New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Jewish-oriented coronavirus tweet of this past week is bad enough. When placed in context of growing global anti-Semitism, it is tragic.
De Blasio’s outburst (“[m]y message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed”) which had ignited a firestorm among Jewish community leaders, took place following the funeral of a beloved rabbi, Chaim Mertz, that attracted a large gathering in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn (for which permission had been granted). Rather than proper coronavirus protocol, many quite understandably saw the mayor’s words as an assault on New York’s 1.2 million Jews.
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