The Dictatorship
Unpacking the ugly aftermath of the antisemitic incident at Dave Portnoy’s bar
On Saturday night, a Temple University student at a sports bar owned by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoyuploaded a video of a personalized sign he and his friends allegedly ordered with their drinks. The waitstaff delivered the sign, which read: “F— the Jews.” The videowhich quickly went viral, clearly showed the sign and plenty of laughter — and no visible intervention from staff or patrons. The president of Temple University issued a statementcondemning antisemitism and suspending one of the students. Portnoy, who is Jewish, took to Instagram to first rage against the perpetrators and to promise to “ruin them,” but later announced he would make this ugly incident a “teaching moment” and pay for the two perpetrators to visit the Auschwitz death camp in an effort to turn the ugly action into a teachable moment.
After more than a year of circular conversations and hand-wringing about whether this or that action is antisemitic — and whether campus antisemitism merits attention, despite its documented rise — the clarity of this chain of events was almost refreshing. A “F— the Jews” sign is obviously antisemitic, and Temple’s response was decisive and ethical. I’m no Barstool Sports fanbut Portnoy acted honorably and honestly: understandably enraged by this act of hatred and ignorance, yet reflective enough to commit to more than vengeance to attempt to make things right.
Portnoy’s offer to send the perpetrators on an educational trip to Auschwitz is a more lavishly funded version of a common educational response to incidents of Jew hatred.
Portnoy’s offer to send the perpetrators on an educational trip to Auschwitz is a more lavishly funded version of a common educational response to incidents of Jew hatred: some type of antisemitism training, which might be the only time students in secular schools discuss Jews or antisemitism, save for a Holocaust unit, which is required in about half of the states. These hard-won initiatives are hugely important, but they are insufficient to avoid, or address, this kind of incident.
This ugly case makes clear that we need a new approach to educating about antisemitism and Jewish identity in the United States. As a Jewish professor working on a campus under federal investigationfor antisemitic discrimination and the lead scholar on the New York City Board of Education’s forthcoming Jewish American Hidden Voices curricular initiative, I am observing this Barstool debacle unfold with sadness. But it’s also giving us some sense of what a solution might look like.
The reaction of the Temple University student who uploaded the video, Mohammed Adnan Khan, makes abundantly clear why we must address the antisemitism that festers on both the political left and right. After admitting responsibility and accepting Portnoy’s offer to go to Auschwitz, according to Portnoy, Khan “did a total 180,” Portnoy said. In a separate video posted to social media, Khan said he had nothing to do with the sign or spreading hatred, but was acting as a “citizen journalist” and was documenting anti-Jewish animus based on Israel’s actions. In the video, Khan offered his own explanation of the eventand its larger stakes, invoking racialized violence by likening Portnoy’s campaign against him to “a lynching.”
Khan had only admitted responsibility to Portnoy “under duress,” he said, due to an “asymmetrical power dynamic” in which Portnoy, who is older and wealthier, “and well connected to these institutions that are very elite,” intimidated him. The outcry over the sign, Khan asserts, was only a result of his bringing attention to the “unjust things Israel is doing around the world,” referring to Israel’s ongoing retaliatory strikes in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, in which Israel has killed more than 52,000 Palestiniansaccording to the Gaza Health Ministry.
These talking points will sound familiar to anyone who has often heard brazen antisemitism dismissed as “just criticizing Israel,” as if such speech operates in a category of its own. Regardless, Khan’s message, shared with a fundraising link for “restitution,” is clear: “… The larger Jewish community is acting like they are the victims … I am the victim.”
Amid this garbled mess of self-righteousness exhibited in Khan’s video is a sentiment that sounds a lot like what we hear in conservative media. The sign was just “an edgy joke,” Khan comments, and well within his right to “free speech.” “Triggered,” hypersensitive scolds were weaponizing “cancel culture” to “sensationalize” these barroom antics, and costing Khan his reputation, a prestigious internship, and even his physical safety.
