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Cut your tax bill by $450 a year? CT lawmakers pushing child tax credit – but there’s a catch

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News 12 Staff

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Holocaust Remembrance Day was this week. It was a day to remember the 6 million innocents systematically murdered by the Nazis for one reason. They were Jewish. Governor Phil Murphy, First Lady, and New Jersey State Police Superintendent Colonel Patrick Callahan journeyed to Poland to take part in the March of the Living, annual event where people travel from all over the world to retrace the death march from Auschwitz to Birkenau. This year, 80 Holocaust survivors and 10 former Hamas hostages took part in the march. Governor Murphy releasing a statement saying in part, quote, we must never forget the atrocities of the Holocaust, and with anti-Semitism on the rise, we must always stand alongside our Jewish friends and neighbors to reject hate. The sobering reality is hate festers. Anti-Semitism is insidious, and over the past few years in particular, that hatred that maybe was just simmering just beneath the surface has been increasingly unleashed with impunity. And in 2024, New Jersey saw the third highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the entire country, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Joining me now is the New York, New Jersey regional director of the ADL, Scott Richmond. Scott, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Scott. Listen, you say that we are, we're entering this alarming new normal in New Jersey and across the nation. I, I mean, I guess the genie is out of the bottle. Does it ever go back in? Uh, that's our hope, uh, and of course our fear now that this is the 2nd year in a row that we're at this elevated level is that it's not going to go back or it's not going to go back for some time. Talk to me about the New Jersey numbers in particular and, and what kind of anti-Semitic incidents were, were most prevalent in the state last year. So you know, in the state of New Jersey, I've been following this for some time, we had seen a pretty steady pace of 200, 300, maybe at its height, 400 incidents that exploded to double that number to over 800 incidents in 2023 in the wake of the Israel Hamas war. And our hope was that, you know, as, as things, uh, the, the initial issue of the of the war was uh was being fought, but it, it, it would begin to calm down. Unfortunately that is not the case. We are still seeing incidents at a very elevated level of 719 incidents in New Jersey, so that's really. What we're talking about here when we say a new normal that while incidents may go down as uh the the situation becomes a little calmer, uh, they're not going down to anywhere where they were in 2022. Now we, we divide those incidents into different categories harassment, vandalism, and assault, uh, and we saw all three of those categories in, uh, in New Jersey, uh, unfortunately. Uh, listen, you're joining us on the heels, as I mentioned a moment ago, of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and, uh, this was a week though just coinciding with Yo Maho, a week which saw posters of Holocaust survivors ripped down in New York. Jewish students at Yale were blocked on campus while others were assaulted with some unknown liquid as police watched. Uh, listen, what's your reaction to these events? Unfortunately, um, people are uh are uh uh attacking Jews in this country for, uh, their concerns about what's going on in Israel, which is horrifically anti-Semitic. Uh, what's going through my mind, especially with the Holocaust posters being ripped down, is that uh people are uh are not able to to see Jews as victims. Any way or don't want Jews to have any kind of advantage in this game of uh of victimhood. uh it's really sick it's, it's the sort of polarized moment where we live uh in which we live, where, where people cannot um cannot focus on this idea that Jews could possibly be victims and be suffering anti-Semitism that is completely warped. Uh, listen, you, uh, through your research from last year, you also looked at the events that played out on college campuses. Uh, there's debate raging in this country right now about what does and doesn't qualify as free speech as it pertains to what we've seen play out. Can can you bottom line it for us in terms of what does and what doesn't qualify as free speech? We live in a country where free speech is uh is very much the norm. In fact, I would say if you look at countries around the world, there's there's no country quite as open to free speech as as the United States and and uh there are a lot of benefits to that, but of course it's. Uh, it's a country in which we have to, uh, to deal with that because some of that speech can be heinous. Uh, we often at ADL we're very big believers in free speech, talk about this idea of uh of uh using good speech to go after bad speech and and not canceling it. That's a very important tenet of ours. Uh, on the other hand, uh, if you are in a, if you are in an institution like a university, uh, where, um, people of a certain identity are made to feel unwelcome, it's a hostile environment, uh, you have to be able to. Manage that and when I say use good speech to go after bad speech, I'm talking about the fact that while you may not be able to cancel it, uh, the leader of that institution may be able to say this is not acceptable, this does not fit with the mission of my institution. Uh, and we need to be able to rely on, uh, whatever the, the head of the the institution may happen to be, maybe it's the head of the department, maybe it's the head of the university, uh, to be able to give Jews comfort in that moment that this is not, uh, this is not acceptable, uh, and very often this is used in the context of the Israel Hamas war. Uh, where, uh, where people are, are saying, well, am I not entitled to, uh, to say whatever I want in terms of criticism of Israel and of course there's nothing wrong with criticizing Israel the way there's nothing wrong with criticizing the US or France or the UK, you. Not agree with it, but there's nothing wrong with it. However, there are moments when that criticism goes well beyond mere criticism of Israel and goes to anti-Semitism, uh, and here we use as our guideline the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. Uh, which basically says that if in addition to criticizing the state of Israel, you also delegitimize it. You say it has no right to exist where you demonize it, you compare the actions of the Israeli government or Israel Defense Forces to the Nazis, uh, or in addition to criticizing you use a double standard, standard that you wouldn't use for any other nation. Those are the moments when it rises above mere criticism of Israel and can be, uh, can be anti-Semitic. Scott Richmond, regional director of the ADL, uh, thank you so much, Scott, for your time. Thank you. And please stay with us. Up next, did the DOJ just admit that they don't have a great case in the suit over congestion pricing?

