De Blasio’s Terrible Tweet

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to have a talent for making a bad situation worse. In addition to his poor management of the coronavirus situation in New York, the mayor badly mishandled an incident with the Jewish community this week.

On Tuesday night, hundreds of Hasidic Jews gathered for a prominent rabbi’s funeral in Brooklyn, showing apparent disregard of public social distancing guidelines. The funeral was approved and coordinated with the NYPD, which blocked off streets for the procession. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, such a gathering was unwise, and both the police and the synagogue leaders should have anticipated the crowds.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was reportedly in the area for an unrelated event, personally oversaw the police dispersal of the crowd and issued an angry tweet in which he addressed “the Jewish community” by name.

The RJC responded to the mayor’s tweet:

Bill de Blasio’s statement encourages and foments anti-Semitism. To single out the entire Jewish community for the actions of a few is both troubling and disturbing. It wouldn’t be accepted if it were directed at any other minority group. We call on Jewish groups both political and non-political to come together and demand an apology, and more importantly, to demand better from Mayor de Blasio.

The RJC noted that this incident “comes on the heels of a dangerous uptick in anti-Semitic attacks in New York City that de Blasio failed to address.” The mayor’s tweet opened the door for anti-Semites and others looking for a scapegoat to blame the pandemic on Jews.

At Tablet magazine, Liel Leibovitz ladled the sarcasm and anger on thick in his response to the mayor: 

It’s true that throngs crowd Central Park daily, that in Riverside Park it’s nearly impossible to avoid maskless joggers panting their spit well within 6 feet of you. It’s also true that just yesterday hundreds of New Yorkers stood very closely together to watch the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds perform a flyover tribute to health care workers.

None of these other people are problematic, though—presumably because they aren’t a danger to others. The danger to others—the danger that must be broadcast to the mayor’s 1.5 million Twitter followers and to 8 million New Yorkers, some of which have spent the past few years growing increasingly and violently anti-Semitic—is the Jews. It’s the Jews.

The next day, de Blasio apologized: 

The mayor said during a press briefing on Wednesday that he spoke out of “frustration” and “anger” after witnessing the crowd himself, and added that he has “a lot of love” for the Jewish community.

While de Blasio didn’t share his apology with his Twitter followers, he did put up a tweet yesterday condemning an anti-Semitic hate crime that occurred in the city – nearly a week ago.