Firefighter Who Tweeted Anti-Semitic Hate Assigned To Orthodox Neighborhood

(JTA) —A newly graduated New York City firefighter who quit his job as an EMT five years ago after racist and anti-Semitic tweets came to light, has been assigned to a firehouse in the heart of an Orthodox Jewish community.
Joseph M. Cassano, 28, once tweeted “I like Jews about as much as hitler.” He also wrote: “Getting sick of picking up all these Obama lovers and taking them to the hospital because their medicare pays for an ambulance and not a cab.” On Martin Luther King Day in 2013 he tweeted, “MLK could go kick rocks for all I care, but thanks for the time and a half today.”
Cassano, who graduated from the city’s firefighters’ academy last week, was assigned to Engine 247 on 60th Street in Borough Park, the heart of Orthodox Jewish Brooklyn, the New York Post reported.
Cassano was allowed to resign after the tweets came to light in 2013. He received counseling from Rabbi Steven Burg, then a director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. After the counseling and an apology he was allowed to return to work as an EMT and apply to become a firefighter.
In 2015, Cassano told the Daily News he had seen the error of his “very ignorant and very immature” ways. “I’ve apologized for those comments and I am still apologizing for them today,” he also said.
He is the son of former New York City Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano.
“For him to be assigned to Borough Park, where you have an incredible number of Holocaust survivors, is an insult to our community,” Orthodox Jewish New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind told the Post. “Put him somewhere else.”
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
- 4
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
In Case You Missed It
-
Theater The ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ revival has us wondering — where are all the Jewish Shelley Levenes?
-
Books From an Italian Holocaust survivor, a Kafkaesque nightmare of imprisonment under fascism
-
Film & TV Why Robby said the Shema on ‘The Pitt’
-
Yiddish World Children taking part in a Seder while hiding from the Nazis
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.