What A Berkeley Elected Official’s Largely Undisclosed Trip to Israel (With Novato Mayor Mark Milberg) Tells Us About “People Vs. Margoliash” and AB 2925

Berkeley City Auditor Jenny Wong’s Undisclosed JCRC-funded 2023 Trip To Israel Is Less Interesting Than What She Revealed About Her JCRC Overnight At Camp Newman

Editor’s Note/Update to last week's article: On August 6, I trailed a group of teachers and activists as they tried to convince California legislators to defeat four toxic bills pushed by JPAC and the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council. Then, last Thursday, Assembly Bill 2918, the not-so-fondly nicknamed “Harass Your Local Ethnic Studies Teacher Bill” was pulled by its author, Assemblyman Rick Zbur. The heroic teachers, many of whom had been targeted for harassment and hounded out of their jobs, won a significant victory – the toxic bill is dead, at least in this iteration. The death of the bill represents a major setback for JPAC and the JCRC, who plan to return with a more punitive bill next year. I hope to have more on that story as it develops. Meanwhile:

This past week, through examination of Form 700’s, I confirmed more SF JCRC-funded Israel junkets accepted by elected officials in Marin County. These trips had been only marginally disclosed to the public, if at all. While I had previously reported the participation on a JCRC-funded trip to Israel in March of 2023 by Novato Mayor Mark Milberg, Tiburon Councilmember Holli Thier, and San Rafael Councilmember Rachel Kertz; it was not until last week that I was able to confirm that Corte Madera Councilmember Eli Beckman and Sausalito Councilmember Melissa Blaustein were on the same trip. But there, barely visible in the background of a group photo of the JCRC’s guests at Israel’s Knesset on March 22, 2023, appeared a less familiar face: that of progressive darling Jenny Wong, first elected as Berkeley City Auditor in 2018 on a promise of expanding transparency in Berkeley city government. 

Wong’s undisclosed participation in the JCRC’s 2023 Israel trip – and followup overnight outing with the FBI and US Attorneys at Camp Newman in Sonoma County – sheds light on a case currently winding its way through Marin County Superior Court, and on a separate Assembly bill at the California State Legislature (AB 2925).

Sadly, despite Wong’s promises of expanded transparency, her participation on the JCRC trip was news to all of the longtime Berkeley activists I spoke with in the last week who had supported Wong in her last two elections (Wong first won in 2018, and ran uncontested in 2022.) Wong had never mentioned her JCRC-funded Israel trip at any Berkeley City Council meeting. Wong’s Form 700 was neither available for download on the FPPC website nor available through the City of Berkeley (COB) website. (One Berkeley activist pointed out that Wong should have submitted a COB Form 801 for conflict of interest trips, but appears not to have done so.)

Note that Wong herself filled out the form incorrectly. She later informed me that the year of her trip to Israel was 2023, and not 2024.

This lack of disclosure is all the more remarkable given that Wong was well aware of the controversy that ensued after Mayor Jesse Arreguin went on an earlier JCRC-funded junket to Israel the prior year, which resulted in public protest and considerable local news coverage. The protests included one of the last public protests that the late, great former mayor Gus Newport participated in before his controversial death in 2023. Newport had long been a supporter of Palestinian rights, and a critic of Israel’s policies.

I.

Questions for the City Auditor

On Monday, I emailed Wong about her missing Form 700’s, and she graciously called me back and answered many, but not all, of my questions. The information provided by Wong during that 23-minute phone call sheds light on “People v. Margoliash” in Marin County Superior Court — and on Assembly Bill 2925. (It also offered a glimpse of one of the most powerful, yet least scrutinized, elected officials in the Bay Area – the Alameda County Treasurer, Henry C. Levy, who also participated in the trip. Levy’s Form 700’s, retrieved from the FPPC, reveal one of the more sophisticated investment portfolios I have yet seen reported on any Form 700.)

Wong not only answered many of my questions, but she did not hang up on me at any point during the call; she deserves credit for that. I have written the following not to castigate Wong (although I am unsparing in my criticism of her actions and essay), but rather in the interest of examining how Wong and others have allowed themselves to be used, and what it suggests about our collective bias and collective complicity in Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinian civilians.

A summary of Wong’s points during Monday’s phone call:

1. Opportunity Knocks!

Wong stated that she did go to Israel on a trip paid for by the San Francisco JCRC in March of 2023, but could not remember the amount the JCRC paid for the trip. When asked whether it was appropriate to accept a costly junket from a controversial NPO that essentially functions as a lobbying group for Israel, Wong said she felt that “as somebody who is Jewish” (Wong married into a Jewish family and converted to Judaism) she was “presented with this kind of opportunity.”

