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Fearless or foolish? Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s Jewish president, stands apart in opposing Trump’s campus policies
(JTA) — As he often does these days, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth recently delivered a lecture on another campus outlining all the reasons why academia should be more forcefully standing up to President Trump’s policies.
He peppered the lecture with Yiddish words. He laid thick on what he called his “Jewish accent.” A colleague came up to him afterwards.
“You’re doing Jew-speak,” they told him.
Roth laughed recalling his response: “No s–t, Sherlock. That’s part of what I’m doing.”
What he’s doing, Roth told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a recent interview, is constantly reminding his potential critics who he is. For one, he’s the only university president in the country who openly, repeatedly rejects Trump’s claims that the administration’s campus crackdowns — rescinding grants, limiting international student visas, dismantling “DEI” — are a means of fighting antisemitism after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
For another, when his own school dealt with pro-Palestinian encampments last year, he made no secret of handling the matter diplomatically instead of through discipline — an approach that landed other university presidents in hot water, but not him.
And above all that, he’s proudly Jewish.
“If you’re going to accuse Wesleyan’s administration of being antisemitic, start with me. But don’t call me on Saturday,” Roth quipped. “Because I’m going to be in Torah study.”
Roth isn’t quite sure how he, the leader of a small-town Connecticut liberal arts school with a mere 3,000 students, became so unusual among his profession by defending what he sees as the central principles of academic freedom.
“It’s a bit of a puzzle,” he told JTA. “I don’t think my view is very original. Any of the presidents I know at different schools probably have similar views.” His views also seem to align with most American Jews, at least according to polls, which show that nearly three-quarters of them also believe Trump is using antisemitism as an excuse to attack higher education.
In recent days, two other Jewish presidents, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University, have publicly rejected a Trump administration offer of “priority” funding that would have required them to bar some forms of speech, making them the only university leaders to do so. But Roth still stands out in the lengths he is going to rebuff Trump’s higher education policies — and to center his Jewish identity in doing so.
There he is, accepting a “courage award” from the literary free-speech group PEN America “for standing up to government assaults on higher education.” There he is, giving interviews in which he lambasts “prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: ‘He’s good for the Jews.’ It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.”
There he is, signing an open letter declaring that antisemitism “is being used as a pretext to abrogate students’ rights to free speech, and to deport non-citizen students.” The leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group that has been suspended from multiple college campuses for disruptive protests, were on that letter. So was the leader of Wesleyan University.
And there he is, telling JTA that so-called institutional neutrality positions, adopted by a range of universities amid the Israel-Gaza war (and supported by the Jewish campus group Hillel International), are “bogus.”
A representative for the American Association of University Professors, a faculty union that has dropped its former opposition to boycotting Israel, praised Roth’s presence on the national stage.
“Michael Roth is criticizing the misuse of Title VI to define anti-semitism as criticism of Israel and its weaponization in the campaign to attack higher education. There is nothing startling about that position,” Joan W. Scott, a Jewish researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study who sits on the union’s academic freedom committee, told JTA.
Scott added, “I’d say Roth’s reasons for his courageous stance have to do with his integrity and perhaps his knowledge of history. He doesn’t want to be among those who, like Heidegger, thought that appeasing the regime in power was a safe position to take.” (A spokesperson for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free-speech advocacy group that supports institutional neutrality, declined to comment on Roth.)
Roth’s profile has caught the attention of some Jewish families, including that of Mason Weisz of White Plains, New York, who said Roth was one reason that his son is a first-year at Wesleyan now. Weisz recalled hearing an NPR interview with Roth in April, after admissions decisions were out but before seniors had to pick their schools, as particularly pivotal.
The interview “in which he argues that Trump’s use of antisemitism to justify his strong-arming of universities actually is bad for the Jews, encapsulates everything I appreciated about Roth.” Weisz told JTA. “Here is a university president who is willing to risk going on record against the administration, again and again, to fight for academic integrity. He has a nuanced view of world events, an appreciation for true debate, and a fearlessness that I hope are an inspiration for Wesleyan’s faculty and students.”
