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This Jewish New York City Council candidate has a prolific passion: serial sperm donation
(New York Jewish Week) — Jonathan David Rinaldi, 44, is a Republican who is running to represent New York’s District 24, which encompasses the Queens neighborhoods of Kew Gardens, Fresh Meadows, Briarwood and Jamaica. This week, he made headlines for protesting outside a motel in his district that, he claimed, was housing newly arrived migrants.
But last November, he gained local fame for a different reason. Rinaldi was featured in a post on Humans of New York, the viral social media project in which photographer Brandon Stanton posts portraits of New Yorkers he meets on the street, along with stories they relate in their own voices.
Rinaldi’s story was particularly eyebrow-raising: He said he had fathered at least 12 children over the course of two years through sperm donation — but not via sperm banks that pay donors, vet their health and limit their offspring. And he said he planned to keep going, in part because of his Jewish identity.
He said he was driven in part by his Jewish identity. “I explain to each [woman]: ‘This child will be born into a larger family. I have eighteen other children.’” Rinaldi said in the caption. “I’d like as many as God will give me. Why put your entire bloodline into one child when you can spread it out? Eighteen is a holy number in Judaism. And the next one is 36, so I’ll reassess then.”
In the Humans of New York post, Rinaldi detailed the process (“Fresh is better than frozen”) and said that he’s had sex with some of the women and wants to remain involved in their lives. “I’m what they call a ‘known donor,’” he said. “Everything is kinda handshake. I don’t charge the mothers. And they don’t expect any financial support.”
The post garnered a string of negative reactions from social media users. In response, Stanton wrote on Instagram that “stories from people you may not identify with, or even like, were a common part of HONY pre-pandemic. And will be again now that I’m back on the street.”
The post did not identify Rinaldi, but he confirmed to the New York Jewish Week over the phone that he was the person in the portrait and post. “I was interviewed once,” Rinaldi said. “It was taken out of context. I had a long conversation, a random conversation with somebody on the street.”
Rinaldi also confirmed that he donates his sperm — and has attempted to square that practice with Jewish tradition. He said that he has spoken with a rabbi to “try and figure out how to be as kosher as I possibly can and have as many children as the Bible commands,” and gave the name of a local Chabad rabbi. The rabbi declined to comment about Rinaldi but confirmed their relationship.
“It’s our responsibility as Jews blessed by God to have children,” said Rinaldi, who also has three children from a previous marriage. “Some of us are doing it extremely kosher, the way it’s supposed to be, you have a nice Jewish wife, you go to temple every day. For me, it didn’t work out that way.”
The Torah contains the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply,” which rabbis have traditionally interpreted as an imperative to have children. Rabbis have prohibited sperm donation, however, in part due to prohibitions on masturbation and on having children with an unknown father. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a leading 20th-century authority, wrote that it’s preferable for Jewish women who cannot use their husband’s sperm to use non-Jewish sperm for artificial insemination in order to avoid accidental incest in future generations.
Rinaldi said that he began donating sperm when the city was locked down due to the spread of COVID-19, and that he first donated to a friend. From there, he said, word spread of his donations. Rinaldi is what is called a “known donor,” or someone whose identity is known to the recipient and, potentially, their children. Known donors are legal in the United States, but serial sperm donation is discouraged by many countries, in large part because of the risk of biologically related offspring procreating together in the future. The Netherlands set up systems to curb a serial donor who fathered at least 100 children, while Israel barred an American Jewish man dubbed “the Sperminator” because of his extensive efforts to procreate from impregnating more women there. Ari Nagel’s own progeny tally neared 100 after a prolific pandemic, he revealed in 2021.
Rinaldi, too, said the pandemic had spurred his donations.
“At no point did I ever go to a sperm bank,” Rinaldi said. “At no point did I ever intend to do this. We were all at home, shut down. A lot of people desired families. This is not your typical sperm donor situation. … I was just blessed to even have the opportunity. I didn’t do it for money. I didn’t ask for anything. I just wanted to help families.”
He wouldn’t confirm how many children he has through sperm donation, though in the Humans of New York caption, he’s quoted as saying he had fathered 12 over the previous two years — and, at the time, three more were on the way. In an interview Wednesday with the New York Jewish Week, he responded to a question about how many children he has by repeating an idea he had alluded to in the caption: that according to Jewish tradition, the number 18 represents life.
“Eighteen is a holy number,” Rinaldi said in the interview. “It’s just what God has blessed me with. I’m doing this because I don’t believe in abortion. I am pro-life.”
Opposing abortion isn’t the only right-wing position Rinaldi holds. In an interview, he railed against the COVID-19 vaccine and compared vaccine requirements to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust, a common line of criticism at the time. “You could have just worn a yellow unvaccinated star on your shirt,” he said, adding, “We were literally one thing away from them coming up to rounding up the unvaccinated.” He also said transgender people are “against Torah principles” and said schools are “not teaching kids God.”
