Uncategorized
How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower off a Florida city council
(JTA) – When Brother John Muhammad emerged this fall as the leading candidate for a vacant city council seat in St. Petersburg, Florida, local Jews were distressed.
Muhammad is well known in the city as the president of a local neighborhood association and as a frequent advocate for minority groups. But Jewish leaders learned that he was also a follower of Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has a long history of antisemitism, and that he had made comments dismissing concerns about Farrakhan’s record.
Jewish leaders tried to stave off Muhammad’s appointment, pushing for more extensive vetting of the seven candidates and, in the case of the local Holocaust museum, actively lobbying against him. But the council confirmed him in a 4-3 vote, leaving local Jews frustrated — before they considered ways to make the situation a learning experience for their city.
“When I see a situation like this, it screams ‘opportunity’ to me,” Michael Igel, chair of the Florida Holocaust Museum, located in St. Petersburg, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The saga playing out in St. Petersburg, Florida’s fifth-largest city, unfolded during the same period that a handful of Black celebrities, including Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, first became enmeshed in controversy over their own antisemitic comments and social media posts. The coincidence meant a dicey environment for broaching a conversation about the antisemitism of the Nation of Islam, whose rhetoric disparaging Jews overlaps with that of Hebrew Israelites, the ideology that Irving promoted by sharing a link to an antisemitic film.
It also turned St. Petersburg into a window for understanding how ties forged between Jewish groups and others can be tested.
Local Jewish leaders initially sought to stop Muhammad from gaining the city council seat, which was vacated after its previous holder resigned following redistricting and accusations she no longer lived in her district. They learned about Muhammad’s city council application only a week before the council’s vote, leaving them with little time to mobilize. The information came from a political rival of Muhammad, former mayoral candidate Vince Nowicki, who shared information about Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation with local Jewish groups.
Nowicki also shared a comment Muhammad had made about Jews in a 2016 video in which Muhammad interviewed local Black LGBTQ activists. In the video titled “A Conversation About Growing Up Black And LGBT,” which JTA viewed, Muhammad said, “Minister Farrakhan got accused of being antisemitic for a long time because he pointed out and made some corrections about the activity of Jews. And anybody who says anything critical of the Jewish community is labeled as being antisemitic. Good, bad, right or wrong, it doesn’t matter what you say. If you criticize them that’s what you are.”
He continued, saying, “And I’m finding that it happens when you are critical of the gay community, when you say anything critical or anything that doesn’t align with that ideology, now all of a sudden you’re homophobic.” Muhammad’s comments about gay people received some light but friendly pushback from his interview guests.
Muhammad did not reply to multiple requests for comment by JTA, including to questions emailed to him at his request. He said during a public meeting ahead of the council vote that he thought scrutiny of him by Jewish groups had been unfair.
To Jewish leaders, the comments in the video coupled with Muhammad’s Nation of Islam affiliation were clear signs that he should not be appointed to the city council.
“I would sure hope that being antisemitic would be a red line, that you could not be a candidate,” said Rabbi Philip Weintraub of Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the city.
Jewish leaders began to take action, issuing statements and launching a letter-writing campaign to the council. They felt so much urgency that some even conducted business on Simchat Torah, a Jewish holiday when Jewish organizations typically pause their activities in accordance with Jewish law.
As a nonprofit, the local federation was constrained in how it could weigh in. Since it could not endorse or oppose specific candidates, it instead pushed for every candidate to be “properly vetted” and informed council members about Muhammad’s affiliations and past comments, according to Maxine Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Florida’s Gulf Coast. She said the efforts did not have their intended effect.
“I don’t think anybody said, ‘Well, who is this Farrakhan, what does he stand for?’” Kaufman said. “I don’t think enough was done, personally.”
The entrance to the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, Nov. 27, 2016. (Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The Florida Holocaust Museum took another approach, circulating information about Muhammad to the wider community, along with a statement opposing the candidacy of anyone who would support Farrakhan’s antisemitism. Their goal, Igel said, was to educate the community about the severity of these views.