Roth also earns good marks from some Jewish students on campus.
“He does care about Jewish students. He’s someone who does take their concerns seriously. And compared to other university presidents, he’s been better,” said Blake Fox, a Jewish senior at Wesleyan who identifies as pro-Israel and serves on the campus Chabad board. “He wants to be the ‘cool’ president.”
Fox says he had a good experience as a Jew at Wesleyan, in part because the encampments there never felt threatening (he noted the protest movement was much smaller at Wesleyan than it was at other schools). That was due, at least in part, to Roth’s efforts to peacefully negotiate an end to the encampments.
Yet, Fox said, the president — whom he’s met several times — was also deeply concerned for the well-being of Jewish students. In meetings with Fox and other Jews on campus, Roth vowed to take action if any protesters ever threatened a Jewish student by name.
He also appreciated Roth standing up to Trump, particularly on issues of campus speech. “I’m pro-Israel, but I also support the First Amendment,” Fox said. “Even if there are individuals whose speech is bad, targeting them for deportation is a dangerous precedent, I think.”
Though a historically Methodist school, Wesleyan today has no religious affiliation and enrolls around 600 Jewish students — nearly 20% of the student body. There’s no Hillel, but the school’s Jewish community includes a full-time rabbi, student leadership, dedicated Jewish residential housing, and a unique, modern sukkah that has won architecture awards. The Wesleyan Jewish Community rabbi declined to comment for this story.
There’s also a Chabad outpost, which opened in 2011. Its director, Rabbi Levi Schectman, told JTA he was “grateful for the open door to the President’s office and for the strides that have been made so far,” adding, “There is still more work to be done so that all students feel heard and safe.”
Schectman also said the Wesleyan Jewish community he interacts with is “living and thriving”: A recent “Mega Shabbat” gathering drew what he said was a center record attendance of 175 students.
And then, of course, there’s Roth, the school’s first Jewish president, who has held the post since 2007. A free-speech scholar, he’s published books about the campus environment, including one called “Safe Enough Spaces.” He grew up in a Reform household on Long Island and has written essays on Jewish identity, but considered himself “only modestly observant” until his father died 25 years ago. After that point, he said, he “began saying Kaddish and subsequently attending Torah study.”
Nowadays Roth makes a point of involving himself in Jewish campus life — all forms of it. He spent Rosh Hashanah with the affiliated Jewish community, and, last year, caught a Shabbat service held at the pro-Palestinian student encampments.
The latter group wasn’t too thrilled to see him there, he recalled; they’d been targeting him by name, often in insulting language. But he wanted to learn more about the Jews who were participating in the protests right outside his office. When one of them, an Israeli, personally apologized to Roth for the aggressive behavior of other encampment participants, he invited the student to his office and they had a long chat. “There were so many interesting conversations,” he said.
Of course, many Jews in academia know that merely being Jewish cannot protect oneself from charges of enabling antisemitism. It didn’t save Northwestern University president Michael Schill, who — like Roth — is a free-speech scholar who tried to deal with his school’s encampments through negotiation instead of by force.
In so doing, Schill was hauled before Congress and lost the confidence of many of his Jewish faculty, staff and alums. The heads of the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America, both Northwestern alums, publicly aligned against him. Last month, Schill announced he was stepping down.
Roth doesn’t know Schill personally, but said he thought it was “just terrible” he had resigned. “I found it very sad that the board didn’t come to his defense in a way that allowed him to continue,” Roth said.
He acknowledges he’s in a better position to speak out than the heads of other universities, where hospitals and major research centers are more reliant on federal funding, and where instances of antisemitism had been more prevalent pre-Trump.
Schools like Columbia have made significant concessions to Trump, including on antisemitism issues, in exchange for having their funding restored. Harvard, after initially putting up resistance to Trump’s demands, has now reportedly entered a negotiation phase; the University of California system has also been targeted for a $1 billion payout to the government. Last week, the Trump administration unveiled what it said was a new “compact” that schools would be required to sign to secure their federal funding; the demands include one to protect conservative viewpoints on campus.
