As he enters his second year in office, Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, finds himself at the center of a heated and increasingly personal debate over a case involving the brutal assault of a Jewish man in Times Square.
The veteran prosecutor, whose closely watched handling of the high-profile tax fraud investigation into former President Donald Trump’s real estate company successfully capped off an otherwise turbulent introduction to city politics, is now facing scrutiny for offering what many are denouncing as an overly lenient plea deal to one of four defendants charged with targeting a Jewish resident of Nassau County, Joseph Borgen, in an antisemitic attack nearly two years ago.
Borgen, now 30, has said he was wearing a yarmulke when, in an incident captured on video, he was violently beaten while walking to a pro-Israel demonstration in Midtown Manhattan during the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, which coincided with an uptick in antisemitic incidents across the U.S. He has recalled being punched, kicked and pepper-sprayed during the assault, for which he was hospitalized.
The six-month plea bargain recommended for Waseem Awawdeh, a 24-year-old Brooklyn man accused of striking Borgen four times with a crutch in an attempted gang assault, provoked an outcry from Jewish leaders in New York City and its surrounding suburbs, some of whom have seized on the chance to cast Bragg as misguided in his approach to crime.
Renewing charges that Bragg, a Democrat who took office last January, has been insufficiently aggressive in pursuing criminal convictions, Bruce Blakeman, the Republican executive of Nassau County, dismissed the deal as “a slap on the wrist” and characterized Awawdeh as a “ringleader” in the attack during a press conference held earlier this month. Meanwhile, in a significant escalation of rhetoric, Dov Hikind, a former state assemblyman from Brooklyn, called on protestors “to go…
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