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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.”
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The latest victim of the culture war over Israel is a leftwing, lapsed Catholic Bible scholar
The flames of cultural boycott of all things Israeli, Zionist and/or Jewish continue to spread across the European continent.
Yesterday, leftwing Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was prevented from serving on the jury at next month’s international film festival in Marseilles. Though Lapid has loudly denounced the “genocide” in Gaza, his crime — apart from being an Israeli who nevertheless lives and works in France — was that 10% of his most recent film Oui was financed by an Israeli source. (The irony is that the European Union, which Lapid first approached for the financing, refused on the grounds that the film was too anti-Israeli.)
Today, though, the latest victim is neither Israeli nor Jewish. Instead, he is a 76-year-old lapsed Catholic and equally lapsed leftwing extremist who also happens to be one of Italy’s most revered novelists, columnists and translators: Erri De Luca. Once again, it is not just hypocrisy that abounds in this affair, but also irony.
As a student during the anni di piombo, or “years of lead” — the grim period, stretching from the mid-1960s to late-1970s, when Italy was convulsed by political and social turmoil — De Luca became a leading figure in Lotta Continua, one of the militant ultra-leftwing groups. Upon quitting the movement, De Luca also quit the public scene, taking a series of blue-collar jobs, whether as plasterer or construction worker.
By the time De Luca reached his 40s, he also took to writing and has amassed an oeuvre of several dozen books that range across genres and have been translated into several languages; remarkably, he also taught himself ancient Hebrew in the 1980s, while working with a Catholic charity in Africa. It was there that De Luca began to read the one book he found in his room, a copy of the Bible. Fascinated, he acquired three different Hebrew-Italian dictionaries and began to translate the texts on his own. Forty years later, he continues this labor of love, recently publishing his own interpretation of Genesis.
Alessandro Carrera — a friend and colleague who is also a wildly prolific and prominent writer in Italy — told me that De Luca’s approach to the Hebrew Bible “follows Walter Benjamin’s suggestion to translate the Bible as literally as possible, yet without De Luca knowing Benjamin’s essay on translation.” (When I asked Alessandro how he knew this, he replied “I know that because I asked him.”) But why his fascination with the Bible? De Luca told an interviewer for the French newspaper Libération that he wanted to grasp “this language which had taken upon itself the weight of the first monotheistic religion.”
This attachment to the Bible, as unwavering as it is unideological, has had perverse and predictable consequences in our current era of sheer thoughtlessness. Last month, De Luca gave a long interview in Rome to Omer Lachmanovtich, the editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom. The occasion was his upcoming appearance at the International Writers’ Festival in Jerusalem. Over the course of the conversation, De Luca addressed the war in Gaza and the wasteland wrought by the Israeli military. Yet he refused to describe it as genocide. “Applying it to the war in Gaza is a historical and verbal distortion,” De Luca insisted. “What took place in Gaza is a brutal, modern war, in which the number of civilian casualties is enormous and horrifying because when fighting takes place inside a dense urban space, among schools and hospitals, the population will always pay the highest price.”
Of course, genocide scholars like Omer Bartov disagree, insisting the term is historically, semantically, and legally appropriate. Other critics take issue with De Luca’s understanding of the term “Zionist.” It is difficult to argue with his observation that “in Italy, and in large parts of the West today, ‘Zionist’ is a curse and an insult thrown at you to mark the boundaries of what is beyond the pale.” But it is far easier to take exception to De Luca’s definition of Zionism as “the simplest and most basic recognition of the Jews’ right to a national home, to existential and necessary defense.” This claim, the Italian writer Cinzia Sciuto remarked, suggests that De Luca is referring “to a reality, a Zionism of the kibbutz, that disappeared decades ago.”
Nevertheless, De Luca holds fast to his conviction, declaring that “I will say it out loud, and I do not care about the price.” The price appears to be a creeping banishment from Italy’s cultural scene. Earlier this month, De Luca’s invitation to speak at a literary festival in Salerno this summer was withdrawn by its directors. My friend Alessandro, who criticized this decision, suggested the festival directors feared a boycott by other writers or disturbances in the audience. “I am quite sure that a lot of people were ready to boo him and maybe force him to leave the stage,” he added, “but I don’t think that anything worse was going to happen.”
No doubt. But perhaps something worse in a different register is happening — namely, losing sight of what De Luca insists upon seeing: the humanity of our fellow men and women. Reflecting on a recent two-week experience on a Médecins Sans Frontières ship darting from one raft to another, all sagging under the weight of refugees desperate for new lives, De Luca writes that the experience had branded him with a single image: “a rope ladder trolling in the void.”