Khan then appeared to make his case on “The Stew Peters Show,” which Temple University then “condemned in the strongest possible terms.” Peters is an unabashed antisemite and right-wing provocateur: flanked by a mug that reads “Mein Coffee” and a hat emblazoned with “Bad Goy,” he referred to Portnoy as “a disgusting Jew” and presented the case as an example of nefarious “Jewish supremacy” in action as Khan nodded along. While Khan at first hesitated to articulate these words himself, by the end of the conversation, he enthusiastically responded, “Absolutely!” to Peters’ invitation to “humanity” — which implicitly excludes Jews — to “join forces against Jewish supremacy.”
The media angle underscores how unremittingly this antisemitism courses through both left and right. Khan repeatedly invokes the idea that Portnoy’s network of powerful Jews is using their media influence to target him; Peters happily amplifies this age-old trope.
An interview Portnoy did with a local ABC affiliate Philadelphia reporterdiminishes the severity of this antisemitic act more subtly. Citing an academic paper, the reporter asks whether a “culture of harassment” perpetrated by Barstool itself helped enable this antisemitic incident. Portnoy flies into a tirade at this “media scumbag” and “liberal college professors” blaming Barstool and “white men” for the incident, which distracts from the fact that itisentirely inappropriate for a journalist to suggest to a member of a group victimized by a hate crime that they might be to blame for this behavior.
Portnoy concedes one point to Khan; that the sign was probably intended as a joke. This only makes the casualness of perpetuating hate even more alarming. “It shows how increasingly normalized antisemitism has become in public spaces,” one museum official commented. Indeed, just a few weeks after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Tom Nichols in The Atlanticworried about the moral cost of college students defending antisemitism merely as protected speech: “After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.”
While educational solutions might seem like Band-Aids on a gaping wound, classrooms can be crucial in combating this ugly environment.
Comedian Daniel Ryan Spaulding made a similar point around the same time, parodying a 2040 college reunionat which alumni bond over memories of ripping down posters of Israeli hostages and cyberbullying Jews. A year and a half after these observations, a college student ordering bottle service with a “F— the Jews” sign on the side, posting it on social media and declaring himself a victim, seems to bear out their predictions.
So what do we do? While educational solutions might seem like Band-Aids on a gaping wound, classrooms can be crucial in combating this ugly environment. Students should learn about Jewish history and identity as an important part of their study of the United States. Social studies curricula should teach about Jews as immigrants, Americans, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, and as members of a diverse community from many national and ethnic backgrounds who hold a range of views on any given topic, including Israel, and most importantly, as everyday people deserving of respect and full civil rights.
Understanding antisemitism is of paramount importance, but it should not be addressed only in response to incidences of Jew hatred, or uniquely in relation to the Holocaust. Rather, antisemitism should be explained as a centuries-old hatred that shape-shifts depending on the historical moment, to be about religion, biology or culture, and as still very much with us. Teaching about Jewish identities and experiences, both of perseverance and success and of facing persistent discrimination, is important to understanding, and improving, our pluralistic society.
There are many reasons Jewish identity has not been a focus in the teaching of American history. For one, Jewish Americans have largely relied on religious education to impart this knowledge, and have not been as vocal in advocating for inclusion in secular curricula. Furthermore, to the extent that many Jews in the United States benefit from some degree of white privilege, the experience of Jews has not been the main focus in anti-racist lessons that focus more on a Black-white binary, insufficient to encompass the complexity of the Jewish experience.
But this narrow vision, applied to Jews or any identity group, dangerously constrains our ability to understand each other and to fight ignorance and hatred of the sort on display in that barroom, and beyond.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is Professor of History at The New School in New York City. She is the author of two books, most recently “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession,”and is currently a Carnegie Fellow, working on a new book about education and political polarization.
The Dictatorship
What Tom Emmer said about Somalis was racist. What’s worse is he doesn’t believe it.
ByMichael Tisserand
There was a time when President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans didn’t think House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., had a sufficient understanding of who his enemies ought to be. But in remarks he made Wednesday at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, Emmer did his best to signal that Trump’s enemies are his enemies, too.
