James Mai, vice mayor of Irvine, Calif., had been involved in the Rotary Club of Orange County L.A. for about five years, including some two years as vice chair of its fundraising foundation. He told JNS that he saw it as a “great organization” that helps the community, including sewing blankets for cancer patients.
But he resigned from both the club and the foundation after the club installed Farrah Khan, a former Irvine mayor, as its president despite concerns that Mai and Jewish groups raised about her social media posts.
“I’m the vice mayor of a city, and I’m an elected official. I represent all sorts of people,” he told JNS. “I don’t want to be involved in a group that is being led by someone who’s saying antisemitic things.”
Khan has always been kind to him personally, but she has also “made some comments that were very hostile and I believe to be antisemitic,” he said. (JNS sought comment from Khan, the club and Rotary International.)
In a June 22 letter, the Jewish Community Action Network, Israeli-American Council and Jewish Federation of Orange County urged the club not to install Khan as president, alleging that she had spread antisemitic blood libels on social media.
The groups said that Khan shared an Al Jazeera article alleging that Israel bombed a girls’ school in Iran and wrote that the “sick pedophiles/cannibals are doing what they do best.”
Khan also claimed that “handcuffed babies were found in a mass grave” and blamed Israel for the alleged atrocity, per the letter.
Mai told JNS that he urged Rotary leadership to reconsider its decision.
“It’s the same thing if you asked me to be led by someone who openly hates black people or hates Asian people or a member of the KKK,” he said. “I’m not OK being part of that group.”
Some Rotary members asked whether he would reconsider if Khan were no longer involved. Mai said that he would, but he never heard back from the organization, and Khan has since been sworn in as president, he said.
“I understand that they wanted a former mayor involved, but I think any group should stay away from someone who’s polarizing,” he told JNS.
Mai found it “interesting” that, as mayor, Khan helped establish an Orange County anti-hate portal given her recent social media posts, he said.
Hate crimes
In January, Orange County, Calif., released a report, which found that the 119 hate crimes reported in 2024 represented about a 25% increase from the 95 in 2023. The report noted, however, that four county jurisdictions provided only partial data in 2023.
Jews were the targets of 24% of the reported hate crimes in 2024. Only black victims were more targeted, at 26%.
Irvine recorded the most hate crimes in the county—19, up from 14 the prior year. The report didn’t specify how many of Irvine’s hate crimes were antisemitic.
Mai told JNS that the findings didn’t surprise him. “There are a lot of hate incidents where people call names,” he said.
His nonprofit, Asian Americans Pacific Islanders United, supports hate-crime victims, including helping them find legal support and report hate crimes.
“We don’t see a lot of that in Irvine, but what we do see a lot is unreported crimes in other areas, especially within the Asian American community,” he told JNS.
“In Irvine, people are very sensitive, and I’m not trying to be insensitive to the reporting, but they report everything,” he said. “That’s why they report hate crimes, incidents, it could be classified as anything.”
“We don’t see physical attacks in Irvine, but we see people yelling at each other,” he said.
Hate in the city is “very subtle,” according to the vice mayor.
“It’s not in your face, like, ‘Hey, I hate you,’ except when some ex-public officials say it,” he said.
Mai told JNS that he would not be surprised if there was an uptick in antisemitic hate crimes and incidents in the city. The anti-Israel movement has become “very big” in Irvine, he said.
“There’s a large concentration of that community here, and a large concentration of the Jewish community here as well,” he said. “I think naturally, people are going to hate on each other because they’re geographically near each other.”
Two years ago, anti-Israel protesters directed hate speech toward Jews during the public comment session at city council meetings, according to Mai.
“No one really put a stop to it at the time, and I was in disagreement with that,” he told JNS. “I couldn’t believe the things that they were saying.”
In their letter to the Rotary Club, the Jewish groups wrote that Khan, while mayor, “declined to enforce the city’s rules of decorum and allowed harassment and bullying of our community at City Hall” when masked protesters “accosted our community members, taunted us, shouted over us, threatened us and did all they could to make us unwelcome in our own city.”
Mai, a Vietnamese American, said that he experienced racism growing up in Cleveland, where he was the only Asian student in his school.
His adoptive father served in World War II and helped liberate the Nazi death camps.
“I grew up hearing the stories of the suffering of the Jewish people, so it’s a personal thing for me to hear somebody say things about the Jewish community,” he told JNS. “I grew up fighting hate.”
Allowing someone like Khan to hold “a position like that, depending on what they say, could maybe normalize hate speech,” according to Mai.
“You should serve everyone equally,” he told JNs. “You shouldn’t be so hateful to others.”
