More than 50 NY rabbis implore Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul to oppose mass deportations
(JTA) — More than 50 rabbis and cantors, including leaders of some of New York City’s most prominent synagogues, signed an open letter Tuesday asking Mayor Eric Adams and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to protect immigrants from the Trump administration’s planned mass deportations.
The letter, the latest in a succession of recent statements by Jewish leaders opposing President Donald Trump’s policies, comes at an unprecedentedly fraught time in the politics of New York City and state. The Trump administration has moved to drop corruption charges against Adams so that he will be able to help the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
The arrangement has led to a cascade of resignations at top levels of city government and beyond along with mounting calls for Adams to resign — which he has rebuffed.
The letter calls on the mayor and governor to “restrict” immigration raids in schools and houses of worship, which are now permitted under new federal guidelines. It also calls on the leaders to refrain from sharing information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to not use jails to detain immigrants. And it hearkens back to American Jews’ immigrant heritage, particularly in New York, as well as past antisemitic persecution.
The letter follows others signed by Jewish leaders or organizations opposing Trump’s or Republicans’ policies on transgender athletes, mass deportations, Gaza and diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
DeSantis appointee to Florida university board under fire for comments about Jews, women
(JTA) — A professor and conservative activist nominated by Gov. Ron DeSantis to chair a Florida university board is in political hot water this week over a series of tweets counting the number of Jews, women, seniors and gay lawmakers among Senate Democrats and lamenting that there were too few “straight, white non-Jews” available to lead or reform the party.
The bipartisan rebuke of Scott Yenor comes as DeSantis and nation’s other leading conservatives have mounted a broader attack on higher education with a particular focus on its diversity initiatives, an effort Yenor is aligned with.
Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University in Idaho, was chosen by DeSantis to serve as the head of the board of the University of West Florida in Pensacola. But he’s drawing attention for a series of social media posts last month in which he remarked that Democrats had “pretty slim pickin’s” for “national leadership or for reforming the party” because so many of the party’s senators “rose to power on identity politics.”
Brawls break out surrounding pro-Palestinian protest in heavily Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park
(JTA) — A pro-Palestinian protest in the heavily Jewish New York City neighborhood of Borough Park descended into brawls and epithets Tuesday night as demonstrators clashed with pro-Israel counterprotesters.
The pro-Palestinian protest’s organizer, Pal-Awda, called on its followers to “flood Borough Park,” an allusion to Hamas’ name for its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and to “show up in the masses to oppose the sale of stolen land, especially when it is happening in our own backyards!”
The Pal-Awda statement, which included an inverted red triangle, a Hamas symbol, also called for “a complete end to the settler-colonial project of Israel and its goal of expansion.”
Borough Park is a heavily haredi Orthodox neighborhood, and politicians had warned of unrest ahead of the protest. Violent clashes broke out between the two sides. Footage on social media shows people fighting in the street as police try to separate the brawlers.
New York City politicians decried antisemitism at the incident.
Kanye West, back on social media again, says he is ‘not under Jewish control anymore’
(JTA) — Shortly after he aired a Super Bowl commercial for a website selling a swastika T-shirt, and two days after posting an antisemitic rant on social media, the rapper Ye announced that he was quitting social media.
One week later he was back — and tweeting about Jews again.
“I am not under Jewish control anymore,” he wrote on Monday. “In war you take a couple loses [sic].”
He also wrote, “There’s [a] lot of Jewish people I know and love and still work with.”
By Tuesday morning, all the tweets had been deleted. But in the stream of all-caps posts the previous day, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, defended selling white shirts featuring a black swastika on his website and wrote that “a few specific Jews not the entire race for crying out loud but a few specific Jews came together and did everything they could to destroy me.” He added that he was “not playing victim just refreshing everyones memory.”
He also wrote, after the e-commerce company Shopify stopped working with his site to sell the swastika shirt, that no one else had agreed to sell it. He also defended the symbol — widely recognized in the Western world as the emblem of the Nazis — because it has historically been a feature of Indian and other Asian religions. He name-checked Harvey Finkelstein, who helms Shopify and is descended from Holocaust survivors.
“I remember going to Japan and gasping when I saw what is known as the swastika on clothing,” he wrote in all-caps. “It felt illegal to even look at it thats how I had been programmed.”
He added, “I then found out that swastika had many different meanings and many different names.”
Ye has been one of the most vocal and prominent purveyors of antisemitic invective since October 2022, and less than two weeks ago called himself a Nazi. He and his wife, Bianca Censori, are reportedly on the verge of divorce.
