A flyer distributed on Election Day attacking one of the candidates for the District 200 Oak Park River Forest High School Board has been condemned by all of the candidates in the race as antisemitic.
The flyer, reportedly distributed outside of the polling place at the main branch of the Oak Park Public Library on April 1, called D200 candidate Nate Mellman an “Israel-first Zionist fanatic.” The flyer, which featured a black-and-white close up of his face, slammed Mellman’s involvement in the filing of a formal complaint against OPRF last year alleging that the school had failed to protect students from antisemitism in the first months of the Israel-Hamas war and attacked his record as a judge within the social security administration.
In text messages with Wednesday Journal, Mellman, who is Jewish, described the flyer in one word — “shocking.”
Mellman and his campaign partner Josh Gertz addressed the flyer in more detail in a statement on social media Thursday, saying the criticism crossed the line into overt antisemitism. The flyer used antisemitic tropes and “falsehoods” to unfairly attack Mellman, they said.
“Nate served for almost 30 years as a military officer, retiring as a colonel. Accusing Nate, or any other Jew, of being more loyal to Israel than this country is a classic example of antisemitism,” they said in the statement. “The close up of Nate’s nose is problematic. Yes, it’s big. Again though, it’s an antisemitic caricature of a Jew. We won’t delve into all the other falsehoods and examples of antisemitism in the flyer. But we will say the flyer in its totality is antisemitic for the simple fact that we were running for a simple local school board, not Congress or president where our position on foreign policy would have been at issue.”
The flyer featured the logo of the Democratic Socialists of America West Cook chapter, which is affiliated with the Chicago office of the national leftist organization. The DSA’s Chicago office did not respond to a request for comment earlier this week.
DSA’s West Cook chapter has a meeting scheduled at Oak Park’s Maze Branch Library this Saturday afternoon.
The other slate of candidates in the election — Fred Arkin, Audrey Williams-Lee, Kathleen Odell and David Schaafsma — condemned the flyer in a statement provided to Wednesday Journal.
“The race for the D200 board was contested, and voters made their choices based upon differences in approaches and perspectives on equity, safety, and financial discipline,” they said. “We were appalled to learn of this flyer, and find it deeply offensive and inappropriate. While we wait for the final results, we condemn this personal attack on a fellow candidate.”
Arkin further condemned the flyer in a brief interview.
“I think it’s filth, it’s disgusting and I would never be a part of something like that,” Arkin said. “It came as a complete shock to me.”
The final result of the election is still somewhat undetermined. The six candidates competed for four open seats, with Schaafsma running as a write-in candidate. Arkin, Williams-Lee, Odell and Gertz were the top vote-getters among the on-ballot candidates, but Schaafsma’s final tally has not yet been confirmed by Cook County.
Last year, both Mellman and Gertz were part of a cohort of community members who argued that leaders at OPRF High School had tolerated antisemitism in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023. Mellman also submitted a complaint against OPRF to the Illinois State Board of Education and the Illinois Attorney General’s office, calling for a formal investigation into the school for allowing a “hostile antisemitic environment for Jewish students” to take root.
In January, Mellman said the complaint had yet to receive a response from either governmental body.
Over the course of the campaign, Schaafsma had also been criticized for public views on the Israel-Hamas war. He was the subject of a social media post by the education policy wing of the pro-Israel media monitoring organization CAMERA, which drew attention to his profile on the social media and writing platform Substack, on which Schaafsma had liked and shared pro-Palestinian content the organization described as antisemitic.
The organization had posted a screenshot of Schaafsma’s repost of an interview with Holocaust scholar and Palestinian advocate Norman Finkelstein, in which Finkelstein said he would refuse to condemn Hamas after the war began.
Schaafsma’s slate-mates Arkin, Odell and Williams-Lee condemned the assertions that Schaafsma was antisemitic or supported the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.
“Working closely with Dave and getting to know him and his family over the past several months, we know, of course, that this is not true,” they said in the statement.