Jewish media activist Daniel Sieradski, left. [Photo: Jared Malsin]

The Emergency Committee for Israel, a conservative Republican group dedicated to criticizing President Obama’s Middle East policy, released an ad Thursday accusing the Occupy Wall Street movement of anti-Semitism.

The ad was the latest in a series of accusations from mainly right-wing pundits and organizations alleging bigotry on the part of the economic justice protesters, who have been camped out in New York and across the country for more than three weeks.

New York Times columnist David Brooks noted on Monday that Adbusters magazine, which was involved in the initial organizing of the protest, published in 2004 an article titled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” about Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush administration.

Riffing on Brook’s suggestion, right-wing talk radio stalwart Rush Limbaugh went on to suggest that the slogan “We are the 99 percent” was a variation of the anti-Semitic trope that financial system is controlled by Jews.

In New York’s Zuccotti Park (Liberty Plaza), where the main Occupy Wall Street encampment is located, there is no evidence that the handful of anti-Semitic signs and utterances featured in ECI’s ad are anything other than an isolated fringe, spurned by the rest of the protesters. On Wednesday, one man holding a cardboard sign reading “Google: Zionists control Wall St.” was followed around by another protester with his own sign reading “This guy does not represent Occupy Wall Street. à” with an arrow pointing to the offensive demonstrator.

Protesters also note that Jews have participated in the demonstration from day one. One group, Occupy Judaism, has organized religious services at the protest camp during the Jewish high holidays. Organizers say a thousand worshipers turned out to a Yom Kippur service last Friday.

The prime mover behind Occupy Judaism is new media activist Daniel Sieradski, who was at Zuccotti on Thursday, standing outside a tent which served as a Sukkah, a traditional structure erected by Jews on the holiday of Sukkot.

For Sieradski, the allegations of anti-Semitism highlighted what he sees as a double standard. He told me: “I think it’s really despicable that the media, and in particular the conservative media, is going out of it’s way to falsely represent the activities here, which are not at all incongruous from the tea party protests, which they adamantly defended as not being anti-semitic, despite the fact that there were way more people holding up anti-Semitic signs to the tea party protests.”

He added: “You’re going to tell me that we’re antisemites? My mom grew up ultra-orthodox.”

He also said: “We’re people who care about social and economic justice for all americans. And we’re not clowns.”

Occupy Wall Street reached critical mass this week.

What began as an encampment of a few hundred protesters swelled, at least temporarily, to a mass movement as thousands of protesters jammed the financial district on Wednesday as labor and community organizations turned out their members in support of the ongoing social justice protest.

The demonstrations have also jumped onto the national political agenda. President Obama was asked twice about the protests at a news conference on Thursday. “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel,” he said. “People are frustrated and the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

Aside from the irony of Obama expressing sympathy with a movement that is at least partly an indictment of his administration, what is interesting about Obama’s statement is that it is a concise summary of the spirit of the protests. One of the central criticisms of the Wall Street protests has been the lack of a clear demand, and yet even the president gets the underlying grievance driving people into the streets.

If the signs brandished by individual protesters on Wednesday were any indication, the demands are a wide variations on the theme of accountability in the financial system. They ranged from the conventional (“Hands off my Social Security!”) to the radical (“Take your money back: Nationalize the banks under worker control”) to the humorous (“You know it’s bad when librarians are marching!”).

This ideological diversity could be seen as a demonstration of the advantages of not having a clear platform: the protest is many things to many people, which means more protesters show up.

Police challenge

As the demonstrators ranks swelled, so did those of the police. On Wednesday NYPD helicopters hovered overhead while on the ground hundreds of uniformed police officers corralled the marchers into lanes designated for the protest, lined by metal barricades and the infamous orange nets seen at previous protests.

The barricades were a source of friction. At one point Wednesday I stood in a crowd of hundreds of demonstrators waiting for 20 minutes just to turn the corner where police had created a bottleneck with the barricades. “Let us march!” the crowd chanted. A young man suggested that the crowd move the barricade themselves. The police didn’t budge, and the protesters hesitated to begin an open confrontation. “They just want to show us who is in control,” one man remarked to me.

Later on Wednesday, two dozen people were reportedly arrested night after protesters attempted to march to Wall Street proper, and one police officer was videotaped using a baton to beat back a number of demonstrators.

Arrests and police violence have provided much of the drama in the three-week old saga of Occupy Wall Street. Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna’s pepper-spray attack, and the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge last weekend, when protesters did openly confront the police, brought more attention to their actions, and perhaps encouraged more people to join them this week.

Many now speculate that the endgame of the protest could be a police eviction of the protesters camped out in Zuccoti Park (Liberty Plaza). The police say it’s up to Brookfield Properties, the real estate company that owns the private park, whether to declare the occupiers trespassers. Justin Elliot of Salon reported Thursday that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s girlfriend, Diana Taylor, sits on the board of that company.

This is an investigative piece I wrote for The Local East Village, a blog collaboration between NYU and The New York Times. Using court documents, I report on the fact that Anthony Bologna, the senior police officer who was videotaped using pepper spray on unarmed demonstrators at the Occupy Wall Street protest last two weeks ago, was named in nine previous civil rights lawsuits alleging violations of protesters’ rights.

Here’s an excerpt:

Last week, The Guardian reported that Anthony Bologna, the senior police officer who was videotaped using pepper spray on the eyes of protesters, was previously named in a lawsuit alleging police brutality at the 2004 protests of the Republican national convention. The Local has now acquired court documents, some of which are posted below, that show it is just one of nine lawsuits in which the officer is named, all of them alleging the violation of demonstrators’ constitutional rights.

The lawsuits, dating as far back as 2003, accuse Inspector Bologna of personal involvement in numerous false arrests, use of excessive force against demonstrators, and violation of free speech rights. In each of the cases, he was named alongside a list of defendants including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, police commissioner Raymond Kelly, and other senior officials.

Seven of the lawsuits resulted from the arrests of protesters at the Republican National Convention in 2004. Two earlier suits followed arrests at the World Economic Forum in 2002. Four of the cases resulted in settlements in which the city agreed to pay as much as $30,000. The other five remain open.

Inspector Bologna, the other police officials, and the City of New York denied the accusations in all of the lawsuits, court documents show.

Notwithstanding the accusations against him, Mr. Bologna was promoted, in the years since the convention, from captain to deputy inspector.

I reported intensively from the United Nations during the General Assembly in September, focussing on the expected showdown over an application for Palestinian membership. We’re unlikely to see a climactic vote any time soon, but in until then, here are three of my reports about the UN gambit:

Escaping Oslo: Questions for Mouin Rabbani

Uncertainty clouds Palestinian bid for UN membership

Fight for votes as Security Council meets on Palestine