Adena Ishii, mayor of Berkeley, Calif., said at a City Council meeting on Tuesday evening that “with us being in election season, that there has been a lot of very intense and inappropriate, hateful rhetoric.”
“I did just want to call that out,” she said.
The Democratic mayor’s comments came after the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, Jewish Federation Bay Area, Jewish Community Center of the East Bay, Jewish Family and Community Services East Bay and two local synagogues stated jointly that “recent reporting on a ‘Zionist takeover’ of the City Council and accusations that Bay Area Jewish institutions, representing tens of thousands of local families, are ‘foreign lobby groups,’ are highly offensive and dangerous.”
The Jewish groups were referring to comments that City Council candidate Majdi Gaith made, according to the Daily Californian, a University of California, Berkeley student newspaper.
A progressive group that endorsed Gaith referred to the JCRC Bay Area in a questionnaire as an “outside foreign lobby group.”
JNS sought comment from Gaith, who referred JNS to a press release from a group called “Berkeley Jews for Majdi,” which stated that allegations of Jew-hatred against him are “false” and “anti-Palestinian racism.”
The Jewish groups that denounced Gaith’s reported comments stated that “most alarmingly, a social media post by a local activist group using the term ‘Zio-Nazi’ to describe a former council member received likes from several candidates for office.”
“By equating Zionism with Nazism, the authors are weaponizing the Holocaust against Jews and demonizing Jewish identity and connections to Israel,” the JCRC, local Federation and other Jewish groups stated.
“I really want to make sure that we, as a community, are continuing to fight against hate and to speak up when we see anything that’s wrong or hateful,” Ishii said at the council meeting. “I do want to call on all candidates who are campaigning right now to really speak out when they see things like that.”
Ishii did not mention Jew-hatred in her remarks.
The Jewish Coalition of Berkeley told JNS that it thanks Ishii for “addressing the hateful speech that has entered Berkeley’s election campaigns this season.”
“We call on all public officials to reject anti-Zionist hate by name, so that it does not become normalized in our political culture,” it said.