It was on the final step of this ladder that, “one by one, I saw faces pop up, the people climbing from the edge of the abyss to their salvation. Those hundreds of faces: I don’t have the force to hold them back. I’ve simply had the absurd privilege of seeing them. From them I have left only the rope ladder they climbed, half-naked and shoeless, up its wooden rungs.” This experience taught De Luca, who is also a mountain climber, a deeper meaning of the verb “to climb,” one that no peak had ever taught him. It is this way of seeing the world that is paying an even steeper price than a writer’s banishment from a literary conference.
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Antisemitic incidents in Germany remained elevated in 2025, fueled by rise-in far-right cases
(JTA) — BERLIN — The number of annual antisemitic incidents in Germany remains at a high, with right-wing extremism surging, according to a report issued Wednesday by the country’s leading antisemitism watchdog.
An average of 24 antisemitic incidents per day were reported in Germany in 2025, totaling 8,725, about the same as in 2024, according to the report from the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, a nonprofit that is known by its German acronym RIAS. The total has been consistently high since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, according to the group.
“These are not statistical outliers; it is the grim reality in Germany,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at a press conference in Berlin announcing the annual tally.
The numbers reflect a concrete impact on Jews in Germany, said RIAS executive director Benjamin Steinitz, who coauthored the report with researcher Bianca Loy. They urged continued funding for programs to report incidents and additional help for victims.
Many documented cases occurred in everyday settings, RIAS reported: In Kehl, four members of the Jewish community were insulted and spat on outside a Jewish prayer room. In Hesse, a rabbi was shoved in a supermarket in front of his children and had his cell phone snatched from him. According to RIAS, the victims in these incidents were blamed for Israeli actions.
But it was incidents with a right-wing extremist background that shot up most, amounting to 807, up from 562 in 2024 – the highest figure since nationwide surveys began in 2020. They outnumbered incidents of a left-wing imperialist (501) and Islamist extremist (166) background.
Right-wing incidents included conspiracy theories, glorification of the Nazi regime, and calls for a repeat of the Holocaust. The incidents also have become more openly violent, researchers said.
For example, a right-wing extremist group in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania shouted “Jews to the wall” on a bus, mocked the Holocaust and threatened refugees as well as passengers who intervened.
The release of the 2025 antisemitism tally came the same day as a new poll finding a best-ever standing among voters for the far-right party Alternative for Germany. The party’s rhetoric, which includes nativism and calling to move on from the shadow of the Holocaust, has ignited allegations of antisemitism from leading Jewish voices in Germany, even as the party and its defenders say its policies are ideal to keep Jews safe.
The RIAS report found that the internet continued to be a major platform for antisemitism: More than a quarter of all antisemitic incidents (2,314 incidents, or 27%) occurred online, including nearly 43% of documented threats, including death threats. It cited as an example messages received by a Jewish woman that included an image of a Zyklon B canister with the comment “Still in stock.” Zyklon B was the chemical the Nazis used to asphyxiate victims in gas chambers.
Four cases of extreme violence were reported, including a knife attack in February 2025 at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The victim, who was Spanish, was saved by an emergency doctor. The perpetrator was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March.
In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, Schuster said Jewish community members in major cities have told him they worry “about appearing in public as visibly Jewish — for instance, by wearing a kippah or a Star of David as jewelry.” He said the concern is not as acute in less populous areas.
RIAS — which subscribes to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — attributes more than two-thirds of the incidents (68%, or 5,916 cases) last year to Israel-related antisemitism.
Anti-Israel gatherings continued to be major hubs for antisemitic incidents, though the total number of such gatherings dropped slightly to 1,210 (from 1,358 the previous year), according to the report. There was also a drop in incidents at Islamic/Islamist gatherings, to 43 in 2025, down from 58 in 2024.
On the other hand, the number of incidents at gatherings had risen within left-wing extremist circles, from 131 in 2024 to 214 last year; and in the right-wing extremist camp, 96 incidents at gatherings were reported — nearly double that of 2024.
RIAS has rejected criticism by Diaspora Alliance, an international group that addresses antisemitism from a progressive stance, that its data overemphasizes Israel-related antisemitism and underestimates far-right incidents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
The poll posted by writer Emily May on X asked: “Married women, have you ever said yes to sex because you didn’t want to deal with his moodiness if you said no?”