In fact, the JCRC trips do, in fact, provide a “kind of opportunity” to secure future campaign funding and essential connections from a very powerful network of Israel supporters, both Jewish and Christian, although this aspect of the the trips are unstated. 

2. Wong And Levy’s Side-Trip During The Israel Junket

In response to my questions, Wong brought up the participation of Alameda County Treasurer, Henry C. Levy, one of the most powerful and least scrutinized men in Alameda. Until that phone call, I had not known of Levy’s participation, and apparently few other constituents did, either.

Wong said that during the trip to Israel, she and Levy had felt the need to make an additional visit to a group called “Extend” which, Wong suggested, provided a less biased perspective on Israel-Palestine than that provided by JCRC. This raises a pretty obvious contradiction: If Wong and Levy needed to seek out an “independent” voice in “Extend”, they clearly knew the JCRC trip was a lobbying effort with, at best, “bias” (a point repeatedly raised by those who had protested Arreguin’s trip the year before.)

So why accept the trip? And if you had taken it, why bury the evidence? If an official cannot disclose a “simple” trip to Israel, what else aren’t they telling us in their capacity as an elected official? That may seem an impolite question to ask of a progressive darling, but it is a legitimate and valid question that others should already have asked, and which Wong should answer.

3. On Wong’s Lack of Disclosure About The Israel Junket

Wong stated that she disclosed the trip “on Instagram”, but I was unable to find the disclosure on her Instagram account (@jennytheauditor), and Wong did not send me the link. Wong said her Form 700 was not available on the FPPC or the City of Berkeley website because she is not a 87-200 filer.

I pointed out that there was nothing prohibiting a City Auditor, especially one who had campaigned on transparency, from making her Form 700 available on the City website, or from making a proper disclosure of the trip in the appropriate venue of a regular meeting of City Council, not social media.

“I did my best,” Wong asserted.

4. Wong Doesn’t Remember Whether the FBI or US Attorneys Were At Camp Newman

Wong said she did not remember the date she attended Camp Newman, but I later confirmed through her 2023 Form 700 (which I had to retrieve in person from the City Clerk’s office on Monday, as Wong did not provide it until the following day) that it was the September 8–9, 2023 overnight trip. Per the JCRC and the US Attorney’s Office Of Northern California, the FBI and two US Attorneys (Benjamin Kingsley and David Devito) were present at the September 8-9 overnight.

When asked about FBI and US Attorney participation at the Camp Newman overnight, Wong stated that she did not recall whether either were present at the event.

I asked Wong how it was possible that anyone could attend an overnight with the FBI and US Attorneys and not remember whether they were present. The FBI has routinely targeted Asian Americans and other racial minorities – how could an elected official who speaks and writes publicly about her own Asian American identity, and about “anti-Asian hate”, not have noticed the presence of the FBI at an overnight?

Wong stated that “I’ve been to so many different things, I don’t remember.”

We moved on to the next topic.

5. On Joining – And Leaving – BANJO

Wong stated that she had been a member of JCRC’s Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials (BANJO) but that she was no longer a member. She estimated that she became a BANJO member before the March 2023 trip, and ceased to be a member at an unspecified date after the September 2023 overnight trip at Camp Newman in Sonoma County. She did not divulge the reason for her departure from this group. 

As an Asian American, Wong would have been a particularly valued member of BANJO, because she lent a gloss of color to an otherwise all-white group. (The March 2023 JCRC junket to Israel group photo appears to be entirely white except for two Asian-Americans, of which Wong was one.) Like the multi-million-dollar, Berkeley-based nonprofit “Jews of Color”, funded out of the SF Jewish Community Federation (the same SF JCF that funneled Diller money into Israeli spy operation Canary Mission), there has been a concerted effort from pro-Israel organizations to re-brand themselves as “multicultural” and “LGBTQ”-friendly in order to distract from supporting an Israeli government that is engaged in running an apartheid state and now conducting a genocide. 

Toward that effort, Wong penned a 2021 essay for Jweekly, ostensibly about her upbringing in relation to anti-Asian hate and briefly, her conversion to and relationship with Judaism. Notably, Wong’s essay declines to note the larger reality: the majority of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US have been enacted by the state and federal governments. Nowhere in Wong’s essay is the Chinese Exclusion Act even mentioned, nor any of the Bay Area politicians who legislated the Act and its extensions (e.g., I.W. Hellman-funded Julius Kahn). The Exclusion Act was far more severe than simple exclusion to entry into the US; it destroyed the civil rights of Chinese already living in the US, and negatively impacted the civil rights of other racial and religious minorities. 

