A city council meeting in Richmond, Calif., ended with shouting and frustration after 11 p.m. on Tuesday evening when the body adjourned without considering a measure seeking to censure Mayor Eduardo Martinez, who is under fire from the local Jewish community after sharing antisemitic posts on his LinkedIn page last month. 

“This is a complete embarrassment as a city council,” Councilmember Jamelia Brown, one of the officials who sought to issue a formal censure of Martinez, said before walking away from the meeting room. “We will stand in solidarity and say that this was antisemitic conduct and behavior, yet we don’t want to formalize it and put it on record. It’s very coward [sic] behavior.”

Tuesday’s meeting was the first since Martinez shared multiple incendiary posts regarding the terrorist attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, last month. He shared one post referring to the shooting as “Israel’s false flag attack.” Another post called the public celebration of Hanukkah “deeply provocative and very un-Jewish” and said it was meant to intimidate Muslims.

He has since fended off calls to resign from the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council and several dozen local elected officials from nearby cities and towns.  

Martinez offered an apology at the start of the meeting, though he began with a jab at “people who are not ready to accept an apology.” 

“I failed to meet the responsibility that my position requires. I reposted content online that included antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, which have long been used to dehumanize Jewish people and justify violence against them. I was wrong to share them,” Martinez said. 

He offered another apology to “people who felt they had to choose between taking concerns of antisemitism seriously or continuing to support me and the larger vision of justice that we strive toward.”

“I regret that I compromised the integrity of the Palestinian solidarity movement here in Richmond,” Martinez said. “We must be clear that we will not allow antisemitism in our movements, nor will we allow antisemitism to be weaponized against progressive causes.”

The antisemitic rhetoric has struck a nerve with the city’s small Jewish community and Bay Area Jewish activists, givenMartinez’s history of sharing anti-Israel content. Richmond, a San Francisco suburb home to 115,000 people, was the first city in the country to adopt a resolution calling for a ceasefire after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel, doing so weeks after the attacks. 

“We’re still angry. His apology did not feel genuine. It was sort of like a ‘sorry that my opponents are coming after me’ kind of apology, and so we’re maintaining the position that he should step down,” JCRC CEO Tyler Gregory told Jewish Insider on Thursday. 

The Richmond City Council voted to adopt a measure to begin a “restorative process” between the mayor and the city’s Jewish community, with Martinez undergoing antisemitism training and meeting at least twice with Rabbi Julie Saxe-Taller, the rabbi at Temple Beth Hillel in Richmond. Martinez said he met with Saxe-Taller and local Chabad Rabbi Yitzchok Wagner in recent days. 

“I appreciate our beginning a much-needed process to address antisemitism and to address the way it’s being increasingly and more baldly used to target Jews as well as to justify attacks on other vulnerable communities,” Saxe-Taller said in brief remarks at the council meeting. “The mayor and leadership of Temple Beth Hillel and others have begun a process of repair with the goal of making Richmond less vulnerable to antisemitism and therefore also to racism and division.”

Wagner and Martinez met for about two hours last week, Wagner told JI. He declined to speak publicly about the content of their meeting, but noted that frustration remains within the Jewish community.

“I think there is a large group that basically says, ‘Well, we have to do our part and just try to work with him. At the same time, the apology is not OK,’ and they’re not ready to accept the apology. They don’t feel it was sincere,” Wagner said. 

Attendees at the council meeting held up competing signs as city residents and activists from nearby communities spoke for a minute each. “Censure Mayor Martinez,” one sign read. “It was not just ‘one mistake,’” read another. The mayor’s supporters held signs reading, “Richmond Jews support our mayor” and “People power from Richmond to Palestine.” 

Vice Mayor Cesar Zepeda was one of two councilmembers, along with Brown, who introduced the formal censure resolution. He told JI that his goal was to show his colleagues that there should be consequences for harmful language. 

“What my colleagues might not realize is that by not voting to censure him, they voted to allow future councilmembers to pretty much get a Get Out of Jail Free card if you say bad stuff about our community, whether they’re antisemitic or racist or homophobic, whatever it may be,” Zepeda said. “You can post three or four things online, say a couple of things here and there, and just do a semi-apology, and you’re good to go.” (While the formal censure resolution was tabled, an amendment to a different resolution that would have censured Martinez was voted down.)

Martinez is up for reelection this year, and Gregory said the JCRC’s affiliated political arm is considering whether to support an opponent to the mayor.

“We’re looking carefully at the mayoral race and seeing if there might be an alternative that’s going to be less of a bomb thrower and less, just to be blunt, less antisemitic as mayor,” said Gregory. “We’re still waiting to see how the race shapes up, but there’s a strong possibility that we get involved in trying to see some change there.”