Over 5,000 people responded. The majority — 72% — were men, despite the fact that the question was directed at married women. Manosphere influencers, including self-proclaimed misogynist and antisemite Andrew Tate, jumped in to use the post as a proof that women use sex to manipulate men, and generally denigrate any woman who turns a man down. Gendered ideas of marriage and sexual drive — that men need sex physically, that women want to “trap” men into marriage — percolate constantly in manosphere and incel circles, and May’s posts sent the internet into a predictable tizzy.
The question of sex within marriage — how often to have it, whether it requires consent, and whether women owe it to their husbands — has been a matter of debate for, arguably, centuries. Marital rape wasn’t outlawed in all 50 states until 1993. The U.S. imported British common law, in which, as 17th century English jurist Matthew Hale put it, a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape” because marriage means that “the wife hath given up herself in this kind to her husband which she cannot retract.” In short, a wife cannot turn down her husband.
Marital rape is illegal in the U.S. in the contemporary era, but the presumptions that women owe their husband sex have continued. And undergirding all of these assumptions in many of the discussions is a Christian idea of marriage and sex.
In Christian subreddits, people discuss the idea that, in marriage, the two become one flesh, and the women must submit to their husbands, concluding that this means the woman cannot refuse the man as her body belongs to him. They cite First Corinthians 7:4-5, which says a couple cannot “deprive” the other except by mutual agreement to abstain for prayer, and that the “wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband.”
It says the same of the husband’s body, though few commenters note this line. But in Judaism, this is in fact the main focus. While both religions agree that sex is a fundamental part of marriage, the emphasis in Judaism is not that the wife owes it to her husband. Instead, it’s that a husband owes it to his wife. Within limits.
The Talmud is very specific on those limits. First of all, there are the menstrual purity laws, which forbid sex during menstruation as well as for seven days after the bleeding has stopped, which means that for about two weeks out of the month, observant couples are forbidden from having sex.
More to the point of the current debate, the Talmud — in the Ketubot tractate, dealing with the laws of marriage — also speaks very explicitly to the realities of life: That people get tired, exhausted and aren’t in the mood for intimacy. Still, it says, there are limits on the excuses. And these relate to exactly how taxing one’s job and daily duties are.
The rules are as follows: A man who is unemployed must offer his wife sex every day, because there is nothing exhausting him. Workers or laborers must be available twice a week if they work in the city in which they live. Donkey drivers — e.g. those whose work requires traveling shorter distances — are obligated to offer once a week, while camel drivers, who must travel long distances, must return home and offer their wives sex at least once a month. Sailors must return home to do the same every six months. And students of the Torah may leave home to study for up to 30 days — but they must then spend a full month at home with their wife.
In each of these cases, the wife isn’t obligated to accept any offer of sex; in fact, the wife can give permission for her husband to be gone longer — perhaps to take a job in another city to support the family, which would result in less sex. But she can also demand he stay closer to home so he can fulfill his conjugal duties. Sex is her right, not her obligation.
Her pleasure is also the focus. Men are instructed to court their wives, not simply rush to sex — to learn from “the rooster, which first cajoles the hen and then mates with it.” In tractate Eruvim, a man is not only explicitly forbidden from having sex with his wife without her consent, but also from doing so in any way that causes her discomfort, emotional or physical — e.g. pushing for her consent or making her unhappy, or even having sex that isn’t pleasurable for her.
What is clear from all of the writing is that the presumption of the rabbis is that it is more likely that the man, for reasons of exhaustion or work or even another wife, might avoid having sex with a desiring woman. This isn’t to say that Jewish text is perfect in its conception of women; there are, of course, plenty of other problematic, less empowering ideas about women in Jewish text. A man has a right to divorce his wife, for example, for all kinds of reasons, including spoiling his dinner, while she cannot divorce him. Still, it’s fascinating that the Jewish approach to sex and gender turns the common gender expectations around sex in modern Western society upside-down.
Today, the dominant stereotypes presume men are horny and desirous at all times, and women are far less sexual. Those are not neutral ideas; just looking at the discourse raging online right now, it’s clear those presumptions drive a lot of misogynistic hate, like the idea that women would only use sex as a way to entrap men. People take these gendered beliefs about sex as though they’re unassailable truisms about the world.
But they’re clearly not; for millennia, Jewish culture has believed the opposite. The reality is nothing is so clearcut, and different people of any gender have different relationships to sex, and different libidos. The internet isn’t a great place for that kind of nuance, but maybe — just maybe — if people realized their conclusions aren’t as foundational, or as God-given, as they thought, they might reexamine their assumptions.
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