On Tuesday, he and a group of Republican activists showed up at a Kew Gardens motel to protest migrants coming to the city, even though a lawyer for the motel said the owner is “not interested in signing a contract” to house migrants.
In District 24, Rinaldi will run against Democratic Council member Jim Gennaro, who has represented the district for more than a decade.
Rinaldi, who grew up in New York City, said his grandmother escaped Poland to Argentina during World War II. His grandfather also left Moldova at the time. Although both countries were occupied by the Nazis or their allies, Rinaldi said his grandparents were “against the tyranny of the left at that time.”
Rinaldi said he studied for his bar mitzvah at Yeshivas Ohr HaChaim, an Orthodox institution in Kew Gardens, and attended City College of New York in uptown Manhattan where he studied architecture, which is also reflected on a LinkedIn page that appears to belong to him.
He later worked in construction and design for over a decade and appeared on the HGTV reality television show “Million Dollar Contractor.”
When it comes to his sperm donation, however, Rinaldi is less comfortable being in the public eye, despite the Humans of New York post. “My lifestyle is nobody’s business,” he said.
“I am what it looks like when you don’t abort children,” Rinaldi said. “Let’s just focus on the issues if we can. I’m going to do the right thing for the community. My personal business is my personal business.”
Back in the Humans of New York post, Rinaldi suggested that he hoped to expand his personal business. He mused about practices that Jewish tradition has, for the past millennium, frowned upon: “My ultimate goal is to find two or three of the mothers who will be sister wives, because I’m gonna need help with all this,” he said. “But I know one thing: It will never be boring.”
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The post This Jewish New York City Council candidate has a prolific passion: serial sperm donation appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist Attacks Israel During Democratic Primary Campaign for Governor
Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist speaks at a “Hands Off” protest at the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 5, 2025. Photo: Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist has sparked backlash among the state’s Jewish community in recent weeks over his fierce condemnations of Israel while running in the Democratic primary to be Michigan’s next governor.
Gilchrist has sharpened his rhetoric against Israel, falsely accusing the Jewish state of both committing a “genocide” against the Palestinian people and purposefully inflicting famine across Gaza.
Since entering the race, Gilchrist has embarked on a full-court press to galvanize Michigan’s Arab community behind his campaign. Gilchrist recently spoke at events held by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and ArabCon, in which he condemned Israel for supposedly committing a “genocide” in Gaza. He has also vowed not to accept money from organizations that support Israel’s war against Hamas, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a lobbying group that seeks to foster bipartisan support for the US-Israel alliance.
“This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of fact,” Gilchrist said to a cheering audience at ArabCon last month. “This has been established by the global leaders who study genocide. This is not something we should support. American taxpayer dollars should not fund offensive weapons of war while children are starving, while medical resources are being blocked to civilians, and while lineages of families are being erased.”
ArabCon, an annual convention held in Dearborn, Michigan to address issues affecting the Arab American community, featured several speakers connected to terrorist organizations. Some featured speakers referred to Zionists as “vile” and dismissed the Jewish people’s connection to Israel.
At last year’s event, Mohammed Maraqa, data strategist for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said that “the Jewish community is led by their business people, by their moneyed interests.”
Gilchrist further condemned Israel in fundraising emails, claiming that the Jewish state has oppressed Palestinians and accusing AIPAC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US, of collaborating with “billionaire allies” to silence him.
“What’s happening in Gaza is a genocide. Families are starving. Children are being bombed. And our federal government is writing the checks that fund it,” Gilchrist’s campaign wrote in a fundraising email. “I stand for human rights, dignity, and safety. That is why I am standing with the Palestinian people and their family, friends, and allies in Michigan – even knowing that AIPAC and its billionaire allies will flood Michigan with attack ads to try to shut me up.”
The Jewish Federation of Detroit issued a statement accusing Gilchrist of peddling “antisemitic” tropes and mischaracterizing Israel’s military campaign against the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza.
“Gilchrist promotes an inaccurate and offensive narrative that also omits the horrific attacks of October 7th and ignores those that remain hostage in Gaza,” the Jewish Federation of Detroit said in a statement, referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“This inflammatory language is an attempt to foster divisiveness as a campaign tool. We expect our elected representatives to reject political rhetoric that plays into antisemitic tropes and instead promote peace and understanding among all Michiganders,” the group continued.
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, endorsed Gilchrist on Tuesday.
“I trust Garlin [and his] lived experience, not only as a father, but as someone who understands what it means when we don’t have people in office defending us and fighting on our behalf,” Tlaib said.
