Sarsour, Other Leaders Accused Of Anti-Semitism Leave Women’s March
Women’s March Co-Chairwomen Linda Sarsour (L) and Tamika D. Mallory speak during the Women’s March ‘Power to the Polls’ voter registration tour launch at Sam Boyd Stadium on January 21, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Image by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The Women’s March is moving on from three of its original four co-chairs, whose struggles to respond to anti-Semitism accusations undercut the movement they led, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour will no longer sit on the board of the Women’s March. They stepped down July 15, but the organization had kept their bios and titles on their website until this week, the Post reported.
The controversies hurt relationships with the Jewish community and confused the organization’s mission. There had been calls for these leaders to resign since it emerged in March 2018 that Mallory, Sarsour and co-chair Carmen Perez had longtime associations with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Perez, who will remains as co-chair, repeatedly met with Farrakhan and praised him online before she took up leadership of the Women’s March in 2017, Algemeiner reported that year.
In a statement, the organization said that Sarsour, Bland and Mallory would “transition off of the Women’s March Board and onto other projects focused on advocacy within their respective organizations.” Bland and Mallory, who were co-presidents, will be replaced when the new board meets this month. New leadership will also be elected.
Bland said that the three planned this move long ago. Sarsour told The Post in a text message that the new board is “AMAZING.”
“I am grateful to the women who stepped up to shepherd the Women’s March,” she wrote. “This is what women supporting women looks like.”
The new board members were selected by a nominating committee, and include three Jewish women: Rabbi Tamara Cohen of Moving Traditions, an educational program for Jewish teenagers; Ginna Green, chief strategy officer of the liberal Jewish political advocacy group Bend the Arc, which advised the Women’s March on anti-Semitism during the peak of the controversy; and Texas political strategist Ginny Goldman.
Alyssa Fisher is a writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
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