What the Hell Is Going on With the Women’s March?

The Women’s March, the organization behind the mass-demonstrations that have taken place around the world since Trump’s inauguration, has had a difficult week. On Monday, Tablet magazine published a 10,000-plus-word investigation detailing allegations of antisemitism and mismanagement, and since then, the organization’s attempt to do damage control — by sending emails to journalists who shared the story on social media — appears to have only intensified the backlash.

The Tablet exposé, written by journalists Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, focused on the group of women who run the organization — notably, co-chairs Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory, who are accused in the investigation of making egregious anti-Semitic statements on multiple occasions.

According to several sources in the piece, the first incident took place during an informal meeting in mid-November 2016, when the two women made a generalized statement about how Jewish people were exploiters of black and brown people. On a separate occasion after the inaugural march in 2017, Evvie Harmon, one of the original March organizers, told Tablet that Perez and Mallory were “berating” another early organizer, Vanessa Wruble, for being Jewish. While Wruble did not comment on this interaction in the original Tablet piece, she confirmed it in a follow-up report published Thursday, saying, “I know what took place.” The Women’s March told Tablet that it “[denounces] anti-semitism, and there should be no confusion about that.”