“There’s nothing else to talk about when somebody is supporting Louis Farrakhan,” Igel told JTA. “Particularly when you are seeking a position representative of a city, particularly one like St. Petersburg that is so known for its inclusivity and its openness.”
Igel praised some members of the city council who asked Muhammad pointed questions about his views at the vote, giving him the opportunity to refute Farrakhan’s comments about Jews. One council member who voted against Muhammad, Lisset Hanewicz, said her stepfather is Jewish and read Farrakhan’s past antisemitic statements into the record, saying, “I think people need to understand why a certain part of this community is upset.”
Igel acknowledged that getting involved in a city council appointment was an unusual move for a Holocaust museum. He said museum leaders had held a meeting beforehand to determine how to proceed but made a decision fairly quickly to weigh in.
“In this case, we don’t consider this to be a matter of politics,” Igel said. “This is a matter of morality. And this is what we teach.” If the candidate had been a white supremacist, Igel said, “that person would have been disqualified out of the gate.”
The Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center, two hate watchdogs, define the Nation of Islam as a group that propagates antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, not a religion. Founded in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad, the Black nationalist group is not the same as traditional Islam and is rejected by most Muslim clerics; it entered mainstream prominence in the 1960s after civil rights leader Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali publicly joined the movement. (Both later left the group, with Malcolm X publicly denouncing its leadership; he was assassinated shortly after, and two Nation of Islam members who were wrongfully convicted of his murder recently received a large settlement from New York City.)
The Nation of Islam entered its current era after Farrakhan took over the group in 1977. Now 89, he has used his platform to issue a steady stream of antisemitism, including calling Jews “wicked” and the “synagogue of Satan,” saying they have “wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government,” and calling Hitler “a very great man.” Only a few years ago, the Women’s March progressive activist collective was nearly derailed over some of its founders’ associations with Farrakhan.
It is rare, but not unheard of, for public officials to have current or former associations with the Nation of Islam. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a practicing Muslim, was dogged by accusations that he had formerly been a member of the group when he first ran for Congress in 2006; he apologized for his past associations with the group. Trayon White, a Washington, D.C. council member and onetime mayoral candidate who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, has donated to the group in the past. Former President George W. Bush once praised the group, and a photograph showing Barack Obama in the same room as Farrakhan was fodder for Obama’s critics during his presidential run.
Muhammad, who is referred to on the city council website as John Muhammad and whose legal name is John C. Malone, declined to condemn Farrakhan at the city council meeting.
“I am not willing to denounce the leader of my faith no more than a Catholic would be willing to denounce their pope,” he said.
Muhammad’s reaction to questions about Farrakhan particularly concerned the federation and other local Jewish groups. Kaufman told JTA she didn’t know whether Muhammad himself is antisemitic, but she said his refusal to disavow Farrakhan was alarming.
“I do have issue with his reverence of someone who is blatantly antisemitic, and he won’t disavow him, he won’t reject him,” she said, echoing the the federation’s official statement on the vote.
At the meeting, Muhammad did say that he had reached out to the Florida Holocaust Museum but had not heard back — and that he thought the museum’s criticism of him was unfair.
“What I found when we reached out to have dialogue with the Holocaust Museum director, they did not want to talk to me,” he said. “They wanted to evaluate and disqualify me based on the association that I have as an individual. I don’t think that that’s just.”
Muhammad also defended his record with Jews by claiming that they were among the “diversity of those who support me.” He added, “And if you look at those who oppose me, they’re coming from one particular group.”
Since the vote, a local Black newspaper condemned the scrutiny on Muhammad, calling it a “perusal into his faith practice.”
Igel said the museum had no record that Muhammad had reached out but encouraged him to come and learn more about the Holocaust and the nature of antisemitism. Stuart Berger, head of the local Jewish Community Relations Council, acknowledged at the city council meeting that Muhammad “has made himself available to us” at the federation, but that none of the federation staff “had been in direct contact with him.”
The federation’s involvement in Muhammad’s case became its own issue at the council vote, when the candidate referenced an email Berger had written to the county commissioner. In the email, Berger wrote that Muhammad’s vetting process had been “good enough for me!”
