Max Berger, now an aide to Elizabeth Warren, organized and participated in anti-Israel protests and compared IDF anti-terror ops to pogroms.
Days after Israeli ground troops entered the Gaza Strip in 2014, following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens at the hands of Hamas terrorists, a group of far-left millennial Jews gathered to plan a public protest of the military operation.
The new group, which called itself IfNotNow, discussed a public demonstration in front of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an establishment Jewish umbrella group.
Max Berger was one of the planners who urged them to take it a step further: The protesters should get arrested at the Presidents’ Conference headquarters in New York, he suggested. And they should recite kaddish, the traditional Jewish mourner’s prayer, for Israelis and Arabs who had died in the fighting.
When the protest took place, on July 28, 2014, that’s what they did. Berger was one of nine Jews arrested in the Presidents’ Conference building.