Emmer’s 11-minute talk, during which he expressed racism and transphobia and railed against abortion, also served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be. The name of the state party used to be Independent-Republicansand the late U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger used to describe the state party’s worldview, without irony, as progressive Republicanism.
Emmer’s talk served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be.
That party is long gone. At Wednesday’s event, Emmer theatrically dismissed a few sheets of paper he said were his talking points and proclaimed, Trump-like, that he was going rogue. He took aim at transgender youth (“there’s a reason why Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed”), at “elite radical lefties,” at “evil Marxists,” at the media, called his state’s abortion laws “as bad as North Korea” and called the state itself the “People’s Republic of Minnesota.”
But Emmer earned some of the most enthusiastic applause in his racist rant against the state’s large Somali American population. “Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re going to call us a racist, you’re going to call us an Islamophobe,” he said, before saying, “But I’m done being careful. Even the least bit careful.”
He said, “I don’t really care where you come from. But if come to this great country, you have to understand, you’re coming here to be an American.” Somalis “don’t assimilate,” he said, “And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
Among the people who responded angrily to Emmer’s slander of Somalis was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who was born in Somalia. “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back to where I came from,” she wrote on X.
In the debacle that followed Kevin McCarthy being voted out of the House speakership in 2023, Emmer was not elected to replace him because, by MAGA standards, he was too moderate. Trump called him a “Globalist RINO” and was still fuming that after Joe Biden won the race for president in 2020, Emmer voted to certify that election.
Emmer has worked harder to be seen as MAGA since then. In December, he appeared on “Varney & Co.” on Fox Business to support an Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge that made Somalis among its primary targets and became known as Operation Metro Surge. He offered up conspiracy theories and lies about Somali Americans committing 80% of the crime in the Twin Cities. He said money was being stolen from Minnesota state and federal programs to fund the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab.
When he signed up with the so-called Sharia Free America Caucus in February, he railed against letting “anti-American ideologies take root in our communities” and said he had been fighting against the nonexistent threat of Sharia law since he was a state legislator. I was unable to find stories of Emmer as a state legislator fearmongering about Sharia law. However, in 2015, when one of Emmer’s fellow Republicans was being rightly rebuked for attending an anti-Muslim event in St. Cloud, Emmer was a voice of reason and tolerance. He wanted his constituents to know that Somali Americans were contributing to the Minnesota communities they had made home and that they were “some of the fastest-assimilating populations.”
That same year, Emmer joined then-Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat who’s now the state’s attorney general, to found the Congressional Somalia Caucus: to help Somali Americans here and to promote peace and stability in Somalia.
Now Ellison is taking the lead in legal challenges against the ICE assaults Emmer champions.
This is the ticket into MAGA world: an embrace of abdication of decency and a necessary rejection of the spirit of welcome and tolerance one once held.
This is the ticket into MAGA world.
In April, a west central Minnesota event called “Understanding Immigration: A Community Conversation,” included Ayan Omar, a Somali American from St. Cloud, as a speaker. She works as equity director for the public schools and has been active in interfaith dialogues in the city.
Omar spoke of coming to the U.S. as a child, learning English by watching “The Simpsons” and learning self-value by watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The message from Mr. Rogers, she said, was especially important because “I just wanted to cower and hide away because I stood out. Not only because I was a Somali-American refugee, but I was also poor.” It was learning about Frederick Douglass that inspired her to become a teacher.
What she was describing was the process of her becoming more and more American. Countless other Somali Americans have had similar experiences. OEmmer knows that.
And not so long ago, he wasn’t afraid to say it.
Michael Tisserand
Michael Tisserand is a Minnesota-based writer whose works include “Krazy,” a biography of cartoonist George Herriman, and Sugarcane Academy, a memoir of his family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently writing a book about Charlie Chaplin and “The Great Dictator,” for Oxford University Press.
An appeals court on Friday upheld Harvey Weinstein’s2022 rape and sexual assault conviction in California, but ordered the trial judge who gave him 16 years in prison to resentence him.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously issued the decision, saying his trial judge did not violate the former movie magnate’s constitutional rights.
