If there were any doubt about the anti-Semitism of some of the leaders of the Women’s March, it’s dissipating fast. In a New York Times article published on Sunday, when asked about a report that they had discussed the issue of Jewish women at their initial meeting days after President Trump’s election, two of the leaders, Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, admitted that they had, despite their claims in an earlier report in Tablet magazine that included this denial:
To this day, Mallory and Bland deny any such statements were ever uttered, either at the first meeting or at Mallory’s apartment. “There was a particular conversation around how white women had centered themselves—and also around the dynamics of racial justice and why it was essential that racial justice be a part of the women’s rights conversation,” remembered Bland. But she and Mallory insisted it never had anything to do with Jews. “Carmen and I were very clear at that [first] meeting that we would not take on roles as workers or staff, but that we had to be in a leadership position in order for us to engage in the march,” Mallory told Tablet, in an interview last week, adding that they had been particularly sensitive to the fact that they had been invited to the meeting by white women, and wanted to be sure they weren’t about to enter into an unfair arrangement. “Other than that, there was no particular conversation about Jewish women, or any particular group of people.”
Then, when The New York Times spoke to Mallory about the meeting, she uttered a statement that might well be taken as an indictment of Jews themselves for white supremacist attacks on them, saying, “Since that conversation, we’ve all learned a lot about how while white Jews, as white people, uphold white supremacy, ALL Jews are targeted by it.”
One of the original leaders of the Women’s March, Fay Wruble, who is Jewish, was jettisoned soon after the initial march. As the Times reported, she then started an organization called March On. A group affiliated with March On will march on the same day in January as the Women’s March; that group will make a point of denouncing anti-Semitism. The Times reported, “Some Jewish women have announced on social media that they will not attend the mass protest in Washington on Jan. 19 being organized by the Women’s March group.”
Wruble has claimed that at the initial meeting, Mallory and Perez told her that Jews had been heavily involved people in the slave trade. Bewildered by the accusation, Wruble Googled the claim, and found it had been promulgated by the anti-Semitic and racist preacher Louis Farrakhan in his book, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and the Jews,” a book which Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor who is black, termed the “bible of the new anti-Semitism.” Perez and Mallory denied that the slave trade had ever been mentioned.
Wruble also asserted that one of the leaders of the movement told her “we really couldn’t center Jewish women in this or we might turn off groups like Black Lives Matter.”
Mallory’s remarks about Jews being white supremacists and the movement’s apparent anti-Semitism drew plenty of criticism:
