Two anti-Israel protesters were arrested outside a 92nd Street Y event on Manhattan’s Upper East Side featuring Bari Weiss, a former New York Times editor and founder of The Free Press. Video footage circulating online also showed comedian Jerry Seinfeld smiling and waving at the antisemitic activists, as they accused him of supporting genocide.
Weiss delivered the 92nd Street Y’s annual “The State of World Jewry Address” on Sunday night.
Abba Eban, then a member of Israel’s Knesset and a former Israeli diplomat, delivered the inaugural address in 1980. Others who have spoken in the series include Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel; former Soviet refusenik and Israeli statesman Natan Shararanky; the late Israeli writer Amos Oz; and French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy, per the 92nd Street Y website.
“Not since the founding of the State of Israel has the Jewish people faced such a crossroads. What is our future? What are our priorities? How do we secure our community for generations to come?” it stated, promoting Weiss’s ticketed talk, which sold out.
Protesters yelled obscenities and “Genocide supporter, you support genocide” at Seinfeld as he left the event.
Seinfeld visited Israel in December.
“I lived and worked on a kibbutz in Israel when I was 16, and I have loved our Jewish homeland ever since. My heart is breaking from these attacks and atrocities,” he wrote on Instagram on Oct. 9 “But we are also a very strong people in our hearts and minds. We believe in justice, freedom and equality. We survive and flourish, no matter what. I will always stand with Israel and the Jewish people.”
