James Mai, vice mayor of Irvine, Calif., was involved in the Rotary Club of Orange County L.A. for about five years and sees it as a “great organization” that helps the community, including sewing blankets for cancer patients.
But he resigned from both the club and his role as vice chair of its fundraising foundation after the organization installed former Irvine Mayor Farrah Khan as its president despite concerns raised by Mai and Jewish groups about her social media posts.
Mai had served as vice chair of the foundation for about two years.
“I’m the vice mayor of a city, and I’m an elected official. I represent all sorts of people,” he told JNS. “I don’t want to be involved in a group that is being led by someone who’s saying antisemitic things.”
Khan has always been kind to him personally, Mai said, but she has also “made some comments that were very hostile and I believe to be antisemitic.” (JNS sought comment from Khan, the club and Rotary International.)
In a June 22 letter, the Jewish Community Action Network, Israeli-American Council and Jewish Federation of Orange County urged the club not to install Khan as president, alleging that she had spread antisemitic blood libels on social media.
Among the examples cited, the groups said Khan shared an Al Jazeera article alleging that Israel bombed a girls’ school in Iran and wrote that the “sick pedophiles/cannibals are doing what they do best.”
According to the letter, Khan also claimed that “handcuffed babies were found in a mass grave” and blamed Israel for the alleged atrocity.
Mai told JNS that he urged Rotary leadership to reconsider its decision.
“It’s the same thing if you asked me to be led by someone who openly hates black people or hates Asian people or a member of the KKK,” he said. “I’m not OK being part of that group.”
Some Rotary members asked whether he would reconsider if Khan were no longer involved. Mai said he would, but he never heard back from the organization, and Khan has since been sworn in as president.
“I understand that they wanted a former mayor involved, but I think any group should stay away from someone who’s polarizing,” he said.
Mai said he found it “interesting” that, as mayor, Khan helped establish an Orange County anti-hate portal given her recent social media posts.
Hate crimes
In January, Orange County, Calif., released a report on hate crimes in the county in 2024. It found that there were 119 hate crimes that year, an increase from 95 in 2023, although the report noted that four jurisdictions in the county only partially provided data in 2023.
Jews were the target in 24% of reported hate crimes in 2024, making them the second-most targeted group after Black victims, who accounted for 26%. Irvine recorded the highest number of hate crimes in the county, with 19, up from 14 the previous year, according to the report.
The report did not specify how many of Irvine’s hate crimes targeted Jews.
The findings were “not surprising,” Mai told JNS, adding that “there are a lot of hate incidents where people call names.”
His nonprofit, Asian Americans Pacific Islanders United, provides support to hate-crime victims, which includes helping them find legal support and guiding them on how they can report hate crimes.
“We don’t see a lot of that in Irvine, but what we do see a lot is unreported crimes in other areas, especially within the Asian American community,” he said. “In Irvine, people are very sensitive, and I’m not trying to be insensitive to the reporting, but they report everything; that’s why they report hate crimes, incidents, it could be classified as anything.”
“We don’t see physical attacks in Irvine, but we see people yelling at each other,” Mai told JNS.
Hate in the city is “very subtle,” according to the vice mayor.
“It’s not in your face, like, ‘Hey, I hate you,’ except when some ex-public officials say it,” he said.
Mai told JNS he would not be surprised if there were an uptick in antisemitic hate crimes and incidents in the city, telling JNS that the anti-Israel movement has become “very big” in Irvine.
“There’s a large concentration of that community here, and a large concentration of the Jewish community here as well, and I think naturally, people are going to hate on each other because they’re geographically near each other,” he said.
A couple of years ago, anti-Israel protesters directed hate speech toward Jews during the public comment session at city council meetings, according to Mai.
“No one really put a stop to it at the time, and I was in disagreement with that,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the things that they were saying.”
In their letter to the Rotary Club, the Jewish groups wrote that Khan, while mayor, “declined to enforce the city’s rules of decorum and allowed harassment and bullying of our community at City Hall” when masked protesters “accosted our community members, taunted us, shouted over us, threatened us and did all they could to make us unwelcome in our own city.”
Mai, a Vietnamese American, said he experienced racism growing up in Cleveland, where he was the only Asian student in his school. His adoptive father served in World War II and helped liberate the Nazi death camps, where he saw the “suffering,” according to Mai.
“I grew up hearing the stories of the suffering of the Jewish people, so it’s a personal thing for me to hear somebody say things about the Jewish community,” he said. “I grew up fighting hate.”
Allowing someone like Khan to hold “a position like that, depending on what they say, could maybe normalize hate speech,” Mai told JNS.
“You should serve everyone equally, and you shouldn’t be so hateful to others,” he said.
