New York City Mayor Eric Adams compared an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor to a “plantation” owner after she complained about rising rents at a town hall meeting in the Washington Heights neighborhood Wednesday.
Jeanie Dubnau was born in Belgium after her parents fled Nazi Germany. She is well known in New York as an advocate for tenants’ rights as the co-founder of the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association (RENA).
This woman is Jeanie Dubnau, the Co-Founder of the Riverside Edgecombe Neighborhood Association (RENA), a tenants & housing rights advocacy organization in Upper Manhattan. She has +40 years advocating for low income NYers of all races. Jeanie is not a racist & this was wrong. https://t.co/KA3lEQDlYu
— Juan Rosa (@JuanRosa_NYC) June 29, 2023
The Forward, a left-wing Jewish publication, reported:
“Don’t stand in front like you treated someone that’s on the plantation that you own,” Adams told Dubnau Wednesday at a town hall meeting in Washington Heights.
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In a phone interview, Dubnau, a microbiologist on the faculty of Rutgers University, said she was born in Brussels after her parents fled Nazi Germany. They managed to survive the war in France in hiding and “were lucky enough to come here,” to the U.S., sponsored by her mother’s uncle.
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Asked to comment on the mayor’s rhetoric toward her, she said, “I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about what the mayor has done as an enemy of the tenants. He was deflecting. He was trying to get away from that.”
Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews, and 5 million others, in the Holocaust. Many of those who survived Nazi concentration camps had been slave laborers, forced to produce war materiel for the Nazi military.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