Is Roth worried that Trump could turn on Wesleyan next?
“Didn’t I say I was Jewish?” he responded, laughing. “Am I worried? Of course I’m worried. I’m a worrier… I would hate to put Wesleyan at risk.” But, he said, that wouldn’t stop him. “I have three grandchildren. I want them to grow up in a country where they don’t have to be brave to speak up.”
As Jews marked the recent two-year anniversary of Oct. 7, Roth’s name was also on some things other Jewish leaders wouldn’t touch.
He spoke to JTA while on the road to a literary festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, co-sponsored by the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, which has emerged as one of the loudest voices in Judaism to oppose both Israel and communal American Jewish support for it. He would be appearing onstage with the journalist M. Gessen, who has compared Israel’s actions in Gaza to Nazi Germany.
Roth told JTA he hadn’t known that Jewish Currents was a co-sponsor when he agreed to take part in the festival. But, he added, it wouldn’t have changed anything about his appearance. He’ll talk to anybody Jewish. He’s appeared on their editor Peter Beinart’s podcast, and a while back he submitted a piece to the magazine that was rejected (“I guess it was insufficiently anti-Israel,” he mused) and wound up running in the Forward instead.
He sees his own views on Israel as moderate. While he called for a ceasefire in March 2024, far earlier than many others in the Jewish world, he still refuses to call the Gaza war a genocide and remains adamant he supports “Israel’s right to exist.” He only blames Israel for what he said were the security failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack, which he had condemned immediately as “sickening.”
He takes Israel’s wartime behavior to task for “paving a path for egregious war crimes and a level of brutality and inhumanity that I never would have associated with the country.” Yet he remains “stunned,” even today, by what he called “the lack of basic sympathy, empathy, for the victims of those horrific murders” of Oct. 7.
“I pride myself on being realistic about the persistence of antisemitism,” he said. “Still, the callousness with which some people greeted those horrors was very disturbing.”
Yet when the encampments came for Wesleyan last spring, and some of their participants accused him directly of being complicit in genocide, Roth — unlike nearly every other university president — opted to negotiate with them. He wrote a piece in the New Republic declaring that he would not call the police, even though he knew the protesters to be in violation of some campus policies.
Even in that piece, he offered an ominous prediction: “My fear is that such protests (especially when they turn violent) in the end will help the reactionary forces of populist authoritarianism.”
Roth didn’t like many of the phrases his own campus protesters used, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Yet he forcefully defended their right to say it, angering some Jews on campus as a result.
“I try to have it both ways,” he said — weighing his principled views on both Israel and protest. This can sometimes lead to very intricate needle-threading. He recalled how, when an address he gave to prospective students was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters unfolding a banner, he let them continue and even acknowledged the banner before pressing ahead.
Fox does take issue with some of Roth’s stances, including his opposition to institutional neutrality.
“I think he fundamentally misunderstands what institutional neutrality is,” Fox said. “We don’t need to hear your views on Ukraine. We don’t need to hear your views on Israel.” Having the school president call for a ceasefire, he thought, is “alienating both sides of campus.”
More significantly for his job, Roth has long opposed the movement to boycott and divest from Israel. This has angered activists at Wesleyan, who, like those at other schools, have made divestment a central demand.
Last spring, in order to peacefully break up his school’s encampment movement, Roth had promised protest leaders they could make a case to the board for divestment that fall. When the board opted not to divest, a small number of protesters became angry and attempted to take over a university building.
“They were not very civil to my staff members,” Roth recalled, describing the protesters as basically daring him to take action.
That time, he did call the cops.
The post Fearless or foolish? Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s Jewish president, stands apart in opposing Trump’s campus policies appeared first on The Forward.
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Most Jewish voters rate Mamdani poorly, new poll finds
As New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani marks four months in office, a new survey of New York City’s Jewish voters suggests he has done little to ease concerns among a community that overwhelmingly did not support his election and remains uneasy about his handling of antisemitism and Israel.