While Muhammad took the email as proof that the federation believed him to be fit for office, Berger and Kaufman maintain that it meant nothing of the sort. Berger had not been speaking on behalf of the federation, they say, and had not intended for his email to be shared publicly.
Now that Muhammad is on the council, attention has turned to building relationships with him. Kaufman has been meeting with individual city council members, and hopes to eventually meet with Muhammad himself. She also aims to have the federation make a presentation to the council about the dangers of antisemitism and push them to make a statement about it.
She doesn’t think it’s complicated. “I think hate’s hate,” she said. “Many different colors.”
Weintraub’s congregation is celebrating its 100th anniversary in March, and one of its congregants, Eric Lynn, is also involved in politics: he was the Democratic nominee for Florida’s 13th Congressional district in the midterms but lost his race to Republican Anna Paulina Luna, who said she was raised as a Messianic Jew and campaigned with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Weintraub himself is a member of an interfaith ministerial dialogue group with Black churches and says he’s “a professional optimist” when it comes to managing conflict between different communities. He sent JTA an episode of the public radio podcast “Hidden Brain” about how to keep conflict from spiraling, saying it “describes what I’ve tried to do.”
Since Muhammad was appointed, Weintraub has met with him; the pair had what Weintraub described as “a pleasant conversation.” The two talked about parenting and “shared traumas,” he said. They did not discuss Muhammad’s comments supporting Farrakhan, but the rabbi couldn’t help but think about him.
“I thought I was a termite, according to Farrakhan,” Weintraub said. In contrast, Muhammad “said I was a person, so that was nice.”
—
The post How Jewish leaders tried — and failed — to keep a Farrakhan follower off a Florida city council appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
What we get wrong about how Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past
On a recent Freakonomics episode about the German film director Werner Herzog, host Stephen Dubner voiced a familiar assertion about postwar Germany’s confrontation with the Nazi past — an assertion shared by many Americans but one that is, in fact, a partial myth.
“It’s always impressed me,” Dubner said to Herzog, “the way that Germany, after the Second World War, assessed what had happened and in its schools and its institutions tried to come to grips with why and how, and to educate its successive generations.”
What’s wrong with this statement? At its core, it recycles a narrative crafted by the United States and its anti-Soviet allies during the Cold War — one designed for geopolitical purposes and carried into the 21st century.
Though it’s true that German schools have been admirably rigorous in teaching the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and Germany has taken many other historic steps to make amends, German government agencies spent decades avoiding a full confrontation with their own past. Files documenting the depth of Nazi continuity within the postwar civil service were kept under lock and key well into the new century.
In my book, Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies, I reveal how West Germany hired seriously incriminated ex-Nazis for civil service positions and tell the story of a reckoning that took nearly six decades to begin — a chapter in Germany’s confrontation with its past that still receives too little recognition.
For decades, ministries shielded their records from public view. The first major breakthrough came in 2005, when Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, appalled to discover that his ministry’s internal newsletter had been publishing glowing obituaries for diplomats implicated in Nazi crimes, established an independent team of historians to examine the Foreign Office archives. Their report, released five years later, documented not only the involvement of German diplomats in the machinery of the Third Reich but also the ease with which many resumed their careers in the West German state.
Over the past two decades, virtually every major German government institution has followed the Foreign Office’s lead — commissioning historians to examine old files and arriving at similarly disturbing conclusions. There was foot-dragging along the way; the Chancellor’s Office, the nerve center of the German government, did not release the findings of its own self-examination until last year.
These long delays raise a question that reaches beyond Germany. If a nation widely praised for its moral clarity took more than half a century to confront the actions of its institutions, what might that suggest about how the United States will one day confront the legacy of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement?
Of all the West German government agencies in the first postwar decade, none — with the exception of the foreign intelligence service — was a more welcoming harbor for ex-Nazis with blood on their hands than the Bundeskriminalamt, or Federal Criminal Police Office, a German version of the FBI known by its initials, BKA. The depth of this infiltration was exposed by Dieter Schenk, a security specialist at the BKA who quit over the West German government’s cozy relationships with right-wing dictators.
