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Joseph Borgen was beaten in the streets while wearing a kippah. Now, he’s fighting in the NYC court system
(New York Jewish Week) — Before Joseph Borgen was beaten in the street nearly two years ago, on the way to a pro-Israel rally, he enjoyed playing basketball after returning home to the Upper East Side from his day job as an accountant.
In the time since Borgen, now 30, was attacked, that hasn’t been possible. The incident — in which five men shouting antisemitic slurs punched, kicked, pepper-sprayed and beat Borgen with crutches — left him needing surgery on his wrist. Only recently has he started going back to the gym.
“It’s something that is still lingering and I’d love to put it in my rearview,” Borgen, who is the eldest of five siblings, told the New York Jewish Week. “It doesn’t just only affect me. My little brother was seeing me on the news. He’s still a kid. We’re very close.”
The attack on Borgen drew national attention, and came amid a string of antisemitic assaults in the United States surrounding the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Now, Borgen is caught in a conflict of a different kind, one that illustrates the long tail of hate crimes that have faded from public consciousness. He doesn’t want the beating to define him, but finds that its after-effects have festered — and that a controversy over the ensuing trial of his alleged attackers has spurred him to become a passionate, if ambivalent, advocate against antisemitism.
“There is some value and good in speaking about what happened and just getting the message out there,” Borgen said. “But it’s not something I want to harp on.”
Joey Borgen, victim of a violent antisemitic attack last yr which took place few blocks from Times Square, said “The attack on me was no isolated incident. Pittsburgh to Poway to across the river in NJ— violent, deadly antisemtism is increasing to record levels”#ShineALight pic.twitter.com/4x29t9Pzi2
— JCRC of New York (@JCRCNY) November 29, 2021
Borgen was walking to a pro-Israel rally when he was attacked in the street in midtown Manhattan on May 20, 2021 — the same day Hamas and Israel announced a ceasefire after 11 days of conflict. A blurry video of the attack that circulated on social media showed a small crowd of men surrounding Borgen, kicking him and beating him with sticks. A photo of Borgen from later that night shows Borgen with a puffy red face, and wearing a neck brace.
“I was just wearing a kippah, listening to music, just minding my own business — and it all just erupted,” Borgen said, recalling the incident. “Before I can even really react or do anything, there’s a group of individuals surrounding me. I didn’t have the time to process what was going on.”
Borgen is still facing those who have been accused of attacking him — but that confrontation has moved to the courts. The lead perpetrator, Waseem Awawdeh, was charged with hate crime assault, along with a list of other charges. The case is still in process, and the next hearing is on April 20.
“I can’t even tell you how hard personally I’ve been fighting for this,” Borgen told the New York Jewish Week. “If there’s no accountability or consequences of what took place, what happened to me is going to happen to someone else.”
Borgen is currently worried that Awawdeh will go to prison for a small fraction of the maximum sentence he faces, which, according to Borgen’s attorney, is 15 years. That concern stems from reports in the New York Post and New York Sun that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg offered Awawdeh a six-month plea deal.
Those reports have sparked a chorus of criticism, as well as a letter to Bragg by nearly two dozen groups lobbying against the deal. The signatories were a mix of right-wing, pro-Israel and Orthodox groups, including the Rabbinical Council of America, an association for Orthodox rabbis; the Zionist Organization of America, a right-wing organization; and Americans Against Antisemitism, a group founded by former New York State Assemblymember Dov Hikind, who represented a Brooklyn district.
“Failing to impose severe consequences here would send the dangerous and unacceptable message that Jews can be brutally attacked with impunity,” said the letter, which was sent earlier this month.
Hikind told the New York Jewish Week that he wants more Jews to vocally support Borgen. “We need to fill the courtroom,” Hikind said. “Unfortunately, we’re just not there. The community needs to come out.”
The six-month deal, however, seems like far from a sure thing. Awawdeh’s lawyer, Peter Marc Frankel, confirmed the deal to the Post in January, as did prosecutors on the case. But speaking to the New York Jewish Week on Monday, Frankel said he was unsure if the deal would come to fruition.