“We reject his attempts to disturb the jury’s guilty verdicts,” the judges wrote in their opinion.
Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said in an email that “We are disappointed by today’s decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal’s conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein’s trial. At the same time, the court correctly recognized that his sentence cannot stand.”
The decision came a day after prosecutors in New York decided Weinstein would not face a fourth trial there, dropping the #MeToo-era case after the accuser said she could not bear to testify again.
The California panel said that resentencing was necessary because the judge that sentenced him considered New York convictions that were later thrown out as an aggravating factor. California’s attorney general agreed.
Weinstein, 74, still stands convicted of another sexual felony in New York, and he remains behind bars awaiting a September sentencing there. Prosecutors there are seeking a 20-year prison term.
In California, Weinstein was convicted in December 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault against an Italian model and actor known during the trial as Jane Doe 1. He would serve his new sentence there only after his New York term is complete.
After the trial, Jane Doe 1 came forward under her name, Evgeniya Chernyshova, when she sued Weinstein in civil court.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Chernyshova did. Her attorney also said she consented to being named.
Chernyshova testified that Weinstein arrived uninvited to her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival and assaulted her.
Weinstein’s defense argued that Weinstein deserved a new trial because Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly prevented his trial lawyers from asking about Facebook messages between Chernyshova and festival head Pascal Vicedomini that would have shown they had a sexual relationship.
The questioning would have demonstrated that she perjured herself when she said she and Vicedomini were just friends and colleagues, the defense said. And the lawyers argued it would have bolstered their assertion that she was not even in her room on the night of the alleged assault.
“The lower court all but gutted Mr. Weinstein’s defense,” attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the appeals judges at April 23 oral arguments.
But the appeals court said in its ruling that Weinstein did make the arguments he wanted during the trial based on other evidence, including another set of Facebook messages that Lench allowed.
“Thus, there was no denial of Weinstein’s constitutional right to present a defense,” the panel wrote in its opinion.
The three judges also found that Weinstein’s lawyers failed to adhere to California’s rape shield law prohibiting evidence of an accuser’s sexual history when they tried to introduce the messages. Weinstein’s lawyers had argued that the shield law was not pertinent because they wanted to use the messages only to impeach the witness’s credibility.
And the appeals judges said testimony from accusers describing sexual assaults Weinstein was not charged with was appropriate, and allowed under state law.
Before his sentencing, Weinstein told the judge that this was a “made-up story” from a woman he had never met.
The Los Angeles jury acquitted Weinstein of the sexual battery of a massage therapist and failed to reach verdicts on counts involving two other women.
“This is not the end of the appellate process,” Engelmayer said in his email Friday. “We intend to seek review in the California Supreme Court because we continue to believe significant legal errors affected the proceedings and warrant further review.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said it would not have comment on the decision until the office reviewed it.
An email seeking comment from Chernyshova’s attorney was not immediately answered.
ByGarry Pierre-Pierre
One of the first people, and the very first doctor, to publicly receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States was Dr. Yves Duroseauthe chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
At a time when fear had emptied city streets and refrigerated trucks were lined up near hospital loading docksthat son of Haiti was a face of hope.
For Haitians, that image carried a deeper resonance. Ours is a community that America has often noticed only in moments of crisis. For once, the country was looking at a Haitian because he represented hope.
Ours is a community that America often noticed only in moments of crisis.
That memory from five and a half years ago is one reason the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians hit me so hard. Not with anger, but with deep sadness.
When I took the oath of citizenship decades ago, I believed America rewarded commitment with belonging. I still want to believe that. Thursday’s ruling suggests that, for some immigrants, the word “temporary” didn’t just describe their legal status but the nature of America’s welcome.
The first TPS recipients from Haiti arrived after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2010. Today, Haiti faces a different catastrophe. Armed gangs control much of the capitalthousands have been killed or displaced and the State Department continues to warn Americans not to travel there.
For many TPS holders, the country they fled has not recovered. In many ways, it has become even more dangerous.
