{"id":195094,"date":"2026-02-26T17:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T17:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/195094\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T17:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T17:28:09","slug":"lurie-blamed-s-f-group-for-antisemitic-chants-it-was-one-woman-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/195094\/","title":{"rendered":"Lurie blamed S.F. \u2018group\u2019 for antisemitic chants. It was one woman."},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie stood alongside city officials and more than a dozen construction workers in hard hats Wednesday afternoon minutes after announcing a proposed new tax cut<\/a> for multi-million dollar real estate deals. That\u2019s when the woman started shouting.<\/p>\n

\u201cTax the Israel! Tax the Israel!\u201d shouted the woman, a passer-by who had wandered into a democratic socialist-lead protest against the tax cut and modified the group\u2019s \u201cTax the rich!\u201d chant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She then started bellowing: \u201cTax the Jews! Tax the Jews!\u201d<\/p>\n

Her chants are clearly audible to officials at the press conference, according to video<\/a> taken from the event, which was held inside a construction site at 1111 Sutter St. in Lower Nob Hill on the cusp of the Tenderloin. The press conference, held by Lurie and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, was fenced off from the protesters, and the site\u2019s chain-link fence was obscured by an orange scrim. Protesters said they could not see the presser\u2019s attendees, and vice-versa.<\/p>\n

It is unclear if Lurie reacted in the moment but, about three hours later, his team put out a statement<\/a>: \u201cAt an event this afternoon, a group of individuals that were chanting \u2018tax the rich\u2019 began to shout \u2018tax the Jews,\u2019\u201d Lurie wrote. \u201cSuggesting that Jews are wealthy is a tired trope, and targeting our community at an event focused on creating economic opportunity for San Franciscans is decidedly antisemitic.\u201d<\/p>\n

It escaped containment. Gov. Gavin Newsom<\/a>, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan<\/a>, Rep. Eric Swalwell<\/a>, Sen. Scott Wiener<\/a>, and dozens of others issued their own condemnations of antisemitism<\/a>. The New York Post headlined blared<\/a> \u201cVile antisemitic chant breaks out at San Francisco press conference.\u201d A CNN reporter, like many others, repeated<\/a> Lurie\u2019s line that \u201ca group of people\u201d participated in the chants. Lurie\u2019s spokesperson said<\/a> he had \u201cnever experienced something like this until today.\u201d Even David Axelrod, Barack Obama\u2019s former advisor, weighed in<\/a> about the \u201cechoes of another, very dark time.\u201d<\/p>\n

By early Thursday morning, a little after noon in Israel, the Jerusalem Post\u2019s homepage carried the piece<\/a>, \u201c\u2018Tax the Jews\u2019 replaces \u2018tax the rich\u2019 chants at San Francisco event, mayor says.\u201d The Times of Israel followed with its own article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thousands of real and imaginary people on social media denounced San Francisco as a hotbed of antisemitism, which was portrayed as the natural course for left-wing politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But the account from Lurie was inaccurate, four participants of the protest said \u2014 and their version of events is corroborated by the on-site video<\/a>. It was not a group chant. It was a lone woman, allegedly known to the construction workers in the area as abrasive and apparently mentally ill, who ambled up and chanted on her own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The protesters, who are with the Democratic Socialists of America, told her to stop, they said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt some point, some woman comes over, I think she lives across the street, and started talking to me about, \u2018Hey what\u2019s this about?\u2019\u201d said Matthew Pancia, a treasurer with DSA San Francisco. <\/p>\n

Pancia, who is Jewish, said he gave her his spiel and she joined in. \u201cThen two minutes in, she starts saying weird shit,\u201d he said. \u201cShe started saying \u2018Tax Israel,\u2019 \u2018Tax the Jews,\u2019 and immediately I was like \u2018No, no, no, not that one, don\u2019t say that \u2014 I\u2019m a Jew, I don\u2019t think you should say that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Pancia said she paused and then \u201cshe started saying it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were multiple attempts to speak with her, and then there was an attempt by us to drown her out by repeating the \u2018Tax the Rich\u2019 chant,\u201d said Christin Evans, another participant. At one point, Evans said she told the woman: \u201cThat\u2019s not why we\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Video<\/a> posted by the account StopAntisemitism shows the woman wandering about, alone, outside the press conference, shouting \u201cCancel Israel!\u201d and \u201cShame on Jews!\u201d The DSA members confirmed it was the same woman.<\/p>\n