“I don’t know if it’s going to happen, frankly,” Frankel said. “It’s unclear at this point. I don’t know if it’s going to be a six-month deal, but I would not expect a shorter deal, certainly.”
The deal has not yet been openly discussed in court, and Borgen’s lawyer, Ross Pearlson, who is representing his client pro-bono on behalf of the Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Jewish Week that “it’s not clear” if the six-month deal will hold.
“I’m unaware of any offers being made,” Pearlson said. “I believe that a year would be more appropriate. Six months to me still seems a little light considering the mob violence and the damage that was done to [Borgen].”
Bragg’s office declined to comment on the deal. The ADL likewise did not respond to requests for comment on the case.
Shortly after the attack, in 2021, a prosecutor on the case said that Awawdeh had told one of his jailers, “If I could do it again, I would do it again,” according to the Post. But Frankel told the New York Jewish Week that “that quote was taken completely out of context” and that Awawdeh has offered to meet and apologize to Borgen. He also met with the prosecutors to explain how remorseful he felt.
“[Awawdeh’s] behavior was the result of bad impulse control and a bad reaction to a bad situation, rather than an effort to try to seek someone out who is Jewish to commit a hate crime,” Frankel said.
Pearlson added that Borgen “has been traumatized by this event.”
“He’s very emotional when I speak to him about it,” Pearlson said. “He gets agitated for each one of these court appearances. When we talk about the case, he’s passionate about it.”
There are now five defendants in the case, including Awawdeh, and the D.A.’s office is treating them differently based on their alleged respective roles in the beating.
“Justice is not one size fits all,” Pearlson said. “It doesn’t move quickly, but in this case, it’s not the D.A.’s office delaying things or dragging its heels. There’s going to be some element of justice done.”
The fact that Borgen’s case is being prosecuted at all puts it in the minority of hate crimes complaints in Manhattan. According to NYPD statistics, police precincts in the borough received 241 hate crime complaints in 2022, and made 118 arrests based on those complaints.
Bragg’s office told the New York Jewish Week that 92 hate crimes were prosecuted in Manhattan last year. His office currently has 20 open hate crime cases related to antisemitism for this year. A report last year in The City, a local publication, found that most hate crimes charges are dropped before any convictions take place.
Although Borgen remains involved in the case, and has spoken about his experience publicly, he suggested that it was still hard to think about.
“Some people have said, ‘God only put you through this because you can handle it,’” said Borgen, who is modern Orthodox and puts on tefillin daily. “But if I start to think about it in those terms, I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to let it factor into my views on God and spirituality because if I did, it might make me start to question and wonder about things. I don’t want to go down that road.”
On March 9, Borgen appeared in court, sitting in the same room as his alleged attackers. While he could not comment on the specifics of the hearing, not wanting to impact court proceedings, he said that “it sucks to be in the same room as individuals who could have killed me.”
“I don’t like going to court,” Borgen said. “I do it because when I’m there with other people, a large group of Jewish individuals, it sends a message that we’re not lying down and taking this.”
—
The post Joseph Borgen was beaten in the streets while wearing a kippah. Now, he’s fighting in the NYC court system appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In her inspired and inspiring history of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple has found her anti-Zionist heroes for our time
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World, 453 pages, $32
The week of Passover, north Brooklyn bus riders found something unusual at several bus shelters. Swapped out for paid ads were quotes including one translated from a 1938 essay in Tsukunft, a Yiddish literary monthly once published by the Forward Association.
“If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine,” it read, “its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?”
There are pithier anti-Zionist slogans graffitied in Brooklyn, but this quote was from Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a staunchly anti-Zionist socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897 that became the most influential political party among prewar Eastern European Jews.
The bus shelter takeover was part of a guerrilla ad campaign for Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, a new book by the artist, activist and writer Molly Crabapple. The campaign, which started the same week the Justice Department sued Harvard University, accusing it of tolerating antisemitism by failing to crack down on anti-Zionist student protesters, also included wheatpasted posters of a model in fishnets holding Crabapple’s book.