A Mercury Public Affairs poll of 665 Jewish voters who cast ballots in last year’s mayoral election found that 58% rate his performance as “poor” or “fair,” compared to 32% who say “excellent” or “good.” Among the 18% who described his performance as “fair,” a majority — 56% — said they disapprove, while 24% approve.
The poll sponsored by The Jewish Majority, an advocacy group led by AIPAC veteran Jonathan Schulman, was conducted from Feb. 17 to 28 in English and Yiddish via landline and cell phone. The sample has a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.7%. It included a diverse cross-section of the city’s Jewish electorate: 30% Orthodox; 32% Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist; and 20% unaffiliated.
The results published Sunday underscore a political reality that has shadowed Mamdani since taking the helm of the city that is home to the largest concentration of Jews in the U.S. He won just 26% of the Jewish vote in the 2025 election, compared to 55% for Andrew Cuomo and 8% for Curtis Sliwa, according to the poll. His support was strongest among younger voters ages 35-44 (34%) and unaffiliated Jews (42%). He drew just 7% among Orthodox voters.
Antisemitism and Israel loom large
A central tension in Mamdani’s relationship with Jewish groups has been his effort to separate his views critical of Israel from his repeated commitment to protect Jewish New Yorkers.
Mamdani, who rose to power aligned with pro-Palestinian activism, has so far declined calls from Jewish leaders to acknowledge the community’s connection to Israel more directly. That comes into sharper focus now as the Jewish community marks Jewish American Heritage Month. Mamdani is not expected to march in the annual Celebrate Israel Parade on Fifth Avenue on May 31, a choice likely to reinforce perceptions of that distance. This year’s parade theme is “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.”
Last month, Mamdani vetoed a City Council bill requiring safety plans for protests near schools, while allowing a separate measure protecting houses of worship to become law. Mamdani said he shared concerns raised by progressive groups and labor unions that the legislation could impact their ability to organize and potentially limit demonstrations, particularly on campuses. He also faced backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations on his first day in office after revoking executive orders tied to antisemitism and campus protests.
At the time the poll was taken, an overwhelming 84% of respondents said they had supported the Council’s initial proposal to establish a safe perimeter around houses of worship to prevent harassment and intimidation, while preserving First Amendment rights. Only 7% opposed it.
According to the survey, 82% of respondents said they are concerned about the rise in antisemitism in New York City, and 58% said they believe the increase is linked to the normalization of anti-Zionism.
A majority — 61% — said Mamdani’s refusal to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the Intifada” has emboldened pro-Hamas protesters. Nineteen percent disagreed.
Mamdani stands firm
The Jewish Majority spearheaded an open letter during the mayoral election, signed by more than 1,100 Jewish congregational leaders opposing what it described as “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization” among figures like Mamdani.
Four months in, Mamdani is showing little sign of changing course, sticking with the coalition that brought him to power even as many Jewish New Yorkers say their concerns remain unresolved.
“I am deeply committed to protecting Jewish New Yorkers,” Mamdani told the Forward last week. “It’s part of a commitment to ensure that public safety is delivered for each and every New Yorker. And I also believe that as we deliver that public safety, as we show an absolute rejection of antisemitism across the five boroughs, we can also do these things while protecting our fundamental constitutional rights.”
The post Most Jewish voters rate Mamdani poorly, new poll finds appeared first on The Forward.
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After a Maryland teacher’s death, her 200-piece Judaica collection finds new life in a Jewish museum
(JTA) — As Rae Ann Kaylie sat on her mother’s couch in the wake of her death, the Judaica felt overwhelming.
Over 50 menorahs adorned the shelves. A dozen seder plates had been meticulously hung alongside a trove of Jewish art on each wall. And countless dreidels, kiddush cups and shofars filled every corner of the 1,100-square-foot home in Rockville, Maryland.
There were so many hamsas hanging near the entrance, Kaylie joked, “Whoa, Mom, what on earth? Like, how much evil eye do we have in here?”
