NEW YORK (JTA) — Joshua Topolsky, co-founder of the Vox media technology site The Verge, said the Jewish conservative writer Ben Shapiro was like Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.
“Ben Shapiro is the Jew who helps other Jews onto the train,” Topolsky wrote in a now-deleted tweet.
Topolsky, rather than apologize, said he deleted the tweet “because a mob of right wing babies were flooding my mentions and it was frankly pretty annoying (as were the DM death threats)” adding “I didn’t apologize lol.”
“You didn’t delete it because it was an abhorrent thing to say?” one user asked.
“No,” Topolsky responded.
“Absolutely disgusting,” the Republican Jewish Coalition tweeted. “Co-founder of liberal blog, Vox calls Ben Shapiro ‘The Jew Who Helps Other Jews Onto The Train.'”
Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of Vox.com, Vox Media’s primary politics site, responded to the RJC.
“Two points on this: One — Ben Shapiro once wrote a column calling Rahm Emannuel [sic] a ‘kapo’ so I don’t think he has much standing to complain. Two — Josh is not a ‘co-founder of liberal blog, Vox,'” he wrote.
Shapiro, the target of Topolsky’s tweet, is editor in chief of The Daily Wire, a conservative website. In 2010, he called both Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago who was a chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and the liberal Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros “kapos.” Kapos were prisoners who aided Nazis during the Holocaust.
A former Breitbart editor, Shapiro recently appeared on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” telling Maher that he did not vote for President Donald Trump in 2016. Shapiro, according to the Anti-Defamation League, was the top journalistic target of anti-Semitism from August 2015 to 2016.