Wong’s essay further declines to mention any of the multiple current lawsuits and complaints filed against law enforcement for targeting Asian Americans. And that is a very specific choice for a woman who will later end up on a JCRC-funded junket to Israel and an overnight with the FBI and the US attorneys at Camp Newman.

I’ve read through Wong’s essay several times now. On its surface, it’s very multicultural-Horatio-Alger (I persevered! I am better off than my parents financially!) but two paragraphs surprised me for their pandering.  “Living in a culture that does not encourage talking about discrimination only perpetuates it and allows racism and hate to continue,” Wong writes, leaving it open to interpretation which culture, “American” or “Asian”, is not “encouraging.”

But in the following paragraph, she clearly indicates that it's Judaism that has liberated her to talk about her shared oppression, i.e., as an Asian American she is repressed, but as a Jew, she is miraculously saved. Wong’s description has a bit of an evangelical cast to it:

“One of the things that attracted me to Judaism and that I love about our religion is how it centers studying, remembering and celebrating the story of our oppression and collective liberation during the holiday of Pesach. As Jews, we tell and retell how we were slaves, the challenges we faced and how we ultimately obtained freedom.”

I should not have to be the only person to challenge the premise that Wong puts forth, but on the most obvious level, anyone who thinks Asian Americans do not discuss their trauma has not actually been listening to Asian mothers who, in my experience, fume not so quietly. (Sometimes even in public meetings, and about a variety of issues.) Complaining is, thankfully, a universal trait, although it may be exercised in different fashions by different cultures. And this is true not just of Asian Americans. There is over a thousand years just of Chinese literature alone filled with expositions of trauma, rage, grief, rebellious women, petty beefs between rival poets, bad jokes that would make Mel Brooks blush, and so on. You don't even have to go back 100 years to read Lu Xun!

Wong’s premise appears to disregard Asian cultural traditions in order to conform to a media stereotype of a long-suffering model minority, while assuming that all Jewish culture is “expressively” represented by the mores of 21st-century reform Judaism. And it is depressing that no one in “progressive” Berkeley ever asked any reasonable questions about the obvious anti-Asian bias in Wong’s essay, which was later republished in Hellman-supported Berkeleyside. Here's a screenshot of the paragraphs I found so puzzling in Wong’s essay:

6. Wong’s Remarkable Claim About What Constitutes Antisemitism

Wong stated that the Camp Newman event had a focus on antisemitism and hate crimes, and that she and the other participants were separated into groups, where they discussed individual topics. Wong stated that her contribution to the discussion of anti-semitism and hate crimes was: “I was sharing information about Berkeley and some of the challenges in Berkeley and some of the schools having graduation on Shabbat.”

This was an astonishing claim. Graduation happens only once a year, and even amongst Berkeley’s Jewish residents, few observe Shabbat so strictly that they could not attend a special event like a graduation on Shabbat. Was Wong trolling me? When I pointed out that this was hardly the stuff of “antisemitism” or “hate crimes”, Wong insisted that she thought it fit the parameters of the discussion topic.

I asked Wong why, at an event where the FBI and at least two US Attorneys had been present, she had not seen fit to use the opportunity to bring up actual hate crimes in Berkeley, the targets of which are overwhelmingly racial minorities, including South Asian and Arab Muslims. In one case profiled in The New Yorker Magazine, a UC Berkeley lecturer, Hatem Bazian, was targeted by a pro-Trump Israeli intelligence outfit that was permitted free rein in the City of Berkeley, in apparent violation of international law. Wong repeated that she had tried to follow the parameters of the discussion, still declining to concede that cases like Hatem Bazian’s case would have fit within the parameters of the discussion.

7. Wong’s Ceasefire Letter

Apparently as a means to argue that the JCRC-funded junket had not influenced her decision-making process, Wong added that she had brought forward a ceasefire letter to Berkeley City Council last December. The letter, which asks for a “long-term” but not a permanent ceasefire, is notable both for the signatures it gathered – and for those it did not. (Alameda County Treasurer Henry Levy was a signatory.) The letter demands a return of hostages, but makes no mention of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons and other detention centers, many being juveniles held without charges. (These “prisoners” are essentially hostages, and the systematic torture, rape and sexual abuse of the Palestinians had been reported well before October 7.)

I have some qualified appreciation for Wong’s effort in this, because the letter, taken at face value, was a worthwhile effort that should have garnered more support from Berkeley City Council. But Wong applied little of the leverage that her position permitted her.

