Eduardo Martinez, mayor of Richmond,
Calif., avoided censure for the second time this month at a City Council
meeting when the body voted, on Tuesday, to again postpone such a
resolution and instead passed a measure, which the mayor put forward,
stating that he would undergo voluntary Jew-hatred training.
The council voted 6-1 on Tuesday in favor of a “restorative process” between the mayor and the city’s Jewish community, after Martinez shared posts
on LinkedIn that referred to the antisemitic mass shooting in Bondi
Beach, in Sydney, as “Israel’s false flag attack” and asked if the
shooter was a former Israeli soldier.
The council voted that Martinez will meet
with Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller, of Temple Beth Hillel, an 80-year-old
Reform congregation in Richmond, in the Bay Area, at least two more
times and will apologize at a future council meeting and in a local
newspaper.
Saxe-Taller is associated with the progressive group J Street and, in prior roles, reportedly signed a December 2022 letter saying certain Israeli officials weren’t welcome to speak at her synagogue, wrote that she wept “tears of relief” when the Reform Jewish movement voted to push for reparations for slavery and was quoted saying that the Trump administration is only aiming to deport pro-Hamas agitators because it is anti-immigration.
The Richmond temple states that it is
guided by social justice and, “whether you’re single, married,
interfaith, LGBTQ+, a Jew by birth or by choice, you’re fully welcome
here.”
Experts told JNS that Martinez appeared to be getting off lightly.
Seth Brysk, regional director at the American Jewish Committee, thinks that the mayor’s response is “not sufficient.”
“We would still maintain that he’s unfit
to hold public office, and to be able to represent the city in an
effective way when he’s unable to really take the necessary steps to
learn, to make amends, to use this as a teachable moment, to truly and
genuinely apologize, not to say ‘I’m sorry that you feel that way,’ but
rather to understand and acknowledge the wrong that was done,” he told
JNS. “That really only comes through the educational process, and then
he can make a genuine and full apology, and we can move forward.”
“In similar situations, when a public
figure has engaged in antisemitic conduct, and they are truly sorry,
they don’t pick and choose the remedy,” he added. “They are asked to
undergo training by a qualified provider, who delivers these kinds of
trainings, and that’s fallen far short here.”
It’s good for Martinez to “engage in
serious conversation with local Jewish leadership” and to apologize to
the community, but “his offense has gone far beyond that,” Brysk said.
“To put it on social media—it affects Jews throughout the Bay Area and
elsewhere, who have seen it.”
Martinez must meet with mainstream Jewish
organizations, like Brysk’s employer, which have “professionally
developed programs to instruct and inform people about what is
antisemitism” and “can explain to him the history, the meaning of
antisemitism, the history, the meaning of what it is that he has said,
and then he can make a genuine apology based on an understanding of what
he has learned.”
“We have seen people who have engaged in
antisemitism go through that kind of process in the past, and it is
something that can work,” Brysk told JNS. “We’ve also seen people who
seek to make something uncomfortable go away. This seems to be more of
the latter.” (JNS sought comments from the mayor and the synagogue.)
Rabbi Yitzchok Wagner, co-director of the
Chabad of Richmond, told JNS that most of the local Jewish community
thinks that the City Council must say something.
Most local Jews feel “very, very strongly”
that this wasn’t an isolated incident and the council should have
censured the mayor, or “at least to call it out and to recognize
antisemitism where it is,” Wagner said. These community members think
that “for him to get out of it by saying ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to take a
training,’ is not necessarily acceptable,” according to the rabbi.
Some community members see things
differently, according to Wagner. These local Jews think that the mayor
apologized, did his part and is ready to “move on and push forward,” and
don’t think that there are enough votes on the City Council to ever
pass a censure, the rabbi said.
“My goal and focus is to try to bring together unity and light and positivity,” he said.
Wagner told JNS that there are an
estimated 2,000 to 2,500 Jewish households in Richmond. He said that a
large percentage of the Jews affiliated with his synagogue and the
temple think that the mayor looks like he could get off too easily.
Tali Klima, spokeswoman for the Bay Area
Jewish Coalition, told JNS that the call for censuring the mayor “was
absolutely justified.”
“Mayor Martinez has a history supporting
rabidly antisemitic rhetoric online and passing anti-Israel city
resolutions that are extreme even for the Bay Area,” Klima said. “He
must be held accountable for crossing the line, excluding and
endangering Jewish residents and setting a dangerous regional precedent
that normalizes Jew hatred.”
‘Mayor must resign’
Jeremy Russell, director of marketing and
communications at the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, told
JNS that the “JCRC continues to believe Mayor Martinez must resign.”
“The mayor did not provide genuine
acknowledgment of harm in his public comments, which took place more
than a month after his latest antisemitic posting was discovered,” he
said. “We are grateful that Temple Beth Hillel has agreed to work on
restorative steps with the mayor, though we remain rightfully skeptical
of his intentions due to his continued disappointing conduct.”
Russell’s employer “will continue to
monitor the situation at City Hall and will provide ongoing support to
the Richmond Jewish community at this vulnerable time,” he told JNS.
The council meeting, which began at 6
p.m., ran for five hours—one hour past its scheduled end time, due to
the large number of people who wanted to speak. As the meeting drew to a
close, a vote to amend the “restorative process” and to censure the
mayor failed, 3-4.
A separate item on the agenda to censure
the mayor for “antisemitic conduct and for actions inconsistent with the
duties and standards of the office” was tabled indefinitely.
During the previous council meeting
on Jan. 6, an emergency item to put a censure resolution on the agenda
failed 2-5 after multiple councilmembers said that they didn’t have
enough time to review it.
At the meeting on Tuesday, the council
agreed that most of its members would undergo the Jew-hatred training as
part of the “restorative process.”
One council member, Jamelia Brown, said at
the meeting that it’s “commendable” that the rest of the council wanted
to join the mayor in the training, but that the council must also “name
the harm” that the mayor caused and set “clear boundaries for the
unacceptable conduct that took place.”
The only way to do that is via censure,
Brown said at the meeting, although her hunch was that the only reason
the “restorative” measure was put on the agenda was to avoid censuring
the mayor. The whole council attending the training sounds “as if we’re
going on a field trip,” she told the council.
She was the only one on the council to vote against the “restorative” measure. (JNS sought comment from Brown.)
Before public comment started on the
measure, the mayor said he has already “made several apologies,” but the
problem is that “everyone needs to hear something different.”
“It’s like making apology after apology after apology,” Martinez said.
He then read a formal apology, stating
that he owes “a clear, unambiguous apology” to the Jewish community in
Richmond and “our broader community.”
“Antisemitism is real,” he said. “It is
not abstract or theoretical. It creates fear, isolation and danger for
Jewish people, including right here in Richmond. As mayor, my words
carry weight, and in this instance, I failed to meet the responsibility
my position requires.”