The Trump administration and leading American Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee argue that opposing Zionism, defined as Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, is antisemitic; Crabapple’s response is a 400-page Jewish history lesson.
Before World War II, most Jews were not Zionists. Many Orthodox communities felt that forming a Jewish state was heresy, others thought the mass migration of 9 million Jews from a hostile Europe was impractical. The Bund’s opposition to Zionism was not religious or pragmatic; it was ideological. Bundists argued that the future of Jews was linked to all workers, and they should stay and fight repression in Europe, not leave. They called this form of solidarity doikayt, Yiddish for here-ness, as opposed to Zionism’s there-ness.
Crabapple places the Bund, initially an outlawed group in Tsarist Russia, at the center of both the failed 1905 and successful 1917 revolutions. In interwar Poland, as a legal party, it became the most powerful Jewish political movement, even winning seats in municipal elections, and during the Holocaust, Bundists became ghetto fighters and partisans. But the Bund was purged by Stalin, who killed Erlich four years after his Tsukunft essay, and decimated by the Nazis. In postwar America, the Bund was mostly forgotten.
Crabapple, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and an Occupy Wall Street alumna, learned of the Bund through a watercolor by her great-grandfather the artist Sam Rothbort. The painting, set in the Belarusian shtetl of his youth, shows a young woman in a blue dress throwing a rock through a cottage window. The caption reads: “Itka, the Bundist.”
In her 2018 New York Review of Books essay “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” Crabapple recounts discovering that Rothbort’s activism in Tsarist Russia forced him to flee to New York in 1904.
Since the publication of her article, Crabapple spent six years learning Yiddish, visited the former centers of Eastern Europe Jewish life, and dug through obscure Yiddish socialist tomes to produce her book. During the same time, Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel responded by killing over 70,000 in Gaza in attacks which many, including the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have called a genocide. At the time of this writing, Israel is occupying southern Lebanon and along with the United States is at war with Iran. For the first time, Gallup polls show more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, and an increasing number of younger Jews have rejected Zionism outright and are rediscovering the Bund.
Crabapple’s book is written for this moment. More than translating Bundist theory from Yiddish, she puts it into the language of today’s left. When Julius Martov declared in 1894 “that Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, as a race and a class,” Crabapple explains that he was invoking what the modern-day scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “intersectionality” and was a form of “identity politics.”
To tell the Bund story, Crabapple focuses on a cast of characters including Erlich’s wife, the poet and activist Sophia Dubnow; the militant leader Bernard Goldstein; the famous ghetto smuggler Vladka Meed (nee Feigele Peltel); and her own great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. In some instances, she relies on memoirs; for Rothbort, she interprets the hundreds of paintings and sculptures in her great-aunt’s Brooklyn home and pulls on genealogical threads from her mother’s shoebox of family papers.
Crabapple, whose artwork is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Rubin Museum, and has posters currently on display at the Poster House, introduces each character with an ink drawing portrait. Her artwork tends to lay bare her political perspective. She renders Donald Trump grotesque, while her sketches of Bundists are more similar to her portraits that glorify leftist icons like Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of the United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.
When asked in 2020 on the progressive Jewish podcast Treyf if progressives were engaging with a “romanticized fantasy of the Bund,” she didn’t disagree. “There’s actually a great value to simplified and aesthetic symbols in politics,” she said. “The fantasy of the Bund that I see is a muscly Jewish guy in a newsboy cap saying ‘fuck the Zionists’ with one middle finger while the other hand punches a Nazi.”
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is not a caricature of the Bund, nor a work of fan fiction; it’s a deeply researched portrait, but at its core lies this romantic vision. The Bund ran soup kitchens, sports programs and day camps, and promoted the Yiddish language, but Crabapple is most attracted to their street-fighting militancy. And her narrative can be one-sided. The Erlich quote in the book and on the bus shelter was part of a public debate with his father-in-law, the historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow’s response goes untold.
But there are plenty of academic texts that dissect 90-year-old political debates. Crabapple’s book is different, and better for it. Here Where We Live Is Our Country reads like an epic novel with the Bundists as its tragic heroes.
