(Jewish Group) Lawyer in Michigan synagogue-protest case accuses judge of being antisemitic

The lawyer representing congregants in a long-running dispute over perennial anti-Israel and antisemitic protests outside their Ann Arbor synagogue on Saturday mornings has accused the federal judge presiding over the case of herself being antisemitic.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined this spring to hear the case, which pits the protesters’ First Amendment right of free expression against the worshippers’ First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion. Lower courts had dismissed the lawsuit the congregants filed in 2019, and U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Roberts ordered them to pay $159,000 in legal fees.

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Susselman noted that one of the plaintiffs is an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, and that some of the protesters also picketed outside a Holocaust museum on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2014 with signs saying “Free Ernst Zundel,” the author of a book titled “The Hitler We Knew and Loved,” who was jailed in Germany for Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred. (Zundel died in 2017.)

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In his latest court filing, Susselman questioned how the judge arrived at the amount of the legal fee —$158,721 — and how the protesters’ signs with slogans including “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” and “No More Holocaust Movies” could be protected as addressing “issues of public concern.”

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