JTA: Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters

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You see, it’s “anti-Semitic” to suppose that a DA could be influenced by his Jewish identity to go after people Jews don’t like.

Alleging conflicts, California judge boots Jewish DA from trying Stanford pro-Palestinian protesters

Local Jewish groups say the ruling “risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices.”

Stanford students protest Israel in California
Students and pro-Palestinian protesters gather at Stanford University to protest Israeli attacks on Gaza, April 22, 2024. (Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images)
By Niva Ashkenazi 

This story originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California.

Jewish groups in the Bay Area are protesting a judge’s removal of a local Jewish district attorney from a case involving pro-Palestinian protesters accused of vandalizing Stanford University’s president’s office.

The district attorney, Jeff Rosen, was disqualified from retrying a felony case against five protesters after the judge ruled that Rosen had crossed a legal line when suggesting in a campaign message that the protest was antisemitic.

“Rosen is allowed to take a strong stance against crime in the community, against antisemitism. But caution and care need to be taken when utilizing active litigation in campaign communication,” Judge Kelley Paul said from the bench.

“This case is not a hate crime,” Paul said. “The characterization of the prosecution as a fight against antisemitism runs afoul of case law.”

In an email to J. The Jewish News of Northern California, Rosen’s office wrote that while it “disagrees with the judge’s ruling, we respect it.”

In a joint statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley wrote that they are “deeply troubled” by Paul’s decision and that the case “must proceed.”

“This decision uniquely targets minority prosecutors, suggesting they are incapable of pursuing justice in cases perceived to be impacting their own communities,” the statement says, adding that it “risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them.”

The five protesters face felony vandalism and conspiracy counts stemming from a June 2024 protest in which 13 people broke into Stanford’s executive offices and caused an estimated $300,000 in damages. A jury deadlocked in February, splitting 9-3 on the vandalism count and 8-4 on conspiracy. Rosen quickly announced his plan to retry them.

The disqualification motion was filed by deputy public defender Avi Singh, who argued that Rosen had compromised his office’s neutrality by featuring the prosecution on a campaign fundraising page titled “DA Rosen Fighting Anti-Semitism,” alongside a donation button.

Singh argued that the fundraising campaign falsely implied that the defendants were antisemitic. None was charged with a hate crime.

Rosen, who has spoken publicly about his commitment to fighting antisemitism and supporting Israel, has denied any conflict of interest.

In her decision, Paul pointed to Rosen’s remarks in a March 2025 speech he gave for the San Jose Hillel, about a month before his office filed charges against the protesters. A video of the speech is linked on the “Fighting Anti-Semitism” page on his campaign website.

In the speech, Rosen equated antisemitism and “anti-Americanism,” a phrase that Deputy District Attorney Robert Baker also used to describe the conduct of the protesters during the trial’s closing arguments. Paul ruled that the similarities in the language disqualified the entire DA’s office from the case, not just Rosen.

In their own statement, the local Jewish groups suggested Rosen was being disqualified because he is Jewish.

“Generations of American Jews in positions of public trust have all too often been treated as suspect or inherently conflicted,” JCRC Bay Area and Jewish Silicon Valley said. “This decision risks reinforcing longstanding antisemitic prejudices and invites future defendants to weaponize a prosecutor’s identity against them, casting any public opposition to hate as grounds for disqualification.”

Rosen’s challenger in his June primary election, former prosecutor Daniel Chung, has turned the ruling into a campaign video. Chung called Rosen’s pursuit of the Stanford case “overzealous” and “a waste of time and money.”

“This is a humiliating loss for DA Rosen and his entire office,” Chung said in an Instagram video. “For years, millions of dollars have been spent trying to prosecute Stanford student protesters with felony charges.” Rosen’s actions, Chung said, “jeopardized the due process of the defendants” and “exemplifies the undermining of integrity, competence and compassion under DA Rosen for the last 16 years.”

The ruling hands the case to California’s attorney general, which will decide whether to retry the defendants — German Gonzalez, Maya Burke, Taylor McCann, Hunter Taylor-Black and Amy Zhai — or drop the charges.

8 replies
  1. ThePrisoner
    ThePrisoner says:

    Jews play victim constantly. Rosen knew better than to make those statements.

    How about that leftist DA pursue rampant crime in the Bay Area instead of promoting his own agenda?

  2. K M Landis
    K M Landis says:

    Drop all charges against these five protestors! DA Jeff Rosen is a Zionist. He is a pro-crime Democrat. As a Jew, his naturally uses the justice system to prosecute anyone opposed to Israel. In his campaign videos and on his website, he has admitted it openly.

