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Passengers accuse JetBlue of antisemitism after Orthodox Jews ordered off plane
Beth Harpaz
January 2, 2024

Three Orthodox passengers were ordered off a New Year’s Eve red-eye flight from California to New York after they changed seats. “My inflight crew tells me they do not want to have you on their plane,” the JetBlue pilot can be heard telling the passengers in an audio recording of the incident supplied to The Lakewood Scoop. “I have to support them.”…The kerfuffle began when a visibly Jewish elderly man took what he apparently thought was a vacant seat on a red-eye from Palm Springs to John F. Kennedy Airport. A flight attendant asked if that was his assigned seat, and when he said no, she told him he couldn’t sit there…One of two Orthodox women seated elsewhere on the plane who were traveling with him then intervened, explaining that he couldn’t occupy his assigned seat because of “religious purposes,” presumably because it was next to a woman. READ MORE