While at the BKA, Schenk heard hushed rumors about investigators with dark pasts. After resigning, he began to dig. He uncovered documents that exposed about two dozen of the BKA’s top employees who had served with Nazi units that committed war crimes and were never put on trial.
Schenk published his findings in a 2001 bestseller titled Auf dem rechten Auge blind: Die braunen Wurzeln des BKA (Turning a Blind Eye to the Right: The Brown Roots of the BKA). Several years later, the BKA commissioned its own panel of historians, who reached conclusions similar to Schenk’s. Their findings were published in 2011.
More inquiries followed.
Even the super-secretive Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, opened up about former SS officers who landed jobs at the West German spy agency, some with the assistance of American intelligence, despite having served in Nazi units that committed war crimes. One of the most stunning revelations was that in the late 1950s and early 60s the BND had on its payroll one of the most sought-after war criminals — Walter Rauff, hiding out in Chile.
Historians hired by the Justice Ministry found that in the late 1950s about half the senior employees had been card-carrying Nazis, including lawyers who attended meetings planning the Holocaust. A 2016 report documented how senior officials helped former Third Reich jurists paper over their pasts.
A 2018 Interior Ministry report exposed networks of ex-Nazi administrators who resumed their careers with the help of testimonials they wrote for one another. These testimonials were dubbed Persilscheine, or “Persil notes,” after a popular laundry detergent — making an ex-Nazi’s past appear as clean as fresh laundry.
One section of the report catalogues the excuses job candidates used to whitewash their wartime acts: They were coerced into joining the party; they needed a steady income; they had worked for the Third Reich to protect Jews; they were secretly in the resistance; they looked like loyal Nazis on the outside but hated Hitler on the inside. In the Interior Ministry’s culture department, researchers found that 43% of reviewed employees had concealed incriminating elements. They found no evidence that anyone was disciplined for lying.
Which brings us to Trump’s America.
America in 2026 and West Germany in the early postwar years are very different. The German democracy was just getting started; American democracy has existed for 250 years. Still, it would be a mistake to dismiss the German experience as offering no lessons. In the early 1950s, there was no certainty that the new German democracy would take root. In Trump’s America, there is no certainty that democracy will endure in the form we have known.
West Germany was still reeling from the war in the 1950s. A top priority of the victorious allies was capturing and punishing Nazi perpetrators — through the Nuremberg trials, denazification, and the imprisonment of thousands of soldiers and Nazi officials. But the populace rebelled against what they called “victors’ justice,” placing massive political pressure on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The United States and West Germany struck an unspoken bargain: suspending the pursuit of war criminals in exchange for Adenauer’s alignment with the United States and NATO in their emerging Cold War confrontation with the Soviet bloc.
Backing away from punishing Germans for the crimes of the Third Reich may have been a factor in the new democracy’s eventual success. But it came at a price. Adenauer was certainly no Nazi, but he was not above employing tactics reminiscent of those of the old regime — including using the foreign intelligence service to spy on his political opponents. And while an untold number of Germans complicit in Nazi abuses were able to resume their lives without consequence, including postwar civil servants who concealed their Third Reich misdeeds during the hiring process, their victims and victims’ families were never given the justice they deserved.
There will be a post-Trump era, but we have no idea what it will look like. What is clear is that calls for accountability are already accumulating — for corruption, for intimidating federal judges, for using the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s political enemies, for obstructing congressional oversight, and for violating migrants’ due-process rights in his sweeping deportation campaign, among other alleged abuses. The question is not whether a reckoning will be demanded, but how it might be pursued.
Like West Germany in its formative years, America will face difficult choices: whom to punish, how they should be punished, and how to keep the coming reckoning from deepening fractures within the country rather than healing them.
The post What we get wrong about how Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Israel Warns Citizens in UAE to Keep Low Profile Amid Iranian Drone, Missile Strikes
Smoke billows from Zayed port after an Iranian attack, following United States and Israel strikes on Iran, in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, March 1, 2026. Picture taken with phone. Photo: REUTERS/Abdelhadi Ramahi
Israel’s National Security Council has urged Israelis in the United Arab Emirates to exercise extreme caution as Iran continues its campaign of drone and missile attacks across the country and broader Gulf region, warning that their safety could be directly at risk.
