Queens, NY – Members of Community Board 9 are set discuss alleged anti-Semitic remarks made in June by Ozone Park’s Sam Esposito towards three Jewish fellow board members at Tuesday’s meeting.
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
DNAinfo.com (http://dnain.fo/1gG7fa5) reports that, at issue, is a disparaging email Esposito sent to board members Evelyn Baron, Wallace Bock, and Jan Fenster following a June meeting where the three—all Jewish— complained that the food provided for the board that evening included nothing kosher.
Following the snub, at least one of the three called board member Rabbi Daniel Pollack, complaining not only about the lack of kosher food, but about the fact that the board staff hadn’t even considered their kosher needs.
According to sources, Esposito’s email to the three said they “were acting like little children that did not get their way at the playground calling daddy on the phone complaining.”
Esposito’s email further stated that Baron, Bock, and Fenster were “ungrateful, selfish, ill-mannered, demanding, unthankful, …juvenile, impolite, ungracious, rude.”
Esposito wrote, “After seeing what I saw at the meeting, if that is what being Jewish is all about, I would rather be atheist because I was raised proper with respect and much different than you three.”
After receiving the email, Baron, Bock, and Fenster all signed off on a letter to CB9 chairman James Coccovillo, saying it was a “vicious anti-Semitic diatribe against the religion which I practice,” while calling for Esposito’s ouster.
What is anti-Semitic about this? Inconsiderate perhaps, but sounds like an abuse of the term.
Food at a Community Board meeting? I’ve been on Board Q14 for 20 years and never had any food at a meeting!!!
This is ridiculous. This Esposito guy did nothing that warrants his ouster.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t se any anti-Semitism here. Frivolous charges like these, undermine the seriousness with which real charges of anti-Semitism are taken.
This moron needs grammar lessons.
Maybe he can not only be an atheist, he can eat off the floor too.
Some of you have to get real; clearly, Esposito’s remarks bordered on insensitivity, at the least; at worst, it bordered on ethnic slurring. One time, an Irish detective whom I worked with told me “I’m glad that you ain’t Irish, because for someone who is Jewish, you’re pretty stupid”. Esposito’s remarks were similar. Jews should not have to stand for such vicious language. Esposito wouldn’t have uttered similar remarks to Blacks.