Published: 1 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IT’S A TOUGH TIME for Jacob Frey, the Jewish Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Frey took office in 2018 with promises to improve relations between the community and the police department. Within months, he had instituted reforms to the department’s body camera policy, leading to record levels of compliance.
Last week, it all blew up in his face.
On Monday, May 25, white police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, for nearly nine minutes, leading to Floyd’s death. Numerous eyewitnesses and video attest to the callous brutality of the scene.
Chauvin was quickly dismissed from the police force and charged with third-degree murder. The next night, initially peaceful protests erupted into riot, a scene that has been repeated in cities across the US, including New York, Atlanta, Seattle, Nashville and Los Angeles.
Buildings have been burned, including police stations, interstate highways have been blocked, and police cars demolished. Protesters, reporters, and police have been injured. Many cities established curfews in hopes of curbing the violence and six states have called up National Guard units in support of police efforts.
To understand these protests, one must be familiar with the contours of the long history and the short history of African-American life. The long history begins with over 200 years of brutal slavery, followed by a century of institutionalised racism, discrimination, and second-class citizenship through a set of laws and practices known as Jim Crow.
The recent history has seen the rise of ‘Black Lives Matter’, particularly in response to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Since then scores of African-Americans have been killed by or died in the custody of police, revealing the dark edge of American racism. Major protests followed the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and many others, including Minneapolis’ Jamar Clark in 2015.
A generation ago, gang violence was most prominent threat in many African-American neighbourhoods. Today, it is police violence.
Minneapolis remains the epicentre and the last thing Frey needed was to have to deal with the childish antics of Donald Trump. But the inevitable occurred and, on Thursday, the President weighed in, demanding Frey "get his act together and bring the City under control." He labelled Frey a “radical left” mayor, a familiar charge from Trump’s twitter lexicon.
I’ve received everything from anti-Semitic rhetoric to threats, and it it’s disconcerting to say the least.
This was not the first time Frey has tangled with Trump. Last October, the Trump campaign planned a rally in Minneapolis. According to Daily Beast, because of the campaign’s history of stiffing cities where it held rallies, “the Target Centre threatened to cancel the president’s ‘Keep America Great’ rally if he didn’t cough up a $530,000 security fee ahead of the event.” Trump responded with his familiar Twitterstorm, labelling Frey “rotten” and a “lightweight”.
Is Trump’s red-baiting a Jewish mayor an expression of his anti-Semitism? One might think so, given his history of attacks on “Shifty” Adam Schiff, “Mini” Mike Bloomberg, “Crazy” Bernie, and Al Franken“stein.” Trump, after all, is the man who found “good people” among the neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia three years ago. Certainly, the far right understood his dog whistle. “I’ve received everything from anti-Semitic rhetoric to threats, and it it’s disconcerting to say the least,” Frey said.
Trump’s bigotry is wide-ranging. He road to office on a racist campaign against Mexicans and, once elected, moved quickly to ban travel to the US from Muslim nations. His prejudice against African Americans goes back to housing discrimination charges in the 1970s and continued through his racist involvement in the Central Park jogger case and his “birther” campaign against then President Barack Obama.
Name-calling and twitter attacks are a routine part of the Trump playbook. Trump has gone after “Sleepy” Joe Biden, “Crooked” Hillary Clinton, and “Nervous” Nancy Pelosi. In 2018, the New York Times published a list of “568 people, places, and ” that Trump had insulted on Twitter.
Like so much of the above, Trump’s inflammatory comments on Minneapolis are little more than a distraction, one designed to stir controversy and bring attention to himself. We must not let the gamesmanship of this posterchild for pathological narcissism draw our attention from what is really at stake.
As New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted, “Structural racism haunts the lives of people of color. What we’re seeing is an overflow due to decades of injustices.” The Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, writing in The Guardian, reminds us “the black wealth gap, education gap and healthcare gap have persisted despite the civil rights movement, legal desegregation and symbolic affirmative action.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Frey would have none of it from Trump. “Weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions,” he shot back. “Weakness is pointing your finger at somebody else at a time of crisis.” Calling for unity in his city, Frey said “If you’re feeling that sadness, that anger, it’s not only understandable, it’s right. It’s a reflection of the truth that our black community has lived.”
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Frey has said that “the moral imperative outlined by Tikkun Olam is something I believe in strongly and is foundational both to Judaism but also my philosophy in government.” Drawing on this foundation in words that would be incomprehensible to Trump, Frey said. “We need to offer the radical love and compassion we all have in us.”
Mayor Frey stands in the progressive lineage of Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish US Supreme Court Justice, who, writing in 1915, said “the 20th-century ideals of America have been the ideals of the Jew for more than twenty centuries.” Those are ideals that align with those of the great African American moral leaders, including Reverend Barber and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.
Reverend King famously declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Sadly, for African Americans, for too long, the justice they’ve experienced bends toward the oppressing knee of Derek Chauvin and his ilk.
Since his famous 1963 March on Washington, King has been revered for his dream of people “not judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” But the fate of King’s dream, nearly 60 years later, may have been best expressed by the African American poet Langston Hughes who asked, in his 1951 poem Harlem, “What happens to a dream deferred?”
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Yes, Jacob Frey, the Jewish Mayor of Minneapolis, has his hands full, with or without the shenanigans of Donald Trump. But he has it easy compared to the average African-American living in the United States today.
READ MORE
Jewish mayor of Minneapolis takes centre stage amid violent US protests (Jerusalem Post)
Frey, a Jewish former civil rights and employment attorney and city council member, has been in power for two years, with his political future potentially hinging on his response to Floyd's death
Jews cannot be silent in the face of anti-black racism (Jewish Journal)
Jews must not be the silent onlookers on anti-black racism in America as we have been the victims of silent onlookers for millennia
Rabbis to return to German military amid growing anti-Semitism (New York Times)
The Army will welcome rabbis into its chaplaincy this year to provide spiritual support to Jewish soldiers as anti-Semitism surges in the country
Photo: Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey
