Mayor John V. Lindsay, who announced yesterday that he will run for re-election in November, faces an up hill fight and not the least of his problems is his relations with New York’s Jewish community which largely supported him when he ran for Mayor in 1965, the Wall Street Journal reported today.
Journal reporter Alan Adelson found bitterness against Mr. Lindsay among two groups–the white working class and the Jews. “Both groups blame the Mayor for the city’s big increases in crime,” Mr. Adelson wrote. “Anger among the Jews is also fueled by charges that Mr. Lindsay encouraged anti-Semitism in the city’s school system by backing efforts to decentralize school administration. It’s claimed that black Militants used a decentralization experiment in the largely Negro Ocean Hill Brownsville section of Brooklyn to harass Jewish teachers.”
Mr. Adelson said that last Sunday, Mayor Lindsay spoke to a Jewish gathering at a new gymnasium on the lower East side. “The audience appeared to be friendly, but in the middle of the mayor’s speech a voice boomed out from the back of the hall interrupting him: ‘What’s happening with all the violence in the schools, Mr. Lindsay? Mr. Quisling? You gave the city to them. Quisling Lindsay.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
