Uncategorized
NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa has a mixed record with Jews. Catch up on it here.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of New York City, is best known for founding the Guardian Angels — and he credits a Jewish group with inspiring the movement.
As a teenager going to high school in Crown Heights, a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, Sliwa says that he saw a group of men chasing out antisemitic gangs. That group was the Maccabees, founded by Rabbi Samuel Schrage to patrol the streets for crime in the 1960s.
“People leaving shul, running down Kingston towards Empire Boulevard, and these gangbangers were running for their lives,” Sliwa recalled in a 2021 interview with journalist Yitzi Weiner. “I said: ‘Wow, this really works! These guys are not coming back in here messing with the Lubavitchers!’”
That image remained with him until he started the Guardian Angels, a citizen patrol group on New York City subways and streets whose members wear a red beret, in 1979. It would become one of many stories about Jews in Sliwa’s public life, during which he has alternately talked about Jewish communities with admiration and disdain.
The radio host, amateur subway patroller and local celebrity is raising two Jewish sons, wearing his red beret as a kippah at their bar mitzvahs. (He and their mother, Melinda Katz, separated in 2014.) But he has also faced his share of controversies with Jewish communities, including accusations of antisemitism.
Sliwa is highly unlikely to become mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic city. Since incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out, he is now the lowest-polling candidate, trailing frontrunner Zohran Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo by a wide margin. Still, Sliwa has cast himself as a champion for Republicans in the outer boroughs and a sizable minority of disaffected, politically homeless New Yorkers — including Jews who don’t like their other options.
We are breaking down for you what Sliwa has actually said about Jews, antisemitism, Israel and the Gaza war.
Jewish security and antisemitism
Long before Sliwa’s foray into politics, he worked alongside Jewish patrols such as Shmira and Shomrim, whose unarmed volunteers respond to emergencies in Jewish neighborhoods and assist police. He talks proudly about the Guardian Angels’ efforts to defend Chabad-Lubavitch Jews during the anti-Jewish Crown Heights riots of 1991.
While Sliwa says he would bulk up the NYPD’s personnel as mayor, volunteer groups like these are central to his vision for security — especially in Jewish communities.
“I, unlike any of the candidates, have said Jews must protect themselves,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “If you depend strictly on Gentiles, history is replete with instances where you’re going to be horribly disappointed.” In another recent interview with the Queens Jewish Link, Sliwa said to Jews that he would not be “your Gentile mashiach,” using the Hebrew word for messiah.
The patrols that Sliwa views as key to public safety have been subjects of controversy over the years. In 2008, a 20-year-old Black man was beaten by a pair of Shmira patrollers. Another young Black man, Taj Patterson, was brutally attacked by a group of haredi Orthodox men that included members of Shomrim in 2013.
The Guardian Angels, meanwhile, have been criticized for fabricating stunts. In a 1992 interview, Sliwa admitted to manufacturing crimes and injuries for the group’s publicity.
New York City mayoral candidates Scott Stringer, Curtis Sliwa and Brad Lander attend a memorial event for seniors who died during the Covid pandemic in nursing homes, March 23, 2025, in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of the borough of Brooklyn. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
Sliwa told JTA that he wants to introduce students to understanding antisemitism at a young age. As a child himself, he described a fork in the road when he lost an academic award to a Jewish classmate. His uncle suggested the classmate had a deal with their Jewish teacher, but Sliwa’s father corrected him, saying, “‘Curtis, he studied a lot harder than you. Lesson? Study harder.’” Sliwa said this kind of correction should be formally implemented in schools.
“There is no curriculum that addresses the problem of antisemitism,” he said. “Me? I would do it in third and fourth grade.”
Israel and the Gaza war
Israel and its ongoing war in Gaza have loomed large over the mayoral race. Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and staunch criticism of Israel shook up New York City politics — and in response, his opponents have proffered the support for Israel that has long been tradition across both parties.
Sliwa talks about his visits to Israel as a thread that connects him to Jewish New Yorkers. During a trip there in 1998, he was offered free rides from bus drivers who mistook him for an Israeli paratrooper with his red beret, he told the Jewish News Syndicate. He applies his theory of Jewish-led security for Jews to Israel, telling The Jewish Press, “Jews have to organize among themselves. That’s why the State of Israel came about.”
He has criticized Mamdani’s views, saying the frontrunner has “no love in his heart for the State of Israel and for Israelis.” Like other candidates, he has rebuked Mamdani for declining to condemn the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada” during the primary. (Mamdani has since clarified he does not personally use the language and would “discourage” it because of interpretations that it could incite violence against Jews.)
