Op-Ed: Crown Heights City Council Member’s Betrayal Has Not Gone Unnoticed

by Yosef Hershkop

I am a member of the Crown Heights Jewish community. I was also privileged to be a part of the ad hoc committee that went all out to elect Crystal Hudson back in 2021. I have zero regrets about that. However, having worked to elect someone does not give me the obligation to stand by quietly when they say or do something wrong, especially when it has the potential to harm my community and other members of her district.

Yesterday evening Council Member Hudson sent out the following tweet/statement. It was sent on her official X/Twitter account, though it is not yet on her official website.

I will break down her statement and point out the serious errors, misstatements, and frankly offensive and dangerous language it contains. My goal here is not to shame or attack the Council Member, but rather to correct the record and remind her of the importance of engaging with the community that elected her before speaking out in the future on the issues that matter to us.

1) The invocation of May Day here as a sacred day for working class people of this city is absurd, wrong, and very offensive. May Day is a Marxist holiday, popularized by the world’s communist movements and governments, almost all of whom eventually degenerated into mass murder, repression, and decay. My ancestors, and the ancestors of much of the community she represents, experienced all of that very personally and very painfully.

We have a different day in this country for celebrating our working people and their stories, struggles, and victories. Labor Day is a day grounded in our American story and history, a history we are all a part of, not the violent, repressive, and ultimately failed Marxist one.

A further absurdity is its invocation in defense of students at Columbia. There may not be a less “working class’’ collection of human beings on earth. According to the best reports we have at this time, the only working class people involved in this story were the janitorial staff held against their will by these students and the police officers who rescued them.

2) Whatever the percentage of her constituents employed by or attending any of the colleges that have had these “encampments”, it is without question much smaller than the percentage of Jewish and Hasidic people whom she represents, and who came out to vote for her en masse. People who have to walk the streets of this city and deal with the rising hate and lawlessness generated by this movement.

More importantly, the idea that what these students are protesting is the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is false, dangerously so. Council Member Hudson owes it to her constituents and herself to seriously research what has been going on at these campuses and not to just keep repeating the soft, disgustingly dishonest platitudes of the wider progressive activist and media orbit.

Because what they are actually protesting is the existence of Jewish people in the land of Israel. This has been made clear by these students’ open affiliation with Hamas and Hezbollah aligned-groups, the waving of their flags, and the constant refrain of “From the River to the Sea,” a call for a Judenrein Palestine. The fact that so many Jewish students and New Yorkers have also been harassed and attacked at or near these “protests” should also help make that clear. This is all on video, all documented, and there is no excuse for such willful ignorance from someone elected to represent us.

There is no “solidarity” here. Just a coalition of naive youth, professional activists, and terrorism supporters united in a modern performance of the world’s oldest hatred.

3) There are zero reports of injury sustained during the NYPD re-taking of the Columbia campus and its effort to restore the rule of law to large swathes of a city that had been illegally occupied by pampered performance-art “revolutionaries.” Considering what we just saw at UCLA, where police stood by and watched hundreds of people engage in an all-out violent brawl (including the use of improvised explosive weaponry and chemical attacks) resulting in dozens of injuries, we should all be grateful for the swift and professional nature of our city’s response.

The only thing this city should be haunted by is how it allowed this poisonous weed to take root and grow so tall over the last decades. There is clearly something very wrong with our schools and culture, and it’s long past time we took a long and hard look at the damage we have done to a generation of our brightest minds and most passionate souls. The sight of a 19-year-old wrapped in an Arafat-inspired keffiyeh shouting for the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people from their ancestral homeland should have been what inspired a statement of this nature from the Council Member, not footage of New York’s finest restoring order to our city’s proudest institution of higher learning.

Council Member Hudson clearly isn’t a bad person. Our community has worked closely with her for years. But she owes it to this community and this city to be better informed and more clear-sighted about this issue. We are always ready to talk and plan and build for a brighter future for our district and for all New Yorkers, but she should understand that the support of our community must be earned, and “solidarity” with terrorist punks who seek our destruction and that of our brethren is something we will absolutely not tolerate.