Jews and Israelis living in the UAE are being advised to avoid public events, synagogues, Israeli-linked businesses, and unnecessary gatherings, including at airports, unless holding a valid flight ticket.
Israeli authorities also instructed employees of companies linked to Israel to stay away from offices and facilities for their own safety.
As flights to and from the UAE remain unpredictable, travelers are strongly advised to avoid itineraries with layovers in the country.
The Israeli government confirmed that supplementary flights bringing Israelis home from the UAE are expected to conclude by Sunday, March 15.
As the war escalates, Iran is continuing to attack neighboring countries and regional interests of the US and Israel, launching waves of drones and missiles that have struck Gulf states, hit critical infrastructure, and forced heightened security measures across the Middle East.
While the US-Israeli campaign has destroyed much of Iran’s military capabilities, thereby reducing their rate of missile fire, launches are still occurring.
Iran has launched more than 1,800 drones and missiles at the UAE since the war began two weeks ago, the latter’s defense ministry said on Friday. While most of the projectiles have been stopped by interceptors and other defensive measures, six people have been killed and 141 have been injured, in addition to significant damage.
In an interview on Friday, UAE Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh urged Iran to cease its attacks on neighboring countries if it seeks a negotiated end to the conflict.
“Ultimately, it will be a diplomatic solution, but there needs to be that tipping point moment, and I think that [US President Donald Trump] will lead us all to that moment in his time,” Nusseibeh said.
“It is difficult to talk about mediation when under attack … Mediation can only happen when the guns go silent,” she continued.
Nusseibeh also expressed that the region was shocked by Iran’s “egregious, illegal, and unlawful attacks” on Gulf nations and Jordan.
According to her, Iranian officials gave no warning that the UAE would be targeted during talks in Tehran two weeks earlier, making the attacks “so shocking and so egregious.”
Iran claims its strikes target the US military presence across the Middle East — including bases in the UAE, Gulf states, Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey — framing them as retaliation for American actions in the region.
However, Iranian drones and missiles have struck key infrastructure, including Dubai Airport, major hotels, and the UAE’s financial hub, sending shockwaves through the region and triggering heightened security alerts across neighboring countries.
The UAE’s top diplomat warned that restoring relations with Iran to their pre‑war status would be nearly impossible, pointing to “the destruction and the chaos that Iran has caused in the region,” as evidence of the deepening regional crisis.
Uncategorized
Temple Israel was my home — and what I learned there can help us get through this difficult moment
Temple Israel has long been a staple of the Detroit Jewish community — and in many ways, it has been a cornerstone of my own life. My connection to that synagogue stretches back to my earliest musical memories.
My first voice teacher, in 8th grade, was the wife of Temple Israel’s cantor, Neil Michaels. As a teenager, I sang in their choir, the Teen T’filah Team, where I was first exposed to the music of the Reform movement and where I first experienced the use of instrumentation in services. It was there that I first learned the song Kehilah Kedoshah by Dan Nichols, a piece I now frequently sing with our own East End Temple choir. As a high school student, I even sang alongside the cantors there during High Holiday services. Throughout childhood I remained close with all three of Rabbi Paul Yedwab’s children, as we attended school together, were in theatre together, and travelled to Israel together.
Temple Israel is where my mother studied for her adult bat mitzvah which was officiated by Rabbi Harold Loss. And it was Temple Israel that took me on my first and second trips to Israel — experiences that profoundly changed the trajectory of my life, deepening and reframing my relationship with Judaism, and ultimately inspiring me to devote my life to the Jewish people. I still vividly remember our 2010 Teen Mission to Israel, led by Rabbi Josh Bennett. On that trip, I realized something transformative: that clergy could be more than just symbolic exemplars of a community, but also fun, adventurous, relatable, deeply present in the lives of young people, and powerful influences on their willingness to engage in Jewish life.