    Judge Kelly Paul made the correct decision to remove Rosen from this case. The California AG, Rob Bonta, must now drop the case, which should never have been launched in the first place.

  3. Pierre de Craon
    Pierre de Craon says:

    “This case is not a hate crime,” Paul said. “The characterization of the prosecution as a fight against antisemitism runs afoul of case law.”

    So-called hate-crime legislation has been part of the statute law of many US states for the entirety of this century. The fact that no state or federal appeals court, far less the US Supreme Court, has ever permitted one of the numerous attempts to have such a law struck down on First Amendment grounds to be argued before it speaks tellingly of that amendment’s dead-letter status.

  4. Tim
    Tim says:

    https://www.gbnews.com/news/world/migrant-crisis-immigrants-north-africa-europe-greece

    Even Prof. Ganteför, an experimental physicist who is apparently still racially blind—and who until now had been known only as a cautious skeptic of “man-made climate change,” and who, by his own admission, had apologetically regarded himself as a “citizen of the world”—now dares to quietly voice doubts about the functioning of the “multicultural society.”

    He himself was born in the GDR ten years after the war but, for some inexplicable reason, grew up in the Ruhr region and has been living in Switzerland for quite some time. On top of that, he cheekily asks for donations every time “to help fund his videos,” even though his generous pension should more than cover the costs.

    In other words: Ganteför is in favor of “controlled immigration of skilled workers,” but opposed to uncontrolled mass immigration of refugees fleeing poverty, which undermines the functioning of society. He knows all kinds of experts in his field from all over the world—from America, Asia, Australia, etc. (even from “Israel,” which he apparently feels compelled to mention as a kind of fig leaf)—but he does not include sub-Saharan Africa as part of his “cosmopolitan universe.” I’m curious to see if, out of the 432 comments posted under the video so far, he has approved even a single critical one.

    In all seriousness, he cites the city-state of Singapore as a positive example. Furthermore, he does not divide “migrants” into those from within and outside Europe, as is the case with the 40 percent in Switzerland. Activate the available English-language (AI-generated) audio track (slightly flawed; the number “Phi,” for example, is recognized as “Vieh” and translated to “cattle”, or the Chinese “Han” as German Hahn, means rooster). The title of his video is “The Multiculti-Fallacy”; he cites Germany and the USA as the worst examples.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iptPGD3DKXc

    Wilhelm, one thing I can TELL you: Those who fall asleep between these mighty tissue bells at night won’t need headphones anymore. Their “great balls of fire” have been shot empty. My dear Mr. Swinger Club! But here, intention becomes the goal. Everything screams at you in bloody fiery red. She jiggles her boobs, wiggles her butt, and flutters her glued-on eyelashes.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzEON7urtMM
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tell_(opera)
    https://i.ibb.co/1GPVrVff/club.jpg

    Those frumpy chicks just can’t keep up anymore, because their whatsits don’t just migrate south in the winter. In the morning, they wonder: “Should I tie them together on my back, or just stuff them straight into my underpants?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PygZs_wm1zo

    Mr. Hulbert’s head, which is slightly crossed-eyed, is—just like Wagner’s—almost as big as the rest of his body. He looks like a cross between Karl Valentin and Fred Astaire, with a touch of Vince Clarke. A truly very likable fellow (born, according to AI, sometime between 1953 and 1960) who is remarkably free of any cloying, feverish sentimentality.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yMyEgv7yWA
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Hulbert

    Kinda “Anglo-Germanic” name
    https://forebears.io/surnames/hulbert

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Block
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7OATWkisww
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpI1XHkVYc
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVaZut7eSMk

    AI responded to my inquiry as follows:

    Why Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto Sounds Triumphantly Bright in a Minor Key

    Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto is famously in B-flat minor, yet its opening often sounds majestic, radiant, and even optimistic. This seeming contradiction is one of the reasons the concerto is so compelling. The answer lies in the difference between **tonal designation** and **musical effect**: a piece may be written in a minor key while still producing a powerful sense of brightness, grandeur, or emotional uplift.

    The concerto begins not with a sorrowful melody, but with a broad orchestral proclamation. Strong chords, rich orchestration, and rising gestures immediately create a feeling of scale and forward motion. Instead of lingering on the darker qualities often associated with minor keys, Tchaikovsky uses the orchestra to build a sound world that feels expansive and ceremonial. The listener does not hear private grief so much as public splendor.