Crabapple, as narrator, relates her experiences protesting at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment, canvassing housing projects with the DSA, reporting from the West Bank and Gaza, and traveling through war-torn Ukraine. The personal interjections remind the reader that this is not a dispassionate history. Naomi Klein’s blurb praises the book as “a portal to an irresistible, lost world,” but Crabapple’s goal is not to write an elegy. She calls the Bund’s history a “candle to illuminate the tumultuous present” and hopes her book “serves as a guide to our urgent moment.” She decouples Zionism from Jewishness and shows that anti-Zionism alone is not antisemitic, but she leaves largely unresolved the question of what the Bund’s example demands of us today.
The Bund organized eastern European Jewish workers who lacked basic civil rights. Today’s challenge is less about Jewish empowerment, than it is about how Jews wield power, vis-a-vis the state of Israel and its military. In the book, however, Israel barely appears as an actual place where millions of Jews and Palestinians live. Instead, Israel is seen through the prism of its founding ideology, Zionism — one which pre-war Bundists argued adopted the worst quality of European ethno-nationalism.
As the Erlich quote argues, a Jewish state in Israel was destined to repeat endless cycles of violence and tribalism. In this view, the socialist kibbutzes that seduced leftists like a young Bernie Sanders or the overtures of peace and coexistence by Liberal Zionists like Yitzhak Rabin, are all illusions. For Crabapple, the inescapable reality of Zionism is instead the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, the violent settlers, and increasingly brutal wars and occupation.
The antidote is the Bundists’ concept of solidarity — where Jews join with the workers of the world but, unlike in Communism, hold on to their Jewish identity. One of the quotes Crabapple returns to several times is from the Socialist Congressman and Bundist ally Meyer London in 1905, where he inverts the story of Exodus: “Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives for liberty? They pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”
The quote, like Crabapple’s book, is poetic and noble. It goes against everything I learned in Hebrew School, yet somehow reflects Jewish values in its call to be empathetic to the oppressed, because we “were once a stranger in a strange land.”
Reflecting on a 1938 Erlich speech about the rise of Nazism, where he calls on Polish Jews to stand in solidarity with the same people who had carried out pogroms across their country, Crabapple writes: “This was it. There was only Egypt, the Bund knew, and they were stuck with the Egyptians. They were people first, not Jews or goys.” It is a beautiful and heartbreaking line, knowing what came next.
This tragic solidarity is presented as a point of inspiration, but how? The 2023 Jewish Voices for Peace cease-fire protest that filled Grand Central Terminal is offered as an example of Bundist-like solidarity in action, but Crabapple, who has supported a cultural boycott of Israel, stops short of prescribing what this anti-Zionism should mean today.
Vast numbers of Jews, including Bundists, did leave Egypt and cross into Israel — not not because of ideology or religion, but because of history. American labor leader David Dubinsky, who is featured in the book, was exiled to Siberia by the Tsar and escaped to New York, where he co-founded the Jewish Labor Committee in 1934, providing Bundists critical support during the Holocaust.
In his memoirs, Dubinsky recalls telling David Ben-Gurion after the war, “even though I am sympathetic to the creation of Israel, I am not a Zionist.” He then spent decades steering American labor to support Israel financially and politically.
Crabapple also includes Vladka Meed, the celebrated ghetto smuggler, drawing on her memoir Both Sides of the Wall, the proceeds of whose English edition were donated to the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, where Meed led groups of Americans on educational trips.
The historian David Slucki in his 2012 book, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, finds that over time the Bund came to terms with the state of Israel; the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee accepted it as an important Jewish community, but not the sole political and cultural center, and eventually advocated a two-state solution.
It’s hard to imagine the Bund simply “Standing with Israel” today. But nearly half of Americans under 30 describe Hamas as a militant resistance group rather than a terrorist organization, and anti-Zionism has been taken up by far right antisemites. Crabapple doesn’t spell out what the Bundist response would be today; she leaves that to the reader. What she does is resurrect a buried political tradition in a way her Bundist heroes would appreciate: not just in book form, but in the streets for everyday Brooklyn bus riders.