That trip had an unquantifiable impact on me. It was on that drive home from the airport that I decided Judaism needed to once again become a more central part of my life. Two weeks later, for my senior year of high school, I made what felt at the time like a radical decision: I transferred from West Bloomfield High School to the Jewish Academy of Metropolitan Detroit (now the Frankel Jewish Academy).
During that year, I began seriously exploring whether I might pursue a career in the cantorate. I arranged an off-campus internship that allowed me to compare and contrast the life and role of the cantor in both the Conservative and Reform movements. Once a week, I studied privately with Cantor Meir Finkelstein at my family’s Conservative congregation, Shaarey Zedek, and another day each week, I studied with Cantor Michael Smolash at Temple Israel. Aside from my internship, my favorite class that year was a course called Denominational Differences, co-taught by rabbis from the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements — including two of my own beloved rabbis, Aaron Starr (Shaarey Zedek) and Josh Bennett (Temple Israel). In fact, that very subject eventually became the topic of my master’s thesis in cantorial school.
Needless to say, it is unlikely that I would be standing here today as your cantor were it not for the profound influence that the Metro Detroit Jewish community—and Temple Israel in particular—had on me throughout my childhood.
It is for this reason that yesterday’s news struck me so deeply. Learning of antisemitic attacks in the news is always painful and disturbing. Yet, as the frequency of these attacks across the globe becomes evermore pervasive, it’s difficult not to become slightly jaded or emotionally hardened — a natural coping mechanism to deal with ongoing trauma. People are not meant to live in a state of perpetual anxiety and hypervigilance.
But yesterday’s attack on Temple Israel shook me to my core. It is impossible not to experience antisemitism differently when it touches your own community. Realizing that one of my childhood synagogues was the target of a terrorist attack feels surreal. We know intellectually that terrible things happen in the world — but we rarely expect them to happen to us. We must, therefore, remain forever mindful that tragedy is always personal to someone.
Even amid this frightening event, I am profoundly grateful for the brave security personnel at Temple Israel — especially their director of security, Danny — who quite literally put his life on the line to protect everyone inside the building, including the 106 preschool children and teachers who were in class at the time. We pray for the swift and complete physical and emotional healing of those officers, and we hold them in our hearts. It is truly miraculous that no civilians were injured during this attack. And the outpouring of support from the broader Metro Detroit community has been extraordinary — especially from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors who did not hesitate to help in our time of need.
We are particularly grateful to the Chaldean (Iraqi-Christian) community who opened their homes and businesses to shelter those fleeing the scene. The Chaldean-owned Shenandoah country club, museum, and cultural center across the street immediately welcomed and protected those seeking refuge. The fact that Shenandoah — the largest Chaldean community center in the United States — stands directly across the street from Temple Israel — the largest Reform synagogue in the United States — is no coincidence. It reflects the deep personal and communal ties between our communities.
When I was a student there, West Bloomfield High School was comprised of roughly one-third Jewish and one-fifth Chaldean students. Our communities shared classrooms, neighborhoods, friendships — and often cultural similarities. Both Jews and Chaldeans are Middle Eastern peoples whose identities weave together religion, culture, and ancestry. Both communities carry histories shaped by persecution and resilience. Both place profound emphasis on family, education, and tradition. In fact, back home I became somewhat known as the Chaldean community’s Jewish wedding singer, singing at numerous Chaldean churches as the bride walked down the aisle.
In moments like this, we see those shared bonds revealed in the most powerful of ways. I have no doubt that from this tragic incident something meaningful will emerge: our communities will grow stronger, more resilient, more deeply connected, and even more outspokenly proud of our identities. Hatred seeks to isolate and intimidate, but solidarity, courage, and compassion remind us that we are never alone. When neighbors protect neighbors, when communities stand together in the face of fear, we transform even the darkest moments into opportunities for unity, strength and hope.
Olivia Brodsky is the cantor and co-clergy of East End Temple in Manhattan.
The post Temple Israel was my home — and what I learned there can help us get through this difficult moment appeared first on The Forward.