For 35 years, Kaylie’s mother, Deborah Brodie, had amassed a collection of over 200 Jewish ritual objects, which she had used as a hands-on classroom for her Hebrew school students with special needs. Among the collection, Brodie had also obtained a Torah from Ebay, which her students used to practice for their b’nai mitzvah.
“She wasn’t the one who was like, ‘Oh, don’t touch it. You’re going to break it,’” Kaylie said. “She was like, ‘Touch it, here, take a bunch,’ you know what I mean, and that was really cool about her entire collection.”
Brodie — known as “Bubbie Cookie” to her family — had not built the collection alone. Her longtime partner, Jay Brill, whom she met through a Washington Jewish Week personals ad in 1986, was alongside her throughout the journey, traveling with her to all 50 states to sell Jewish jewelry and a computerized Hebrew-learning program they created together.
Over the years, the couple attended both B’nai Shalom and Shaare Tefila Congregation, two Conservative synagogues in Olney, Maryland. Toward the end of their lives, they attended Chabad of Olney, whose rabbi officiated their funerals.
But after Brodie, 76, and Brill, 74, died in February just 19 days apart, Kaylie said she and her family were faced with a painful question: What would happen to the couple’s lifetime of Jewish devotion in their absence?
“We all picked something we wanted, but then, you know, you don’t want to sell it, you don’t want to make any money off of it,” Kaylie said. “It was just trying to figure out, like, what can we do to further her passion, her vision?”
The answer, Kaylie said, arrived through Instagram.
Earlier this month, Kaylie sent a simple message to Nick Fox, who operates a social media series titled “Millennial Inheritance,” writing, “Hey, you want to see a lot of menorahs?”
Since October, Fox has documented dozens of inheritance stories across his social media channels, featuring people grappling with their late parents’ vast collections of Breyer Horse figurines, salt and pepper shakers and Christmas decorations.
But while Fox said the mission of his page is not necessarily to help people find homes for inherited collections, Kaylie’s story felt different.
As he viewed images of Brodie and Brill’s home, Fox, who is Catholic, said that he immediately flashed back to childhood memories attending his classmates’ bar mitzvahs and receiving souvenir hamsas from their trips to Israel.
“It was the fact that she was actively grieving and really had no idea what to do, and I think the fact that I was raised how I was, where I was, that I had a knowledge of what this stuff was and what it meant,” Fox said.
Just days later, Fox posted a short video for his 200,000 followers featuring snippets of the sprawling collection along with a call to help find it a permanent home that would “love it the way Rae Ann’s mom did.”
As the post garnered hundreds of comments offering ideas for the collection’s future and tributes to Brodie’s contributions to Jewish education, it was also making its way through Washington’s Jewish community.
The morning after the post, Jonathan Edelman, the collections curator for the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum, said he woke up to dozens of messages from people urging the museum to find a home for the collection.
“It was so meaningful that so many people in the broader community, and who have never stopped in our museum, tagged us and said, you know, this should be the home of this sort of wild story and this amazing collection,” Edelman said.
By the following weekend, Edelman had travelled to Brodie’s home to meet with Rae Ann to view the collection himself. But even after seeing Fox’s post, Edelman said he was unprepared for what awaited him inside.
“It was incredible, floor-to-ceiling Judaica like I’d never seen in anyone’s home before,” Edelman said. “It wasn’t just thrown on a shelf. It was so thoughtfully laid out. I mean, she had seder plates and hanukkiot hanging on the wall, which is no easy task to do…it felt like a museum quality display. It was really impressive.”
Edelman quickly reported back to the museum, which opened in June 2023, telling them that he believed he had stumbled upon an “incredible opportunity” to launch its inaugural education collection.
Now, the Capital Jewish Museum has plans to house the entirety of Brodie and Brill’s collection in its second-floor education and program space, the Community Action Lab, where visitors will be able to interact with the Judaica firsthand, just as Brodie encouraged her students to do in her home.
The museum also plans to photograph the collection so it is accessible online, and lend individual pieces to schools and organizations in the area for educational use.
