From Mintzer, On The Hush-Hush: The San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council’s Behind-The-Scenes Assault on Free Speech in Marin County

CPRA’d documents show the JCRC’s “suggestion” to shut down Zoom participation at council meetings in Marin started as early as September 26, 2023, and took effect in San Rafael by October 2, 2023

On July 8, I published an article about elected officials in Marin who accepted largely undisclosed trips to Israel paid for by the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (SF JCRC). Since that time, I have continued to retrieve emails that trace the political influence of the SF JCRC and other prominent pro-Israel groups based in the Bay Area. Often, these groups’ efforts are focused on controlling and/or limiting First Amendment rights under the pretext of “limiting hate speech.” In Marin County, this has impacted not only Jewish residents who are critics of Israel’s policies but, as importantly, Latino and Black residents of the Canal and Marin City who continue to be restricted from full participation in local meetings.

Still, few would have imagined that SF JCRC, a powerful nonprofit based in San Francisco, would have micromanaged their effort to focus on ending zoom/virtual participation at City Council meetings in Marin. But consider a September 26, 2023 email sent to Ross Town Mayor Bill Kircher from SF JCRC’s “Director of External Relations” Jonathan Mintzer. In the email, Mintzer proposed that, as a remedy for “antisemitic and bigoted statements during public comment periods” (comments that had allegedly been issued delivered by an organized white supremacist “zoom-bomb” group in Sonoma County), a town or a city might simply shut down zoom public comment entirely.

In support of this notion, Mintzer cited as a resource a legal memo conveniently penned by San Rafael City Attorney (and former Osher Marin JCC Vice President) Rob Epstein. You may remember Rob Epstein as the City Attorney who delivered a particularly clumsy public response after the savage San Rafael Police beating of a Latino gardener in 2022. At that time, a historically large number of Latino residents had appeared to criticize Epstein’s failure to act in response to the beating. Many of those Latino residents had been able to participate via Zoom. Here is a brief sample of Epstein’s unhappy response to actual workingclass Latino residents in 2022:

Ross Town Mayor Bill Kircher, a former US Attorney who once worked for State Senator Arlen Gregorio, appears not to have taken Mintzer’s suggestion to end zoom participation to heart, as the Town of Ross still permits virtual public comment. But in the cities that aligned with Mintzer’s suggestion, ending zoom public comment has severely limited the participation of workingclass and poor residents. In San Rafael, the kibosh on zoom access is so extreme that the City has routinely denied zoom/virtual participation even for people too disabled to attend in person, and even after they put their disability access request into writing to Rob Epstein’s office. In San Rafael, it also appears that the general public was neither given any warning that eliminating zoom participation was being considered, nor were they asked for their input. The change came six days after Mintzer’s email, co-signed by San Rafael Councilmember Rachel Kertz (Mintzer’s BANJO co-Chair), was sent to Bill Kircher.

The denial of zoom participation was also deeply discriminatory against many elderly residents who cannot attend in person, especially during periods of rising Covid rates in Marin. Yet Mintzer’s email gave absolutely zero consideration to the silencing of those voices; nowhere in the email does Mintzer even mention the First Amendment, or demonstrate an ounce of concern for how his suggestion would impact a broad variety of vulnerable residents who do not enjoy the perks and salary of Mintzer’s powerful position. 

Which is funny, in a bleak way, because other documents retrieved indicate that the SF JCRC has been trying to promote its own DEI training. That’s right, the powerful nonprofit that has lobbied against ceasefire resolutions across the Bay Area and which has insisted that everything from the Palestinian flag to protesting genocide is “antisemitic”, has been actively promoting its own special brand of DEI training. It’s almost as if those of you who were skeptical about how DEI had been weaponized to gate-keep workingclass and poor minorities out of critical decisions were, at the very least, onto something.