They believed something basic: that the United States would not send them back to a country engulfed by political violence, armed gangs and institutional collapse. TPS was created for those for whom returning home is unsafe. That humanitarian commitment should matter just as much as the lives those TPS holders have built since arriving.
They waited for Congress to do what some members had pushed for for years: create a pathway from temporary protection to permanent belonging. Instead, the years passed. Children became adults. Mortgages were paid. Careers were built. Entire lives unfolded while Washington postponed action. Temporary Protected Status became less a bridge than a waiting room. The finish line kept moving. Now, for many, it has disappeared altogether.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Haitian nurses, home health aides and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. Their work was indispensable then, and healthcare leaders say it remains indispensable today.
This dependence is not sentimental. It is measurable. The Boston Globe, citing data from the National Domestic Workers Alliancereported that roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
According to a report by Massachusetts lawmakers Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, ending TPS for Haitians “threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care and disability care workforces amid a nationwide health care crisis and persistent staffing shortages.”
Roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
There is nothing temporary about the lives these TPS holders have built. There is nothing temporary about paying taxes for decades, buying a home, planting a garden or knowing your neighbors by name. There is nothing temporary about raising children who begin each school day by pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. There is nothing temporary about risking your life to care for strangers during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I never imagined that, decades after taking my own oath of citizenship, I would be writing about a generation of immigrants who walked that same path with the same faith only to discover that the road ended before they reached their destination.
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, it must also confront a question that has shadowed much of its history: Who gets to belong?
Too often, America has answered that question by welcoming people when their labor is needed most, only to question their place later.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people we continue to call temporary have spent years proving their commitment to this country. This ruling is bigger than Haitians or Syrians. It speaks to the covenant a nation makes with the people who answer its call during moments of need.
Though that process has never been smooth, America has always been at its best when it expanded the circle of belonging. Italians, Jews, Asians and even Black Americans born here were all told at one time that they could never fully be American. The country was not diminished by widening the definition of who belongs — it was strengthened by it.
The question is no longer whether Haitians who have their built lives here belong. They have answered that question through years of work, sacrifice and service.
The question is whether America still remembers what it means to be a country that welcomes immigrants.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum. They also reflect the promises a nation makes about who belongs. After more than 16 years, the Haitians affected by Thursday’s ruling are no longer strangers passing through. They are co-workers, parishioners, homeowners and taxpayers woven into the fabric of neighborhoods from New York to Florida to Massachusetts.
Pull one thread and you do more than remove one person. You weaken the fabric itself.
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Garry Pierre-Pierre is a Pulitzer-prize winning, multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist. In 1999, he left The New York Times to launch the Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language publication serving the Haitian diaspora. He is also the co-founder of the City University Graduate School of Journalism‘s Center for Community and Ethnic Media and a senior producer at CUNY TV
- Palestinian flags fly in Texas
- Trump-backed Letlow wins GOP primary for Sen. Bill Cassidy’s seat
- House panel subpoenas Leon Black, escalating tactics in Epstein investigation
- Congressional Black Caucus blasts Slotkin over her calls for new leadership in the House
- Key Democrats urge House to reject kids’ safety proposal
- Moderates beware: Mamdani coalition portends a dramatically different Democratic Party in NYC
- Divisive Israel vote to be discussed on Sunday House Democrats call
- House panel subpoenas Leon Black, escalating tactics in Epstein investigation
- The Dallas booboys
- Rubio, Patel at Miami match
-
Politics1 year agoFormer ‘Squad’ members launching ‘Bowman and Bush’ YouTube show
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoLuigi Mangione acknowledges public support in first official statement since arrest
-
Politics1 year agoFormer Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron launches Senate bid
-
Uncategorized2 years ago
Bob Good to step down as Freedom Caucus chair this week
-
The Josh Fourrier Show2 years agoDOOMSDAY: Trump won, now what?
-
The Dictatorship1 year agoPete Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon goes from bad to worse
-
Politics1 year agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit
-
The Dictatorship10 months agoMike Johnson sums up the GOP’s arrogant position on military occupation with two words