When I suggested to Wong that her introduction of the ceasefire letter would have been the perfect time to disclose finally her JCRC-paid trip to Israel, Wong seemed to shrug it off. But had she acknowledged the trip, Wong could have leveraged her involvement with the JCRC and BANJO to make a stronger case for the letter with the strongly pro-Israel Berkeley City Council and strongly pro-Israel residents who influence City Council.

The fact that neither Wong nor Levy disclosed their trip suggests the possibility that they were trying to have it both ways: In private, they maintained the benefits of the trip (the good graces of a powerful group like JCRC), but they also garnered sympathy with liberals by playing the “savior” in the largely performative public sphere of Bay Area politics through the letter.

Wong, after all, did not side with the public that desired an actual ceasefire resolution; but provided a tidy distraction in a “both-sides” letter, a means of momentarily relieving pressure on City Council. Reading it calls to mind the JCRC’s efforts to move BANJO members to promote San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s letter over the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ actual ceasefire resolution, a resolution which itself had to be considerably diluted in order to pass.

In a Daily Cal article by Riley Cooke, Wong was quoted regarding the letter, but neither Wong nor Cooke made any indication that Wong had participated in the controversial JCRC trip to Israel in March 2023, nor that she had attended what should be an equally controversial trip to Camp Newman with the FBI in September 2023. I wondered: Do local reporters simply not check Form 700’s, or was this a matter of an open secret that insiders knew and found more convenient to ignore?

II.

Why The JCRC Trips Matter

The matter of the JCRC Israel junkets is critical if under-reported, because the vast body of documents retrieved through CPRA shows that the JCRC trips do not simply end when the planes return to the Oakland and San Francisco airports. Even though the cost of the trips may be relatively small, from approximately $4,700 to $8,000, each trip is an investment the JCRC makes with an expectation of a return.

Whether you are the City Auditor (Wong) or a Superintendent of Schools (Carroll) or a Mayor (Milberg), the JCRC will remain in constant contact with your office, urging you to speak about anti-semitism, cautioning you against ethnic studies classes that might discuss Palestinian issues, and even vetting your public statements for you. And, of course, expecting you to support their legislation.

That is a wholly unacceptable level of control to enforce on elected officials – and it is conducted on behalf of a foreign government that can only be described currently as a rogue state, and on the absurd premise that legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is somehow antisemitic.

But elected officials are willing to be the conduits for the JCRC’s manipulations because the JCRC (which on Friday announced that it is forming its own 501(c)4 lobbying group), can connect candidates and electeds to powerful and wealthy pro-Israel constituents and politicos, Jewish and Christian, who can assure campaign cash and support at the polls. And probably a few other rewards along the way.

Note the unhinged language (“betrayed!”) that JCRC’s Tyler Gregory uses to announce the new formation in this article from Jewish Insider:

“‘This is our way of saying we want to be there for those candidates and elected officials that have had our back, and we want those that have betrayed us to know that there are consequences for mistreating the Jewish community and allowing the spread of antisemitism,’ Tyler Gregory, CEO of the JCRC, told Jewish Insider on Thursday. He will also serve as executive director of BAJA.”

III.

How Wong’s Silence At Camp Newman Informs Our Understanding of “People v. Margoliash” And Assembly Bill 2925:

While Wong may have played dumb on the phone, she’s a bright and capable public official, and is well aware that Muslims have been viciously targeted by the FBI for several decades, as well as by federal prosecutors. Thus her absurd claim that holding graduation on a Saturday is somehow antisemitic was a very specific choice, one that makes a mockery of actual, provable antisemitic acts, and which distracts from the concrete effects of substantive hate crimes against racial minorities, including many Muslims and Arabs in the Bay Area.

In reality, Wong had a duty, in the presence of the very people who should be responsible, to tell the FBI and US attorneys to investigate actual hate crimes taking place in the city where she is the elected auditor. Sadly, hateful acts of bias are often perpetrated by police and prosecutors, themselves.

Wong’s failure is of a piece with the decision of Novato officials to make no public reference to the violent physical and chemical attack on the Islamic Center of North Marin in Novato on the first night of Ramadan in 2024. And of course, the Mayor of Novato is none other than Mark Milberg, who accompanied Jenny Wong and other elected officials to Israel in March of 2023.

At a hearing for “People Vs. Margoliash” last month, at which Marin Independent-Journal reporter Cameron MacDonald was present, a representative read a list of the injuries sustained by the primary victim, and I was shocked to learn that the injuries were far more severe than even I had known. But none of this was reported in the Marin Independent Journal, nor in the Pacific Sun.