“When I heard her mother’s story, you know, we were doing the same thing. Our goal was Jewish education, and she did it as an individual, we’re doing it as an institution,” Edelman said. “It means so much for us to honor her mother’s memory by doing the work that she dedicated her life to…it feels particularly special.”
But while Fox said he was not surprised by the outpouring of support and suggestions from the Jewish community, he said other Jews that inherit large quantities of Judaica should not look to Kaylie’s story as a roadmap.
“This is absolute best-case scenario, but it also makes it so very unique, because there aren’t going to be a lot of collections that museums usually are going to take on,” Fox said, adding that people should not assume that inheritances will find a place in a museum.
Instead, Fox said he encouraged people that inherit Jewish collections to consult their local Jewish community centers or synagogues to see if they might have a use for them.
“In the case of someone having a tremendous amount of Judaica, I think the best way would be to tap into your network, first, talk to people that you know that are in your community,” Fox said. “And then if it goes nowhere, then you have every right to, you know, if you’re looking to sell it, or if you’re looking to donate it, I think the big ask would be, what would your relatives want done with that stuff?”
Rachel Steinhardt, a California resident who organized a large-scale Judaica drive for people impacted by the Palisades and Eaton fires last year, recommended that people who find themselves with inherited Judaica they cannot keep turn to local Facebook groups or Judaica rehoming communities such as L’dor V’dor Judaica or Heritage Judaica.
“New Judaica is great, but people definitely value something that has been touched and loved and appreciated over the years…you want something that has a little soul in it,” Steinhardt said. “So I think that even something that’s not of value, other people can appreciate that it has been loved and want to acquire it.”
Reflecting on Fox’s decision to spotlight her mother’s collection, Kaylie said that he had been a “guardian angel.”
“He didn’t have to do that, and really, it’s because of him that we’re able to have my mom’s legacy be how we could have wanted it,” Kaylie said.
Edelman said he expects the collection to be installed in the museum sometime this summer, where it will be displayed alongside a plaque honoring “Bubbie Cookie” and “Zayde Jay,” names the couple were referred to by their families.
For Kaylie, imagining the future museum visitors handling her mother’s kiddush cups and menorahs felt like “exactly how she would have wanted it.”
“When we lost Bubbie Cookie, we said the legend of Bubbie Cookie was over,” Kaylie said. “And now, for the legend and the legacy to move on, I mean, it’s unreal. It’s, I have no words, I can’t even articulate it. It’s just amazing.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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British Green Party candidate tweeted about killing Zionists from Anne Frank parody account
(JTA) — A candidate in the United Kingdom’s Green Party is under fire after posting under that social media handle “thereal.anne.frank” that “every single Zionist” should be killed, marking the latest antisemitic scandal to hit the party in a matter of days.
Two other candidates have been charged with spreading hate online in relation to anti-Israel social media posts, while the party’s Jewish leader, Zack Polanski, is fending off allegations of deep-seated antisemitism.
The latest scandal came after the Jewish News revealed that in a series of posts on Threads, Tina Ion, a Green party candidate in Newcastle, referred to “Zionists” as “vermin” and “rats” and posted an image of an industrial shredding machine, which she called a “Zionist juicer.” She also referred to “Jewish Nazis” as “money grubbing thieves” who “have built mountains of money over centuries,” according to the newspaper.
The profile photo for the account, titled “thereal.anne.frank,” featured an image of a young woman wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf. In one post referencing the image, Ion allegedly wrote that it was used “because Ann Frank wearing a keffieh pisses Zionists off.”
Ion’s rhetoric, which was first surfaced by Labour party activist Steve Cooke, was quickly condemned by a host of Green Party lawmakers, who wrote in a joint statement posted on X Friday that the party was “reviewing our vetting processes.”
“We are appalled by the racist material written and shared by Tina Ion,” the statement read. “We are anti-racists and are clear that antisemitism has no place in our party or society. We do not support her candidacy.”
