To the editor:
Your Oct. 2 article on District 4 candidate Majdi Gaith’s fireside chat with Hatem Bazian quotes Gaith lamenting “the Zionist takeover of council.” The Daily Cal also featured that quote on its Instagram. In neither place did readers get any indication that the remark was anything but ordinary campaign rhetoric.
It is not ordinary. The claim that Jews, or “Zionists” standing in for them, have taken control of a government is among the oldest antisemitic tropes. The article also relays, unexamined, a moderator’s objection that a city commissioner “holds Zionist beliefs,” as though that alone disqualified someone from public service.
Reporters should report what candidates say. But when a newspaper repeats conspiratorial rhetoric about Jews without comment, it tells readers this is a normal part of local political debate. A single sentence would have done the job: a note that this language echoes long-standing conspiracy theories about Jewish power, or a follow-up question to the candidate.
Berkeley’s Jewish residents read the Daily Cal too. We ask the editors to add that context to the article and the Instagram post, and to adopt a clear standard for covering such rhetoric before Election Day.
This letter was written by Itamar Landau, a member of the Jewish Coalition of Berkeley and a UC Berkeley alumnus. To submit a letter to the editor, please see this guide.