Ex-editor of Jewish paper arrested for assaulting cop during Jan. 6 Capitol storming
Elliot Resnick, who was running Jewish Press at time and faces several felony charges, was seen grabbing arm of officer trying to spray rioters to keep them from entering building
The former editor of an Orthodox, right-wing Jewish news site was arrested Thursday and charged with assaulting a police officer during the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol by then-US president Donald Trump’s supporters.
Elliot Resnick, a 39-year-old New Yorker who had been the editor of the Jewish Press at the time of the insurrection, was also charged with the felonies of obstructing an officer from performing their duties during an incident of civil disorder, entering and remaining in restricted grounds, disorderly conduct in restricted grounds and demonstrating in a Capitol building, according to a press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Resnick was arrested in New York and was slated to make a court appearance later Thursday.
According to court documents, Resnick was part of the mob that rushed the Central East Steps of the Capitol building after the police line there fell. Footage shows him gesturing for others to follow him up the stairs. Upon reaching the doors of the building, Resnick is seen grabbing the arm of a police officer who was attempting to deploy a chemical irritant to keep the rioters from entering the Capitol. Resnick was one of the first people to push their way inside the East Rotunda Doors.
Upon entering the building, Resnick sought to push open an additional door so more people could get inside. After the door wouldn’t budge, he began grabbing rioters from outside the building and pulling them through the other door that had been pried open.
Resnick was seen roaming through several restricted areas of the Capitol before returning to the entrance he used to get in and beckoning more rioters to come inside. He left the building after 50 minutes but was seen roaming the Capitol grounds for another hour, according to court documents.
Resnick is one of the roughly 1,000 individuals who have been arrested from nearly all 50 US states for crimes related to the Capitol storming, including 320 people who were charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, according to the Justice Department.
Resnick was fired from his job as Jewish Press editor in May 2021, several weeks after he was identified in YouTube videos of the Capitol breach.
At the time, Naomi Mauer, the publisher of the Jewish Press, appeared to initially stand behind Resnick.
“As we understand the facts, we believe that Mr. Resnick acted within the law,” Mauer told Politico in an email, declining to respond to follow-up questions.
Resnick assumed the position of editor at the Jewish Press in 2018. He has a long history of using incendiary language and has called the gay rights movement “evil.”
Under Resnick’s editorship, the Jewish Press was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019 after publishing an op-ed titled “The Pride Parade: What Are They Proud Of” comparing gay marchers in the New York event to animals, adulterers and thieves.
“If blacks resent America’s [sic] so much, let them discard Christianity (which the ‘white man’ gave them) and re-embrace the primitive religions they practiced in Africa,” Resnick wrote in a tweet in 2019.
“Can someone give me a coherent reason why blackface is racist?” he wrote in another tweet that year.
Resnick was not the only editor in Jewish Press history to espouse racist views.
The paper was edited in the 1960s by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a Jewish ultranationalist who advocated violence against Arabs and was banned from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Though the paper distanced itself from Kahane in 1969, it still lists him among the paper’s prominent past editors on its website.
In 2015, Resnick gave a glowing review to a Kahane biography written by Kahane’s wife and described his own experience of “near trance” while reading one of Kahane’s books in high school.
JTA contributed to this report.
