Cory Booker's Jewish Society Hosts Genocide Supporter Ben Gvir

As usual, Booker is silent.

Photo of Cory Booker embracing extremist rabbi Shmully Hecht, with whom Booker created the Shabtai Jewish Society at Yale that hosted Israeli fascist Ben Gvir last week. “I like Ben Gvir,” says Hecht. “No comment” from Booker. (By way of contrast the new Democratic senator from New Jersey, Andy Kim, is outspoken on Gaza and on stopping the supply of lethal weapons to Israel. Here is Kim’s statement. Booker as usual voted for the weapons with the usual blah blah mush about Israel’s right to defend itself.

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MJ here:

Cory Booker, the New Jersey senator, has an Israel problem. It is not that he takes big money from AIPAC (although he does) it is that he is deeply and almost fanatically in love with Israel and has been since college when he was president of the Jewish Student Union even though he is not Jewish.

He is not just involved deeply with Israel but with the extremist Chabad movement, which is a Jewish equivalent of the racist Christian right. Take a look at the excerpts below from the Guardian or do a quick Google or AI search.

Cory Booker, unlike most Israel Firsters, is not just bought by Israel’s most extreme backers. He is a true believer. He loves Israel. It can do no wrong although, in the usual copout by Israel Firsters he says he does not like Netanyahu. BFD!

And he’s indifferent to Palestinian suffering. Even now. I’d put him high on any list of Democrats who should be taken out in a primary. Indifference to genocide against Palestinians is one reason. That is enough for me. Actually indifference to any genocide anywhere is enough for me.

Why is Yale University implicitly endorsing Israeli extremist Ben-Gvir?

Arwa Mahdawi FROM THE GUARDIAN

Shabtai, a Jewish society based at Yale, hosted the extremist far-right politician convicted of supporting terrorism. Why did Yale allow this?

Fri 25 Apr 2025 15.08 EDT

Let me start with a statement that should be obvious: deliberately starving 2 million people – half of whom are children – is indefensible. It is not complicated, it is not a nuanced situation that requires a PhD to parse. It is not an unfortunate and unavoidable part of war. It is quite simply indefensible. I would say that it is also very much prohibited by international human rights law, but that doesn’t seem to exist any more, does it?

As I write this, no food, water or medicine has been allowed into Gaza for almost two months. It is impossible to know just how bad the situation really is because Israel has imposed a media blackout on the region. However, aid organizations have said: “The Gaza Strip is now likely facing the worst humanitarian crisis in the 18 months” since the war began. Thousands of children are malnourished. Childhood malnutrition, I can’t stress enough, has long-term consequences. An entire generation’s future has been violently stolen from them.

“Starving kids to death is bad, actually” isn’t a statement that should require any debate. Over in the White House and the hallowed halls of Yale, however, they seem to think otherwise. On Wednesday night, an organization called Shabtai, which is based at Yale though not officially affiliated with it, hosted Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, for a talk.

Ben-Gvir has had the red carpet rolled out for him by the US. The extremist politician came to New Haven following an extravagant dinner, presumably paid for by US taxpayers, at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort the night before. While he ate fancy food with Republican party officials they all reportedly discussed how they could starve kids in Gaza more efficiently. “[Lawmakers] expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely,” Ben-Gvir tweeted following the dinner.

I’ll give Ben-Gvir his due. He doesn’t even try to hide his hatred for Arabs. If Ben-Gvir were a Palestinian, every single politician and media outlet would be in an uproar that he was anywhere near Yale. The man lives on an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank and has advocated for the deportation of all Arab citizens. He had a picture in his living room for years of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron in 1994. He has previous convictions for inciting racism and supporting terrorism.

Again, Shabtai is not officially associated with Yale but it very much looks like a Yale organization, especially as it is based there. It was founded by the Democratic senator and Yale alumnus Cory Booker and the New Haven rabbi Shmully Hecht. Speaking to Shabtai, with all its elite associations, grants Ben-Gvir respectability. It gives his violent and racist ideas legitimacy. Particularly as Hecht – a man closely associated with Booker – has said he admires Ben-Gvir. At the time of writing, Booker hadn’t made a public statement about Ben-Gvir’s Shabtai invitation and had not responded to a request for comment….

Once again: kids are being actively starved to death in Gaza as I write this. This should prompt nonstop outrage in the media. And yet there seems to have been far more outrage in certain sections of the US media about the fact that the Irish rap group Kneecap recently ended their Coachella set by displaying the message: “Fuck Israel, Free Palestine.” Fox News went into a complete tizzy about it. Meanwhile, Sharon Osbourne denounced their “aggressive statements” and called for the group to have their US visas revoked. Kneecap responded to Osbourne by noting: “Statements aren’t aggressive, murdering 20,000 children is though.” If only that were more obvious to people.

Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and barely mentioned Gaza. That’s no surprise

Judith Levine FROM THE GUARDIAN

Seven and three-quarters hours into his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker uttered the word “Gaza”. He was not talking about the war. He stepped nowhere near the 50,000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli armed forces since 8 October 2023, or the US’s military and political support of the genocide.

Rather, Booker was searching for a particularly ludicrous lie from a presidential administration that has told thousands. “There are lies about USAID, like, I don’t know, 5 million condoms going to Gaza or something outrageous,” he said. Considering the other outrageous things Trump has said about Gaza – such as his plan to “clean out” the strip to make room for luxury resorts – the remark felt trivializing.

The word “Gaza” came up once more, when the senator mentioned his “humanitarian and peace-building work” with the UN there.

It was not until hour 13, more than halfway through his oratorial marathon, that Booker engaged at any length with the subject of Israel and Palestine. This time it was not about the war, either. Instead, he was condemning the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech at universities and its summary deportation of legally resident foreign students who “espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine”.

The senator recounted the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish Tufts University graduate student who was surrounded on the street by masked plainclothes agents, handcuffed and hustled into an unmarked vehicle, then shipped to a hellish Louisiana detention center, where she faces deportation – all apparently because she co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper urging the college to divest from Israel. “Her arrest,” said Booker, “looks like a kidnapping that you might expect to see in Moscow rather than in the streets of Boston.” True.

Denouncing censorship, the senator self-censored. “Certain views on topics”: he neglected to specify which views. He didn’t say that punishment is being meted out exclusively to critics of Israel and never to its supporters, or that those supporters are supplying homeland security with the names of the critics – in other words, collaborating in the very violations of constitutional rights that he decries.

The atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza since the temporary ceasefire collapsed are arguably the worst yet. Trump is cheering Bibi on like a fan at a wrestling match. His support of Israel’s policies is not only unconsciously racist, like Biden’s, but blatantly racist. Yet few Democrats are saying – or, more importantly, doing – anything to stop him. In fact, a few days after the speech, Booker voted against Bernie Sanders’ resolutions to block $8.8bn in arms sales to the Netanyahu government. Only 14 of his colleagues voted in favor.

Antiwar activists are having a hard time catching anyone’s eyes – including the eyes of those who are sympathetic to their cause

Perhaps senators are hoping their constituents won’t notice their inaction. Indeed, as the mudslide of executive orders buries immigrants, federal workers, transgender people, science, regulation, the economy, the rule of law and US democracy, it is hard for the press, or anyone else, to take their eyes off what is going on at home. Even when horrors are taking place abroad. Especially if they’re taking place in Palestine.

Above: Cory Booker advises AIPAC to recruit more African American students. Lots of luck with that, Booker.