Skeptics have suggested that Gilchrist’s repudiation of Israel is an effort to inject life into his fledgling gubernatorial campaign. Despite serving as the running mate of sitting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), Gilchrist has failed to secure her endorsement. Earlier this year, Whitmer refused to throw her weight behind Gilchrist, breaking a longstanding tradition of Michigan governors endorsing their second in command.
According to polls, Gilchrist faces a steep uphill climb to win Michigan’s Democratic nomination for governor. A recent poll conducted by Impact research showed Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson leading Gilchrist by a whopping 39 points. Unlike Gilchrist, Benson has refused to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.”
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US-Backed Efforts Bring Longtime Foes Israel and Syria Closer to Security Pact
Members of Israeli security forces stand at the ceasefire line between the Golan Heights and Syria, July 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Israel and Syria are reportedly in the final stages of months-long negotiations over a security agreement that could establish a joint Israeli, Syrian, and US presence at key strategic locations.
Jerusalem and Damascus have agreed to form a joint Israeli-Syrian–American security committee to oversee developments along their shared border and uphold the terms of a proposed deal, Israeli officials told Saudi media outlets Al-Arabiya and Al-Hadath.
Following the fall of longtime Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December, Israel deployed troops into a buffer zone along the Syrian border to establish a military position aimed at preventing terrorists from launching attacks against the Jewish state.
The previously demilitarized zone in the Golan Heights was established under the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement between Damascus and Jerusalem that ended the Yom Kippur War. However, Israel considered the agreement void after the collapse of Assad’s regime.
After months of negotiations and rising tensions, both countries appear close to finalizing an agreement based on the 1974 framework, with minor adjustments to reflect current realities — one of the most promising efforts yet to reach a lasting security arrangement.
For its part, Israel assured US and Syrian officials that it will not support any destabilizing forces within Syrian territory, according to reports.
Meanwhile, the Syrian government pledged to protect the Druze population while providing Sweida, a Druze region in the country’s south, with the support and resources needed to maintain stability.
Under a US-backed proposal, a humanitarian corridor from Israel to Sweida has reportedly been ruled out, with any aid route instead planned to run from Damascus to ensure all movement passes through officially sanctioned channels.
Earlier this year, tensions escalated after heavy fighting broke out in Sweida between local Druze fighters and regime forces amid reports of atrocities against civilians.
At the time, Israel launched an airstrike campaign to protect the Druze, which officials described as a warning to the country’s new leadership over threats to the group — an Arab minority with communities in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel whose religion is derived from Islam.
Jerusalem has pledged to defend the Druze community in Syria with military force if they come under threat — motivated in part by appeals from Israel’s own Druze minority.
But the Syrian government has accused Israel of fueling instability and interfering in its internal affairs, while the new leadership insists it is focused on unifying the country after 14 years of conflict.
Describing Syria’s new rulers as barely disguised jihadists, Israel has consistently vowed to prevent them from deploying forces in the country’s southern region, which borders northeastern Israel.
Despite lingering reservations about the newly established Syrian regime, Israeli officials have signaled interest in pursuing formal diplomatic relations if specific conditions are met.
Under the Trump administration, Washington has lifted sanctions on the Syrian government to support the country’s reconstruction efforts and pushed for Damascus to normalize relations with Israel.
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Civil Rights Leader Alyza Lewin Joins Combat Antisemitism Movement
Alyza Lewin (center), constitutional lawyer and former president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. She was recently announced as Combat Antisemitism Movement’s (CAM) new President of US Affairs. Photo: Israel on Campus Coalition.
Civil rights leader and constitutional lawyer Alyza Lewin will draw on her family legacy of Jewish resilience and advocacy in her new role as president of US Affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), one of the world’s leading nonprofits raising awareness about the global surge in anti-Jewish hatred, she told The Algemeiner in an interview this week.
CAM — whose recent work includes a new report showing a surge of antisemitic incidents on college campuses just over a month into the new academic year — announced Lewin’s joining the organization on Monday, calling her addition a move that “will elevate CAM to an even higher level.”
“I am incredibly proud that Alyza Lewin — among the foremost authorities on antisemitism in the US, with decades of unmatched experience safeguarding Jewish civil rights — will now, as CAM’s President of US Affairs, employ her personal expertise and vision in engaging American decision-makers so that they can better implement effective solutions to address the challenges facing American Jewry,” CAM chief executive officer Sacha Roytman said in a statement.
Lewin’s family history is rich with Jewish traditions of resistance to fascism and religious persecution, replete with stories of dead of night escapes from hostile countries, a grandfather who was murdered for publicly opposing Hitler during World War II, a grandmother born in Jerusalem during the Ottoman occupation, and victories in landmark legal cases, including Zivotofsky v. Clinton, which established the legal right of people born in Jerusalem to designate Israel as their place of birth on government documents.
“My father, Nathan Lewin, only knew one of his four grandparents because three of them perished in the Holocaust,” Lewin said, recounting her family history. “So, I grew up feeling as though the significant events in modern Jewish history were not just the history of the Jewish people, they were my personal history, my personal family history — you know, the Holocaust, the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. And I went through a phase as a child in which I read every young adult historical fiction book about the Holocaust. It was as if I felt this need to really understand what that was and what that was about.”
Nathan Lewin’s influence on his daughter was formative, serving as a paragon of Jewish excellence in education and the professions. After college, she enrolled in law and later joined forces with him to fight, pro bono, a succession of cases brought by Jewish people whose rights had been violated or denied.
“We started working together on religious liberty cases when I came to his firm,” she explained. “For example, we brought the Boim v. Holy Land Foundation case, the first case brought under the US Anti-Terrorism Act on behalf of victims of terror. We sued groups providing material support for it, opening a legal avenue for victims to collect damages from those in the US who facilitate it.”
It was during this partnership with Nathan Lewin that Alyza worked on Zivotofsky v. Clinton, which, as she recalled, was a vanguard of recognizing Israeli rights in Jerusalem.
“Prior to President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Jerusalem, the city was treated as a city with no country from the time Israel was established. Even the part of Jerusalem that was under Israeli control was still not recognized as being in Israel for the purposes of US passports and other policies. Zivotofsky v. Clinton changed that finally, but official for the passports it changed in 2020. So, it took us 20 years, pro bono, to effect that change,” she said.
She continued, “We had cases that involved the right to put up a mezuzah in your housing complex; cases that involved the right to grow a beard while employed in the police force. These were cases that really spoke to me.”
In 2017, Lewin joined the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, taking over as president of the organization while its founder, civil rights champion Kenneth Marcus, served in government as assistant secretary for civil rights in the US Department of Education. She went on to serve in the role for nearly eight years, fighting civil rights cases involving campus antisemitism.
“We express our gratitude to Alyza for her dedication passion, and tireless efforts during her time at the Brandeis Center. CAM has made great progress in the fight against antisemitism and have served as such valuable partners to the Brandeis Center,” Marcus said on Monday.
The Algemeiner covered Lewin’s litigation efforts regularly, as they took on the forces of rising antisemitism long before the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, when most Americans had not yet registered the issue as a problem that needed to be addressed.
In February 2022, Lewin represented Cassandra Blotner, a Jewish student at State University of New York (SUNY) New Paltz who was expelled from a sexual assault awareness group for expressing support for Israel. In August of that year, she precipitated a civil rights investigation of antisemitism at University of Vermont and later challenged its president, Suresh Garimella, when he minimized Jewish students’ accounts of bigotry and discrimination.
“He essentially chosen to blame the victims,” Lewin, backed by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other groups she mobilized for a concerted response, said in a statement. “Instead of summoning the courage that other university leaders across the country have shown in acknowledging the problem or offering support for Jewish students who are fearful about identifying publicly as Jewish, the UVM president’s statement doubles down and refuses to take responsibility.”
In 2024, the Brandeis Center won rulings, rendered by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which verified claims of discrimination brought by Jewish students enrolled in the City University of New York (CUNY) colleges. One of the cases sought justice for Brooklyn College Mental Health Counseling (MCH) program students, who were repeatedly pressured into saying that Jews are white people who should be excluded from discussions about social justice.
“I witnessed a Jewish student get told by the professor in front of our whole class to get her whiteness in check,” a Jewish student and witness to the events described in the complaint told The Algemeiner at the time, speaking anonymously due to fears of retaliation. “The professor basically said, ‘You can’t be a part of this kind of conversation because you’re white and you don’t understand oppression.’”
The badgering of Jewish students, the students said at the time, became so severe that one student said in a WhatsApp group chat that she wanted to “strangle” a Jewish classmate.
Those cases and more created legal precedent and school of thought for recognizing antisemitism as a civil rights issue falling under the jurisdiction of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which aimed to abolish discrimination based on heritable traits such as race, religion, sex, and ethnicity. Lewin hopes to expand the “ecosystem,” holding all institutions, from large corporations to private schools, accountable for allowing hostile antisemitic environments to degrade to the point of causing irreparable harm.
“What I hope to do now at CAM is to expand the ecosystem of individuals and institutions that understand, utilize, and apply this same framing,” Lewin explained. “There are so many additional communities and constituencies in society that would benefit from being able to understand and recognize how contemporary antisemitism manifest.”
She added, “I’d like to be able to help ensure the safety, security, continuity, and flourishing of the Jewish people. And to the extent that I can do that by using the legal education I was provided, by using the Jewish education that I was provided, and by celebrating my own families, and, as an extension, my people’s history that I am so proud of. If I can combine all of that in a way that really helps the Jewish people, I couldn’t ask for anything more. I’m grateful to be in this position every day and to call it work.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