“It’s surreal the extent to which this has been covered up,” said a longtime resident about the clearly premeditated Islamophobic attack on the Islamic Center of North Marin.

Wong’s obfuscation in the presence of the FBI and US Attorneys at Camp Newman in September 2023 also rhymes with Novato police “declining” to investigate the attack on the Islamic Center as a hate crime on the false premise that the targeted victims did not perceive the incident to be a hate crime. In reality, the Islamic Center members were well aware they had been targeted as an act of hate, but feared that demanding a hate crimes investigation would only make them more vulnerable to attacks, while potentially alienating the white-led local police and prosecutors. Had they been Jewish victims rather than Muslim victims, they would have had the muscular advocacy of the ADL, JCRC, and countless nonprofits, and it is likely there would be an investigation by the FBI — and full charges. Instead, the victims were silenced.

Wong’s decision not to raise concerns about anti-Muslim hate crimes with the FBI and US Attorneys also mirrors Assembly Bill 2925, currently making its way through the legislature. AB 2925 is one of four anti-free-speech and anti-Palestinian bills written and promoted by the California Jewish Legislative Caucus after Israel began its illegal and ongoing bombing campaign on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

As I wrote in last week’s article, AB 2925 is “the erroneously and awkwardly titled ‘Equity in Higher Education Act: prohibition on discrimination: training’ introduced by Assemblymember Laura Friedman. The language surrounding this bill is intentionally obfuscatory, but the opposition is based on the bill’s outright rejection to include Muslims in any of the top categories of targeted groups. And no surprise – no Muslim organizations or leaders were consulted in the drafting of this bill.”

What ties all of these things together – Wong’s dissembling at Camp Newman, the lack of any public statement from Mayor Milberg about the assault on the Islamic Center, and the failure to consult Muslim organizations or leaders in the drafting of AB 2925? Decades of Islamophobic, pro-Israel propaganda from well-funded organizations like the JCRC, ADL, and JPAC, to name but a few.

IV.

A Personal Note and a Proposed Remedy:

I share a few things in common with Wong’s family, as I, like Wong’s children, am the product of a mixed-race, white-Asian marriage (although I was born when such families were far less common, a year after the Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision.) Many of Wong’s statements, as well as some of her previous writing, have raised uncomfortable questions for me about the political uses of identity, and how Asian Americans have, when not being actively targeted by law enforcement and state and local governments, more recently been utilized to whitewash explicitly racist institutions. Fairly or not, that is the lens through which I view Wong’s involvement with the JCRC/BANJO and her trip to Israel and to Camp Newman with the FBI and US Attorneys.

That Wong accepted the trip in 2023, when Israel had long been overseeing a provable apartheid system, and seven months before Israel initiated its genocidal bombing campaign that has now killed upward of 186,000 Palestinian civilians is, at best, a bitter pill.

But as I have detailed for months now, Wong’s case is no outlier. For the most part, these trips have not been disclosed, and when they were, they were disclosed to private groups. In the case of Damon Connolly, the trip was disclosed by him only to a group at Kol Shofar in Tiburon, and at the home of Jennifer Wolfe, a former JCRC President now on JCRC’s Board of Directors. This dinner appearance was “in conversation with” Sausalito Councilmember Melissa Blaustein, who traveled to Israel on the JCRC’s dime with Wong and Milberg. Neither are venues where most Arab or Muslim constituents would be welcome, even if they had been invited.

The lack of accountability and disclosure surrounding the JCRC trips is particularly concerning given the JCRC’s new, threatening statements about how it will conduct its new 501(c)4 to punish its critics — or anyone who pushes back on its hate-fueled legislation. That, combined with JCRC’s close relationships with already dysfunctional police and prosecutors, and its often successful attempts to capture our elected officials, reasonably terrifies many of those who justly criticize Israeli policy.

It is time for all of those who accepted the JCRC trips not just to disclose the trips publicly, but to compensate the Palestinian victims of their complicity. I respectfully propose that Wong and the other JCRC trip participants, in recognition of the complicated nature of accepting a trip from a “nonprofit” group actively promoting Israel’s genocidal “war”, might remedy the situation by trebling the amount the JCRC paid for their individual trips, and publicly donating it to a Palestinian-approved relief fund.

Perhaps Berkeley City Auditor Jenny Wong could also put her much-lauded auditing skills to good work by determining the most effective Palestinian relief funds for her donation.

©️2024 Eva Chrysanthe