Ion defended her posts in a statement posted on Facebook, writing that “isolated fragments” of her statements had been used to “distort” her core values and that she “absolutely reject any accusation of antisemitism.”
“My criticism is not directed at an ethnicity or a religion; it is directed at a political ideology and a set of state actions,” Ion wrote. “The common denominator among those I criticise – from Zionist Jewish hardliners to Western supporters and our own government – is not their culture, but their active support for what the International Court of Justice has deemed a ‘plausible risk of genocide.’”
She added, “I acknowledge that in moments of raw, unshielded grief, witnessing live-streamed images of children being torn to pieces, I have used dehumanising language toward those supporting these acts.”
Ion is not the only Green Party candidate facing scrutiny for posting antisemitic content online.
Sabine Mairey and Saiqa Ali, who are both running for seats in the Lambeth borough of London, were detained by the Metropolitan police Thursday “on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred online,” an offense under the UK’s Public Order Act. Mairey and Ali were taken into custody for questioning.
Mairey posted an image on Facebook with text that read, “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism, it’s revenge,” according to a screenshot from The Telegraph. The post referenced Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a U.S. citizen and Lebanese immigrant who drove an explosives-laden truck into a synagogue in Michigan in March, shortly after losing several of his family members to Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Ali has shared an image on Instagram of an armed man wearing a Hamas headband, together with the slogan, “Resistance is freedom,” according to another screenshot.
Other Facebook posts by Ali, which have now been deleted, allegedly claimed that 9/11 was a “false-flag attack” engineered by Israel. She also allegedly posted an image of a serpent marked with a Star of David choking the Earth, and a caricature of a Jew with the caption, “We went through the Holocaust, and now we get to kill everyone, forever!”
The arrests came hours after the stabbing of two Jewish men in London’s heavily Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, which police are investigating as terrorism. London has also recently seen a string of arson attacks on synagogues and other Jewish sites. And in October, a man drove his car into people gathered outside a synagogue in Manchester and fatally stabbed one man.
The left-populist Green Party seized major gains in recent months, riding issues that have animated the global left — including affordability, the environment and widespread anger over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Polanski, the party’s Jewish leader who hopes to topple the Labour government’s power in local elections next week, has accused Prime Minister Keir Starmer of complicity in “the very obvious genocide in Gaza.”
Amid the Green Party’s sudden growth, it has faced mounting scrutiny over its candidates. Polanski admitted during the selection process that vetting was a “real challenge” for the Greens, though he has since said he has confidence in “99%” of his candidates.
Several other candidates have been accused of making antisemitic comments. A candidate in Newcastle, Philip Brookes, said in a Facebook post about Gaza that it “takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit antisemitic.” Aziz Hakimi, a candidate in Camden, has shared content blaming “Zionists” for 9/11 and claiming that Israel orchestrated an arson attack on ambulances owned by the Jewish charity Hatzolah in Golders Green. Other candidates have posted comments that appeared to sympathize with the Hamas attack on Israel or promote tropes about the global influence of Jewish people.
The deputy leader of the Greens, Mothin Ali, privately told the Greens for Palestine group that candidates who were accused of antisemitism should seek “serious legal advice,” The Times of London reported. Ali suggested a “class action” against his own party over its handling of suspensions as “they’re coming after more and more people.”
Polanski has said that some of his candidates were falsely accused of antisemitism because they challenged the Israeli government or supported Palestinians.
“It is really important that we do not conflate genuine antisemitism with legitimate criticism of an Israeli government which is committing war crimes,” Polanski told the BBC, adding that complaints of antisemitism were taken seriously.
“Where you have 4,500 candidates, to have a handful of cases I would say is not some kind of big scandal,” he said.
Polanski has also accused Starmer of weaponizing fears about antisemitism to stifle criticism of Israel. “We’ve got into a bizarre situation in this country where a non-Jewish prime minister is attacking the one Jewish leader on a case of antisemitism,” he told The Guardian.
Since the nomination deadline for the upcoming elections has passed, even if parties withdraw support from candidates, their names cannot be legally removed from ballots even if they are suspended.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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