Jewish Insider reporter assaulted by crowd during Brooklyn anti-lockdown protest

Jacob Kornbluh, national politics reporter for the national news outlet Jewish Insider, was assaulted by a crowd during anti-lockdown protests in the Brooklyn borough of New York on Oct. 7, 2020, according to tweets from Kornbluh and news reports.

Videos of the assault, which were posted on Twitter, show a group of men in clothing typically worn by members of the Orthodox Jewish community surrounding Kornbluh and pinning him against a wall while screaming “moyser,” or “snitch” in Yiddish.

Kornbluh wrote on Twitter and confirmed in a conversation with the Committee to Protect Journalists that he was “hit in the head and kicked by an angry crowd of hundreds of community members” that were calling him “Nazi” and “Hitler.” New York Police Department officers and several community members helped Kornbluh leave the crowd, according to Kornbluh’s tweets.

The New York Police Department arrested one of the anti-lockdown protest organizers, Heshy Tischler, on Oct. 11, and charged him with inciting a riot and unlawful imprisonment in connection with an assault of a journalist, according to New York state’s online court record system and a tweet from the NYPD.

Before his arrest, Tischler posted on Twitter that he would be pleading not guilty.

The protests were against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new COVID-19 restrictions on neighborhoods with high infection rates, including in Borough Park, where the incident occurred and where both Kornbluh and Tischler live, according to Haaretz.