San Francisco \u2013 keffiyeh clad woman walks around screaming “Shame on Jews” \u2026 “tax on Israel”.<\/p>\n

Near\/at Larkin and Sutter Streets \u2013 she appears to be local to the area. Recognize her? pic.twitter.com\/fHoZIviqeU<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) February 25, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t really have a way to stop her, so we just started chanting over her and eventually she just rambled on,\u201d added Marc Dantona, another protester. Jennifer Bolen, co-chair of DSA San Francisco, said that when she walked up to the woman to tell her to leave, \u201cshe blew up at me, threw her hands up, I stepped back, and then she left.\u201d<\/p>\n

The episode lasted perhaps five to 10 minutes, the participants said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The mayor\u2019s office did not reply to questions asking whether Lurie would retract or modify his version of events. <\/p>\n

The San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, which was also at the press conference, has done so. It issued its own initial statement<\/a> in line with Lurie\u2019s but, six and a half hours later, acknowledged it was incorrect.<\/p>\n

Building Trades at 3 p.m. on Wednesday claimed that \u201cindividuals identifying themselves with the Democratic Socialists of America disrupted the event with antisemitic chants.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 9:30 p.m. \u201cupdate,\u201d it clarified that \u201cWe have been in touch with members of DSA San Francisco, who have reiterated their condemnation of the antisemitic remarks made by an individual who was not part of their protest nor a member of their organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of today, the union\u2019s admittedly erroneous statement is still posted online<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Woman was purportedly known to construction workers<\/p>\n

Pancia and Dantona spoke to construction workers outside the fence, who recognized the woman. \u201cThey were like, \u2018We know her, this lady comes out and just yells shit at us,\u2019\u201d Pancia said. A worker told Dantona: \u201cOh yeah, that lady, she\u2019s around \u2014 she\u2019s a crazy person.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

For seasoned protesters in a city with its share of troubled people on the street, the unhinged comments were not as surprising as the mayor\u2019s response \u2014\u00a0and the resultant international amplification of the shoutings of a random passer-by.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe get it, we\u2019re in the TL, people are out,\u201d said Pancia. \u201cAs an organizer, I mean, it\u2019s almost at every community rally or protest \u2026 there\u2019s going to be someone coming to say something,\u201d added Bolen. \u201cEveryone does the same thing: You de-escalate, they lose steam, and they walk away. That\u2019s what we did here.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, Bolen said, it was \u201ca little reckless\u201d of Lurie to issue the statement he did. \u201cIt makes the city less safe to create this story that a group of people were engaging in an antisemitic protest when it was a single woman who did not seem to have all her facilities.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lurie\u2019s team did not reach out to DSA, she said, and DSA in fact had issued a statement<\/a> two hours before the mayor\u2019s saying that a lone \u201cnon-member joined the crowd and spouted disgusting antisemitic remarks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pancia called the reaction a \u201cvery cynical, obnoxious weaponization of a random person\u201d and said that, \u201cas a Jew,\u201d he found the \u201cboy-who-cried-wolf antisemitism\u201d from Lurie to be \u201coffensive\u201d and \u201cgross.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of Frank Chu \u2014 it\u2019s the same thing,\u201d added Dantona, referencing San Francisco\u2019s famed former eccentric<\/a> who was for years a ubiquitous presence at demonstrations and large events, carrying signs warning against the \u201c12 galaxies\u201d and alien mind control. <\/p>\n

Associating the many hundreds of demonstrations that Chu crashed over the years with the views of the paranoid conspiracy theorist would be as unfair as what happened Wednesday, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf somebody thinks about it and takes a picture of Frank Chu and says, \u2018These are the crazy leftists in San Francisco,\u2019 that\u2019s what this is,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like if we rewind 25 years and Frank Chu is there with his sign and Fox News says \u2018look at these liberals.\u2019 It\u2019s an opportunity, and they\u2019re on top of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As of Wednesday evening, DSA organizers said no one from Lurie\u2019s team had reached out to check on the veracity of the mayor\u2019s broadly distributed claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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