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Federal prosecutors trying to stop New York's controversial congestion pricing plan admitted to flaws in the plan the Trump administration intended to use in the lawsuit against the state. The document written by lawyers in the Southern District of New York was supposed to be an internal memo sent to the US Department of Transportation. However, it was accidentally filed. In the lawsuit, the memo explaining the current legal strategy to end congestion pricing had too many holes and recommended taking another route to end the toll. The attorneys who wrote it are representing US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The news came just days after New York ignored the DOT's deadline to turn off the congestion pricing cameras. Commuters take note engineers who run the trains for NJ Transit could strike May 16th. That date was set after union membership recently voted down a tentative contract, and just this week, NJT rescinded that latest contract offer. News 12 New Jersey's Chris Keating spoke with union leadership about what they're looking for and what it'll mean for commuters. On May 16th, the trains could stop running if negotiations fail, which hasn't happened since the last strike back in 1983. Engineers recently turned down a deal with New Jersey Transit, which Transit says would have bumped up the average salary to $172,000 by 2027. But union members are looking for more. Our base pay is actually under $89,000 a year. We haven't seen an increase in. And since 2019, Union chair Tom Haas says his engineers are now leaving for jobs that pay 20% more. Most are leaving for Amtrak, for Metro North, for the Long Island Railroad. However, Transit has countered that if they give the union what they want, fares will go up by 17%, and the corporate transit fee will rise by 27%. That has some weighing in on the engineers' demands. What they are looking for as we objectively understand, is something that is not reasonable. Michelle Sikerka is president of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association. She has little sympathy for the engineers right now. We can't be banking and using that money on operations such as those salaries. That money right now in the short course needs to go to investment in transit. Of course, a strike would have a major impact on commuters. How would they get To work whether they use the car, bus, or maybe path. Some say they haven't figured it out. No, I haven't, and it's actually going to be a good long conversation between me and my wife because we have only one car. No negotiations are scheduled, but union leadership says they'll sit down any time. Tom Has saying we don't want to stop running the trains. In Westfield, I'm Chris Keating, News 12, New Jersey. And that'll do it for this week. I'm Eric Lanz Kronner. We thank you for watching New Jersey Power and Politics. We'll see you again next time.

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Peter Curatolo, mayor of Lacey Township, and Scott Richman, the NY/NJ regional director of the ADL, join the show this week.

Power & Politics: Massive wildfire in Ocean County; antisemitism in New Jersey

Peter Curatolo, mayor of Lacey Township, and Scott Richman, the NY/NJ regional director of the ADL, join the show this week.

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