A Public Defenders Union Debated A Pro-Palestinian Resolution. Then Came The Backlash.
Threats, and lawsuits, to prevent a vote from being held on the motion.
Michael Letwin, a retiree member of the union who had been its president for 13 years, until 2002, worked for decades as a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and identifies as an anti-Zionist Jew. He’s part of a coalition within the union, ALAA Labor for Palestine, that supports the resolution, which Letwin described as a response to a call for solidarity from Palestinian trade unionists.
“The idea that we would, or should, sell our conscience because of threats to funding is really abhorrent,” he told HuffPost. “There’s a genocide going on, and we’re not going to just ignore that, anymore than we would ignore what was happening in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. We will not be silent, and we will not be silenced.”