(JTA) — The editor-in-chief of the Jewish Press, a politically conservative Jewish newspaper based in Brooklyn that serves a primarily Orthodox audience, was identified among those who breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Elliot Resnick was identified in a video of the Capitol breach by an anonymous researcher and first reported by Politico.
Resnick later wrote about the Jan. 6 riot, which left five dead and injured well over 100 police officers, without disclosing that he was there.
“Democrats keep on declaring that never again can this country see its Capitol overtaken by a mob,” he wrote in a post from March 17 on the website American Thinker. “Well, there’s an easy solution for that. Don’t steal elections in plain sight, and maybe ordinarily law-abiding citizens won’t snap.”
In a statement posted to the Jewish Press’s website Thursday night, the newspaper’s editorial board said Resnick was at the Capitol in a journalistic capacity on Jan. 6 but the paper decided not to publish anything about the Capitol breach “because of the heated atmosphere surrounding the day’s events, especially within New York’s Orthodox Jewish community.”
Resnick was a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, who claimed without evidence that he lost to Joe Biden in November because the voting was rigged.
In the video, Resnick can be seen stumbling as he enters the Capitol building through a doorway while a Capitol police officer tries to keep out the intruders. He reappears a few minutes later, his face clearly visible, standing nearby as another rioter shouts at a Capitol police officer.
Resnick declined to answer Politico’s requests for comment. But the publisher of the Jewish Press, Naomi Mauer, sent a statement to the publication Monday.
“As we understand the facts, we believe that Mr. Resnick acted within the law,” Mauer said in an email, declining to respond to follow-up questions.
Resnick, who has edited the Jewish Press since 2018, has a history of using incendiary language and has called the gay rights movement “evil.” Under Resnick’s editorship, the Jewish Press was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019 after publishing an op-ed titled “The Pride Parade: What Are They Proud Of” comparing gay marchers in the New York event to animals, adulterers and thieves.
“If blacks resent America’s [sic] so much, let them discard Christianity (which the ‘white man’ gave them) and re-embrace the primitive religions they practiced in Africa,” Resnick wrote in a tweet in 2019.
“Can someone give me a coherent reason why blackface is racist?” he wrote in another tweet that year.
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The Jewish Press was edited in the 1960s by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a Jewish nationalist who advocated violence against Arabs and was banned from the Knesset. Though the weekly distanced itself from Kahane in 1969, as recently as last week it published a piece with the headline “Arab MKs Get Away with Altered Swearing-In Text, But When MK Kahane Did It He Was Banned.” In 2015, Resnick gave a glowing review to a Kahane biography written by Kahane’s wife and described his own experience of “near trance” while reading one of Kahane’s books in high school.
Resnick was not the only person from the Orthodox Jewish community present at the Capitol riots. Aaron Mostofsky, whose father is a Kings County Supreme Court judge and a former president of the National Council of Young Israel — an Orthodox synagogue association that has been outspokenly pro-Trump — was arrested by the FBI at his Brooklyn home in January. Some other Orthodox Jews also present at the Capitol riot traveled on chartered buses from a number of Orthodox Jewish communities.
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