Sliwa went a step further by extending his attacks to Mamdani’s Jewish supporters. “I would say the Jewish community must look internally,” he said to JNS. “Why are some of our children and grandchildren following this guy and giving him absolution and exemption when he is using the language of an antisemite?”
But Sliwa has also said that he is more focused on his “law and order” platform than foreign policy. In an interview with The Forward, he pointed out that Cuomo’s focus on antisemitism accusations against Mamdani failed during the Democratic primary, which Mamdani roundly won.
And he recently acknowledged the intensity of pro-Palestinian sentiment in New York City, citing a New York Times/Siena poll that found voters are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel. In an interview with City & State, he suggested that President Donald Trump could dampen Mamdani’s momentum by brokering peace in the Middle East.
“If he can bring peace to Gaza, he can definitely take one political plank away from Zohran Mamdani, who has used that effectively during the primary and will now use it in the general campaign,” said Sliwa.
Controversies
Sliwa has clashed with Jewish New Yorkers over the years. In a 2018 speech, he described Orthodox Jews as a drag on the tax system and warned suburban residents that they were trying to “take over your community.”
Curtis Sliwa, the Guardian Angels founder and now a New York mayoral candidate, responds in a video to accusations that remarks he made in 2018 were antisemitic, July 25, 2021. (Screenshot)
“We’re not talking about poor, impoverished, disabled people who need help. We’re talking about able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day and we subsidize them,” he said in a videotaped meeting in the Hudson Valley. “All they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow and who’s subsidizing that? We are.”
This speech resurfaced when Sliwa ran for mayor in 2021. He responded with a video in which he did not apologize or disavow his comments, but offered to meet with Orthodox leaders to “resolve our differences.”
“My two youngest sons have been raised Jewish. They need to read this? To say to themselves, my father is an antisemite? Come on, even my worst critics out there would recognize that’s a shanda,” he said in the video.
Despite his offense at being called an “antisemite,” Sliwa sparked backlash again at a 2024 event by saying that antisemitism was innate to “Gentiles.”
“It’s in our DNA,” he said at an event supporting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in Staten Island. “I also have to hold myself back sometimes. And I have two Jewish children.” He later told JTA that he “used the wrong term” in those remarks, meaning to say that antisemitism was often “fed into the minds” of non-Jews.
—
The post NYC mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa has a mixed record with Jews. Catch up on it here. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
The post PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mike Pence denounces alleged arson of Israeli flag in his Indiana hometown
(JTA) — Former Vice President Mike Pence has weighed in against antisemitism after officials in his Indiana town say a costly fire may have been caused by arson to an Israeli flag displayed on a local barn.
The alleged arson broke out early Friday morning, damaging a historic home in Zionsville, Indiana, where Pence lives, and causing an estimated $150,000 in damages, according to the Zionsville Police Department.
Zionsville Mayor John Stehr said during a press conference on Friday that officials believed the fire began when an individual set fire to an Israeli flag that had been displayed outside the building alongside an American flag. The town later announced that the FBI had joined the investigation and that officials were examining whether the arson “may have been motivated by bias” but said no determination had been made.
“Absolutely despicable,” Pence tweeted on Sunday. “There can be no tolerance in America for Antisemitism or political acts of violence, and it is heartbreaking to see in our adopted hometown of Zionsville, Indiana. We thank God no one was hurt and urge anyone with information to contact law enforcement.”
Pence has long cast himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, including after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and has also repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism in the conservative movement and beyond.
Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks also condemned the alleged arson in a post on X Saturday. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated. Not in Zionsville. Not in Indiana. Not anywhere,” Banks wrote. “Thank you to the federal, state, and local officials working to bring the perpetrators of this despicable arson attack to justice.”
On Sunday, the Jewish community in central Indiana hosted a rally condemning the alleged arson attack, chanting, “We will stand up,” according to local outlet Fox 59. While Zionsville does not have a large Jewish community of its own, other suburbs of Indianapolis have significant Jewish populations, and Zionsville is also the longtime home of a Reform movement summer camp, the Goldman Union Camp Institute, which is in session now.
“The founding fathers founded a country where we have the ability to resolve differences among each other; we don’t do it by firebombing homes,” rally organizer David Schiller told Fox 59. “It’s inexcusable and unacceptable.”
The Zionsville Police Department did not respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the status of the investigation on Monday.
The post Mike Pence denounces alleged arson of Israeli flag in his Indiana hometown appeared first on The Forward.