    One reason for this effect is that music communicates mood through more than key alone. Harmony, rhythm, register, texture, and orchestration all shape the emotional character of a passage. In this opening, the upward sweep of the music is especially important. Human listeners often perceive rising motion as hopeful or triumphant, while descending motion tends to suggest settling, rest, or resignation. Tchaikovsky leans heavily into upward motion, which helps the music feel uplifting even while it remains grounded in a minor tonal center.

    Orchestration plays a major role as well. The opening sonorities are full, luminous, and almost ceremonial. The brass and strings do not sound intimate or confessional; they sound large, public, and self-assured. This creates what might be called a “major-like” emotional impression without actually changing the key. In other words, the music behaves like a celebration even though its harmonic home is minor.

    Another important point is that minor keys are not inherently sad. That is a common simplification. In practice, minor can suggest many different emotional worlds: nobility, tension, mystery, longing, tragedy, or determination. Tchaikovsky exploits that flexibility brilliantly. His opening does not deny the minor key; rather, it transforms it into something grand and resolute. The result is a paradoxical blend of darkness and radiance.

    This is also why the concerto’s introduction feels so different from what many listeners expect when they hear “a piece in minor.” The opening is not designed to sound psychologically fragile. It is designed to sound monumental. The effect is almost architectural: wide, towering, and ceremonial. The emotional message is not “I am sad,” but rather “something immense is beginning.”

    Tchaikovsky’s genius lies in how he holds these qualities together. The concerto remains unmistakably in B-flat minor, yet it projects confidence and brilliance at the same time. That tension between tonal gravity and expressive lift gives the opening its unforgettable power. It is not a contradiction so much as a demonstration of how much emotional range a minor key can contain.

    In that sense, the opening of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto sounds so uplifting because it is built not on simple tonal labels, but on musical rhetoric. The key is minor, but the gesture is heroic. The harmony is dark, but the sound is luminous. The result is one of the most stirring openings in the repertoire: music that begins in shadow and immediately seems to reach toward the light.

    Jewishness in music: “Like Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow was a staunch anti-Semite.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No._1_(Tchaikovsky)

    The sheer infallible mouse ears of the Jew Schiff claim to be able to “hear out” that Bösendorfer pianos have a “Viennese accent” (in contrast to High German spoken in Hanover, which is more commonly spoken by Steinway pianos). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Schiff

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIumzO9z1-Y

    Dave Brubeck looked like a Jew, if you ask me. Apparently, his name comes from Swiss ancestors and was originally Brodbeck. His closest friend and songwriter was, aside from a Negro in their band, the Jew Paul Desmond (real name “Paul Emil Breitenfeld”).

    Here he recounts his experiences from 1945, when his GI comrades in Nuremberg “enjoyed” German women and were otherwise able to trade expensive musical instruments (those that hadn’t been destroyed by their bombing raids) for their cheap Lucky Strikes, since tobacco was in short supply at the time.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z4tvrDjL-g
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-h3h2nE9lE

    And, oh, how terrible it was after the Germans were defeated, when they returned to their homeland: unspeakable racism! This injustice was unbearable, as Eugenia Rich—who now goes by the name Zuckman because she was married to a Jew—learned.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z5ojCEy9SA
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenia_Zukerman
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinchas_Zukerman
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stadqAHRroA

    Speaking of which: The storks are already back from Africa. Will they finally bring us a few white babies this year, or have they lost their skills too? It’s even more likely that he’s now only importing Negro babies because he, too, has lost his compass. https://i.ibb.co/DgGCQkJ2/stork.jpg

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr5zebXpO-M

    Personally, I can still only tell Schumann and Schubert apart by name. This gentleman is a different kind of a Schuman—as the connoisseur can tell at a glance, an Aquarius. However, it must be noted to his detriment: The leader of his band, Spyro Gyra, is a Jew named Beckenstein. Other Jews may also be in the band.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPz_itQweY4
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Schuman

  5. Tim
    Tim says:

    https://www.perplexity.ai/search/5ee2776b-e725-479e-b452-f986003b5160

    The fact that the Jew denigrated this monumental work in such a despicable manner, while the evil German anti-Semite enthusiastically staged it in America, may hold a deeper truth about Jews in relation to Aryan art (if one is willing to call Russians Aryans). In the meantime, there has certainly been some zealous historical distortion aimed at portraying Jews as better than they are, and we will likely only ever learn a fraction of the truth.

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