Mintzer’s Mash-Note:

Here’s the original email from Mintzer to Ross Town Council Member Bill Kircher, which starts out innocuously enough, before it goes downhill.

Note that Mintzer referenced that the zoom-bombers made “antisemitic and bigoted comments” but declined to identify that the zoom-bomber group had also made viciously anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ statements during a period when violent, and even fatal attacks on Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, Muslim, Arab, and LGBTQ people have become increasingly common. Meanwhile, the ADL has come under increasing criticism for artificially inflating data on antisemitic incidents, data to which the SF JCRC has clung.

It’s worth noting that no emails from other groups appear to have been sent regarding the zoom-bombers. That is, there appear to be no emails suggesting ending zoom participation from any Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, or LGBTQ groups. The only group that appears to have suggested such restrictions is the SF JCRC.

Mintzer’s email thanked members of the Jewish Community Federation for assistance in compiling the checklist. You might recall that the JCF was previously exposed by The Forward, Ha’aretz, and The Nation Magazine as having surreptitiously helped to fund the Israeli spying operation “Canary Mission”, which doxxed and harassed Jewish and Muslim activists and academics simply because they had criticized Israel. That illegal activity by a foreign agent is no small matter, but it doesn’t seem to have dented the formidable power of the JCF.

Mintzer’s subsequent “checklist” recommended that Kircher check out the JCRC’s DEI training, and, in a subsequent item, unnamed other DEI trainings. Given how controversial the SF JCRC has become with other advocacy groups in California, it’s not surprising that Mintzer couldn’t name any Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, or LGBTQ groups to provide DEI training; those same groups are increasingly critical of the JCRC.

Mintzer’s “Other Ways to Adapt Public Comment Procedures”

The insidious part of Mintzer’s email is in the second half, where it listed: “Other Ways to Adapt Public Comment Procedures”, the first of which is “moving the public comment period to the end of meeting agendas.” But this move is particularly restrictive for working people because it’s impossible to predict when the end of any given meeting will occur. In fact, one of the reforms Supervisor Rodoni implemented back in 2021 was moving the County Supervisors meeting’s public comment period to the beginning of the meeting, so that working people could fit their participation into a more predictable timeline, and thus not be penalized by their employers.

Mintzer then suggested closing public comment after a “reasonable time” if hate speech commences, but this punishes the entire public for offensive speech that an outside group is engaged in, and which the rest of the public members have nothing to do with at all.

On his way to suggesting shutting down public comment entirely, Mintzer then suggests a variety of meaningless actions, among them “Providing board members with signs affirming the agency’s commitment to inclusivity.” This would change absolutely nothing. Nor would “Physically turn one’s back to hateful speakers to show opposition,” or “Requesting speakers provide their full name and location prior to speaking.” You can do all of this, but it’s not required by the Brown Act, nor does anyone have to comply. Then again, if Mintzer doesn’t write a lot of meaningless emails, how would he make such a fat salary? Mintzer needs to look like he’s “doing a lot of stuff”; the actual content doesn’t matter.

And because none of the above would make any difference, Mintzer closes with the real point of his memo. When all else fails, he suggests: “Ending the option to provide virtual public comment.” 

To buttress his “suggestions”, Mintzer cites four documents. The first is a legal memo penned by Rob Epstein, the City Attorney of San Rafael. Second is an article on the group that was alleged to be the hateful zoom-bombers, a group known as the “Goyim Defense League; this article was penned by the ADL. (Recall that the ADL itself has generated several exposés of its racist history, a history so egregious that it spurred a movement called “Drop the ADL”.)

Mintzer also provides the California AG’s “Guide to the Brown Act”, and an article by Kevin Wilk, Walnut Creek Councilmember. (Wilk’s article ran in Jweekly.com, which is little more than a newsletter financed by SF JCF, which is reported to have helped finance Canary Mission.)

