, a group of families in Stockholm, Sweden, meets in a local school to create handicrafts, do gymnastics — and learn Yiddish.
Katka Mazurczak, the instructor of this grassroots group called The Yiddish Club, told me that the families seem to really enjoy the weekly Yiddish immersion. One of the resources she uses is YiddishPOP, a free online animated and game-based learning tool that features short episodes about a young teenager named Nomi, her robot sidekick Moby and her friends.
I’ve known about YiddishPOP for years and often share its videos with my grandchildren. The episodes cover topics that are familiar and easy for children to relate to. In one, a friend of Nomi’s finally scores a basket. In another, Nomi and Moby laugh as they look at their comical reflections in funhouse mirrors.
Each story is accompanied by a video clip presenting the new vocabulary and grammar, interactive games and a multiple choice quiz.
“Children love YiddishPOP,” said Mazurczak, who also uses the program when teaching kids in more formal school settings like the Stockholm Jewish Hillel School, known as Hillelskolan. “It has captivating graphics, clear speech and the movie goes at a good pace. Some episodes are really funny and kids laugh out loud.”
Part of the appeal of YiddishPOP, particularly for beginners, lies in Moby’s slapstick antics. I too find myself laughing during those scenes.
In a time when seeking diversity has become a main focus in schools across America, Jewish educators might want to consider introducing young students to the multi-faceted language and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, using a contemporary language learning tool like YiddishPOP.
Teaching the Yiddish language through animation and interactive games helps it come alive for children, depicting it as a natural, even cool way to express Jewish identity, rather than stereotypically sending the language to the dustbin of history.
One school that has tried out YiddishPOP is the Krieger Schechter Day School in Baltimore, MD. When the school piloted the program with its third-grade class last year, the director of the lower school, Toby Kaplowitz, was impressed.
“Though students had just four sessions, they were truly engaged and walked away with both a sense of the language and an appreciation for its connection to their Jewish learning,” Kaplowitz wrote in an email. Krieger plans to continue using YiddishPOP with these same students, as they transition to fourth grade.
Last year, YiddishPOP began distributing $500 microgrants to help teachers and parents bring the Yiddish program to schools. Dana Yudovich Katz, a teacher at Kehillah High — a supplemental program for students in grades 8–12, run by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston — was the first recipient. She added YiddishPOP to a course she had initiated with the teens called TAM: A Taste of Yiddish Language and Culture. Tam is Yiddish for “flavor.”
Most of the students came away from using YiddishPOP with a positive feeling towards the language. As one student in Yudovich Katz’s class told her: “The film was good at using the words in a way I could understand because it was just slow enough.”
The YiddishPOP team is now working on teacher materials that will make it easier for people without a background in Yiddish or language teaching to use YiddishPOP. Teachers and school administrators who’d like to apply for a YiddishPOP microgrant can do so here until July 31.
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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
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