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Long Island town ordered to pay $19M after blocking Chabad synagogue construction
(JTA) — After nearly two decades of legal sparring, a town on Long Island has been ordered to pay a local Chabad center $19 million, settling claims that officials unlawfully blocked the construction of a synagogue on its rabbi’s property.
Rabbi Aaron Konikov and Lubavitch of Old Westbury sued the Village of Old Westbury in 2008, after the village passed a law in 2001 governing places of worship as Konikov sought to build a synagogue on his property.
Local officials enacted the law two years after Konikov planned a ceremony to announce a new building on the land where he already operates a synagogue. They decreed that houses of worship could be built only on plots of 12 acres or more. Konikov owns a 9-acre plot.
In October, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown ruled that the 2001 ordinance “unconstitutionally discriminates against the free exercise of religion and is therefore facially invalid.”
Old Westbury agreed to pay the plaintiffs in the suit $19 million as part of a consent decree, which was signed by Brown on March 18, Newsday reported this week.
“This consent decree may not be modified, changed or amended except in writing signed by each of the parties approved by the court,” Brown wrote. “Each party participated fully in the negotiation and drafting of the terms of this decree, and any ambiguity shall not be construed against any party.”
Kornikov did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. But he may soon be switching into construction mode for his long hoped-for synagogue, for which preliminary plans show a 20,875-square-foot building and an adjacent parking lot.
The $19 million payment will be made by the village’s insurance providers, and Lubavitch of Old Westbury has until Jan. 15, 2027, to apply for a special-use permit from the village to build a synagogue, according to Newsday.
The ruling marks a notable victory for emissaries of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who have often been met with legal challenges when establishing centers. Last July, the Village of Atlantic Beach in New York agreed to pay Chabad of the Beaches $950,000 to settle a legal battle over the construction of a new community center.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Long Island town ordered to pay $19M after blocking Chabad synagogue construction appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran claims synagogue in Tehran was ‘completely destroyed’ by US-Israeli strike
(JTA) — Iranian state media claimed on Tuesday that a synagogue in Tehran was “completely destroyed” by a U.S.-Israeli strike.
The claim was impossible to verify. Footage of the alleged attack on the Rafi-Niya Synagogue posted online showed open Hebrew prayer books scattered among the rubble of a building.
The synagogue was damaged when a nearby residential building in Tehran was attacked, according to Iranian news agencies. The Rafi-Niya Synagogue is located near Palestine Square, an epicenter of the Iranian regime’s anti-Israel propaganda.
The United States and Israel have been bombing sites in Tehran for more than a month since launching a war on the Islamic Republic regime. Israel emphasized that it does not target religious sites.
Homayoun Sameyah Najafabadi, the only Jewish representative in Iran’s parliament, condemned the attack in a video published by Iran’s official IRIB News outlet.
“The Zionist regime showed no mercy towards this community during the Jewish holidays and attacked one of our ancient and holy synagogues,” Najafabadi said. “Unfortunately, during this attack, the synagogue building was completely destroyed, and Torah scrolls remain under the rubble.”
About 8,000 Jews live in Iran and worship in dozens of synagogues. The war has exacerbated their delicate position, as they are technically granted freedom of religion but face peril if they demonstrate any connection to Israel or dissent against their government. Hundreds of Iranian Jews who have applied for refugee status because of religious persecution are trapped in the country after the United States halted refugee admissions.
The alleged attack comes one day after the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted footage of an undetonated missile on a street, writing that an “Iranian regime missile struck next to a mosque in Israel.”
“A regime that targets civilians and sacred spaces of all religions has no red lines,” the ministry wrote in a post on X. “Nothing is off limits for them.”
On Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister’s office issued a statement about the alleged damage to the Rafi-Niya synagogue. “Iran is firing missiles at civilians, Israel is striking terror infrastructure,” it said. “Missiles on civilians versus precision strikes on terror targets. That’s the difference.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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