And though the September 26, 2023 email was sent from Mintzer’s email account, the signatories include two others: San Rafael City Council Member Rachel Kertz; and El Cerrito Mayor Pro Tem Tessa Rudnick; the two co-Chairs of SF JCRC’s “Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials”. (BANJO, alongside Mintzer, appears to have coordinated the pro-Israel mini-mob that harassed and finally assaulted ceasefire advocates in Fairfax last June.)

I had difficulty at first obtaining Epstein’s legal memo, which understandably was not delivered as a workable link within the PDF’d email by the Town of Ross. But although it was written by the City Attorney of San Rafael, it was apparently not available on any San Rafael City Council agendas.

Did that mean that the SF JCRC had been provided with a legal memo penned by the San Rafael City Attorney before the public ever got it? 

After an email to the City Attorney’s office, and voicemails left at Rob Epstein’s private law firm, I did receive the legal memo from the San Rafael City Attorney’s office, and subsequently the document was released to me by the Town of Ross.

If the memo had been made available to the public, I would have expected the City Attorney’s office to include a link to the agenda in which it first appeared, as they normally would. Instead, I received an email with a pdf file of the legal memo. I circled back with the San Rafael City Attorney office to inquire whether it had ever been provided to the public previously. They have not responded. 

And when you read the 1.25-page memo, you might understand why. It’s so sparse that Epstein didn’t even bother to date it. And this blew my mind: the average hospital janitor is still required to date his signature on the completion sheet when he finishes cleaning the bathroom in the emergency room. So how does a six-figure City Attorney fail to date an actual legal memo? 

The lack of a date made me wonder: Is it possible Epstein’s memo was never supposed to be read by the general public? Was this document produced by the City Attorney primarily for use by the SF JCRC?

Guess What Epstein’s Memo Doesn’t Recommend?

But let’s not overlook what’s in Epstein’s memo, or rather, what’s not. To my surprise, nowhere in Epstein’s legal memo did Epstein recommend that zoom/remote/virtual participation be ended. But in San Rafael, six days after Mintzer’s email, zoom participation was ended, and has remained ended. 

This gives the unfortunate appearance that JCRC’s Jonathan Mintzer, a man whom we know little about, is calling the shots in San Rafael, at least in regard to how public participation will be managed.

The Signatories:

The email was sent from Mintzer’s account, but is co-signed by his BANJO Co-Chairs, one of whom sits on San Rafael City Council. During this October 2, 2023 meeting, the Mayor, Kate Colin, who has repeatedly conveyed her allegiance to Israel in emails retrieved via CPRA, cited “hate speech” from zoom-bombers as the reason for ending zoom public comment.

But here’s the thing. The actual hate-speech zoom-bombers had appeared at no more than a handful of city council meetings. And what’s more, other cities had already demonstrated that the zoom-bombers could easily be cut off once it was determined that they were part of a coordinated attack. In the zoom-bombers, the SF JCRC had helped San Rafael identify a “problem” that was nearly engineered to achieve the goal of restricting regular working-class and poor residents from making relevant and valid critiques of city policy. 

And what were the two cities in Marin that were quickest to eliminate zoom participation? They are the two cities with the largest Latino populations: San Rafael and Novato. Another city was Mill Valley, which had previously “suffered” from having Black residents of Marin City call in and register complaint with how the Mill Valley Police treated Black Tamalpais High School students from Marin City. But none of those comments had ever constituted hate speech of any kind.

*****

There’s much more in the CPRA’d emails, I have received thousands of pages of documents in response to my requests, and as related in the last article, I hope to be able to write about as many of them as possible. As a preview, I offer my own appearance at San Rafael City Council this past month, when I again raised questions about Councilmember Kertz’s use of official City email to lobby for Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza — apparently with the approval of Rob Epstein.

I’ll update later this week with some important information about legislative hearings in Sacramento that start on August 5, and will include an update on the latest “People vs Margoliash” hearing, which took an unexpected turn.

©️2024 Eva Chrysanthe