(JTA) — Actress Amber Tamblyn claims a “Hasidic man” tried to run her and her baby over in Brooklyn.
The accusation, made in a tweet asking if there were any witnesses to Sunday’s incident, led to some angry responses against Tamblyn and condemnations of the Hasidic community.
“If anyone in Brooklyn near the intersection of Washington Ave and Atlantic Ave just saw a Hasidic man in a grey van try to hit a woman and her baby in a stroller as she crossed a crosswalk, honking and touching the stroller with the car’s bumper, please DM me. That woman was me,” Tamblyn, who was unhurt, tweeted Sunday morning.
“Thank you everyone for your kind words of support today. We are fine. But this is not the first time a man from the Hasidic community in NYC has attempted to harm me or other women I know. Any woman riding a bike through South Williamsburg can attest. I hope this guy is caught,” she also tweeted.
Tamblyn described herself as “shaken” but “okay” after the incident, in response to followers who asked how she was doing.
Some Twitter followers accused her of being anti-Semitic and stereotyping Hasidic Jews.“What kind of anti-semitic BS is this?” tweeted Mordechai Lightstone, the social media manager for Chabad.org. “It’s awful for any pedestrian, let alone a mother, to be threatened by an aggressive driver … But bad drivers are bad drivers. I’m sorry but this is an incredibly troubling generalization.”
Others criticized the Hasidic community.
“They really don’t follow our laws or really care. It’s scary,” one of Tamblyn’s followers wrote.
Tamblyn responded to the criticism of her tweets as being anti-Semitic by pointing out that she is married to a Jewish man, comedian David Cross. Tamblyn starred in “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and “127 Hours” and had a recurring role in the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men.” Her father, dancer and actor Russ Tamblyn, starred in “West Side Story” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”
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