OCTOBER 24 • 2024 | 19

ran nearly three hours. The public 
meeting can be viewed in its entire-
ty on YouTube: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=z8TkPI6uQu8. 
David Kurzmann, senior director 
of community affairs at the Jewish 
Federation of Detroit, 
was the first to speak. 
He expressed his 
gratitude to the fine 
working relationship the 
Federation, located in 
Bloomfield Township, has 
always had with the board. 
“[Fakih’s social media 
remarks] are a blatant and harmful 
attack on our Jewish community,
” 
he said. “Labeling us as ‘scum’ is not 
merely offensive, they are deeply 
hurtful and contribute to a climate of 
hatred and dehumanizing intolerance 
that has no place in our society. 
Zionism is the belief in a Jewish 
ancestral homeland. It’s a central tenet 
of Jewish identity and history. The 
vast majority of Jews are Zionists. Our 

liturgy is full of references to the Land 
of Israel and Jerusalem.
” 
Addressing the board, Kurzmann 
continued: “Our elected officials 
understand the responsibility you take 
on in your role. You have been elected 
to serve all the people of this township 
and have the duty to denounce hate 
speech and promote a culture of 
respect and understanding.
”
Rabbi Mark Miller of Temple 
Beth El in Bloomfield 
Township was the next 
to speak, expressing the 
hurt that Fakih caused 
by calling him and his 
family “scum of the earth” 
and criticized using a 
definition of Zionism 
pulled from an English dictionary. 
“When you call a person ‘scum,
’ it 
is either out of hatred or ignorance,
” 
Miller said. “I would like to think you 
said it out of ignorance. You can’t get a 
definition of Zionism from Merriam-
Webster, which is good for verbs and 

nouns, but it doesn’t do Zionism.
” 
Miller said that the word and 
the historic, spiritual and religious 
meanings of it, have been around 
long before the publication of the first 
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. 
“My son is named Ben Tziyon, the 
son of Zion,
” Miller said. “
All of that 
predates the modern idea of Zionism. 
And when you label me personally as 
‘scum,
’ you say that I am ‘scum,
’ what it 
means is that if you aren’t antisemitic, 
you have committed an antisemitic 
act. And I hope you can understand 
the difference. 
“
And my hope, honestly, my deep 
hope, is that you will understand the 
anger in this room and the anger 
that’s coming from a lot of different 
quarters, which isn’t because people 
hate you; it’s because what you said 
was hateful, and my hope is that 
one day we can find a way to work 
together to make that better.
” 
In his remarks at the meeting, 
Rabbi Tzvi Muller of the Birmingham 

Bloomfield Shul warned Fakih about 
how antisemitism is now masked as 
anti-Zionism and that the roots of this 
type of hatred can be traced back to 
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The 
propaganda from this forgery, Muller 
said, was embraced by the Nazis to 
perpetuate the Holocaust. 
“The words posted by you, 
Stephanie, a township trustee, convey 
the message that in Bloomfield 
Township, it is open season for Jew-
hatred,
” Muller said. 
“Those words uniquely contribute 
to an environment in which those 
who wish to harm my community 
feel emboldened. For them, it doesn’t 
matter whether they know my views 
on Zionism. Wearing my kippah is all 
they need to see to call me a Zionist 
baby-killer on the street. 
“I came here asking Stephanie 
to retract and apologize. But 
unfortunately tonight, all I have heard 
from you was a lot of gaslighting, 
aggression and playing the victim.
” 

David 
Kurzmann

Rabbi Mark 
Miller

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