Boston Mayor Wu's Elizabeth Warren-Egerman-ADL Connection Revisited

As an Oct. 28, 2021 article in the New York Times noted, the current mayor of the city of Boston (a U.S. city which has still never elected an African-American man to serve as its mayor), Michelle Wu, is "a protegee of Senator Elizabeth Warren" who "at her suburban Chicago high school...wowed the audience at graduation with a piano solo from Gershwin's `Rhapsody in Blue'."

Then, according to the same New York Times article, when the current Boston mayor first attended institutionally racist Harvard University as an undergraduate in the early 21st-century, but had not yet become Elizabeth Warren's protegee, "Ms. Wu was not sure whether she was a Republican or a Democrat;" and, after graduating from Harvard College in 2007, initially "Ms. Wu, newly graduated, had started a fast-track job at the Boston Consulting Group" (the same Boston-area-based firm that, three decades earlier, had employed Israel's current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for two years, after Netanyahu graduated from MIT's Sloan School of Management in the late 1970's).

But after later enrolling at Harvard Law School, however, Boston's current mayor apparently then began a close political relationship with the then-Harvard Law School Professor Elizabeth Warren. As the New York Times observed in its Oct. 28, 2021 article:

"Ms. Warren...remembers Ms. Wu coming to her office hours in her first semester of law school...`She felt she hadn't done her best and wanted me to know she had not intended any disrespect,' Ms. Warren recalled.

"As they sat together, Ms. Wu told the story about how she had come to care for her mother and sister...That marked the beginning of a close relationship between Ms. Wu and Ms. Warren...Asked...why she endorsed Ms. Wu...Ms. Warren responded simply, `Michelle is family.'"

So, when then-Harvard Law School Professor Warren "decided to run for" the U.S. "Senate" in 2011, "Ms. Wu asked for a job on her campaign," according to the same article.

Following Warren's election to the U.S. Senate in November 2012, Warren's protegee soon began her own political office-seeking career, at the then-age of 27, by announcing her candidacy for a Boston City Council At-Large seat in Dec. 2012, which Wu succeeded in first winning in Boston's 2013 municipal election.

And, after occupying a Boston City Council seat for 4 terms (as the pace of Boston's gentrification by real estate developers, who often individually contribute a lot of money to the campaign committees of local and state elected officials in Massachusetts, accelerated), Warren's protegee declared, in September 2020, that she wanted to be the mayor of one of the largest U.S. cities which had still not yet elected a Black man to be its mayor (like Chicago, Illinois did as long ago as 1983).

So, not surprisingly, given the current Boston mayor's historical political relationship to Elizabeth Warren, the campaign finance chairman for Warren's successful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign and the campaign treasurer of Warren's unsuccessful 2020 Democratic Party presidential campaign, Paul Egerman, as well as Paul Egerman's wife, have contributed a lot of money in support of Wu's higher political office-seeking in Boston, since September 2020.

On Aug. 11, 2021, for example, the Boston Turnout Project Independent Expenditure PAC deposited a $50,000 campaign contribution from Paul Egerman, according to its financial disclosure form. And between May 10, 2021 and Aug. 23, 2021, this same "Independent Expenditure PAC" spent $298,878 of the $415,500 it collected during this period supporting then-Boston City Councilor Wu's 2021 mayoral candidacy; while between Aug. 24, 2021 and Sept. 7, 202r1, the 2020 Warren presidential campaign treasurer-funded Boston Turnout Independent Expenditure PAC spent another $33,977 supporting Wu's 2021 mayoral candidacy.

Following the current Boston mayor's election in November 2021, Wu's campaign committee then deposited 3 campaign contributions, totaling $3,000 from Paul Egerman and 2 campaign contributions, totaling $2,000 from Joanne Egerman (who both live in Weston, Massachusetts, not Boston, Massachusetts) between Feb. 14, 2022 and Dec. 16, 2024.

In addition to being Wu campaign committee contributors, U.S. Senator Warren's former 2012 campaign finance chairman and former 2020 Warren presidential campaign treasurer Egerman, and his wife, are also both trustees of their Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation, which has historically helped fund the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] lobbying group that endorsed the IDF's post-Oct.7, 2023 military attack on people in Gaza, which has killed over 48,000 Palestinians, including tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, as of Feb. 2025.

Between 2014 and 2019, for example, the Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation gave 4 "charitable grants", totaling $800,000, to ADL, according to the foundation's Form 990 financial filings; and, according to a June 10, 2014 Jewish Insider article, Joanne Egerman sat, historically, on the board of the ADL in 2014.

In addition, according to the 2022 and 2023 Form 990 financial filings of the Paul and Joanne Egerman Family Charitable Foundation, during the same decade Paul Egerman and his wife contributed $55,000 to either the PAC supporting the current Boston mayor's 2021 campaign or to Wu's post-2021 election campaign committee, their foundation also gave another $400,00 in "charitable grant" money to the ADL.

So, not surprisingly, U.S. Senator Warren's protegee chose to authorize Boston Police Department [BPD] officers to violently break-up an antiwar and Palestinian solidarity encampment, set up on Emerson College's Boston campus in the 2B Boylston Place Alley near Boylston Street by Emerson College antiwar students, in late April 2024.

And following the arrest of 118 non-violent antiwar and Palestinian solidarity demonstrators on Emerson College's campus by BPD officers on April 25, 2024, in violation of their 1st amendment/ freedom of assembly constitutional rights, Boston's current mayor then told WCVB-TV she supported the actions of the BPD and its handling of the Emerson College encampment protest.

Yet, according to one of the arrested Emerson College antiwar student protest organizers, in the early morning of April 25, 2024, the BPD officers "just started ripping us from the crowd, throwing us down on the ground" and "started beating people, even people who weren't arrested, dragging them on the ground."

In addition, Boston Mayor Wu also later claimed in a statement "that the growing encampment needed to be removed in order to address the public safety and fire hazards that it presented;" rather than more candidly indicating that "the growing encampment" was being removed because of the special influence in Boston of some of Emerson College's big donors, political campaign committee contributors and lobbying groups like the ADL.

But since her election as Boston's mayor in November 2021, Elizabeth Warren's "protegee", who "notably keeps an upright piano in her" Boston "City Hall office" according to the Boston Globe, has appeared as a feature soloist, performing one movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra [BSO]'s free Concert for the City event in May 2023; and as the featured piano soloist in George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" with the Boston Pops, at the BSO's September 2024 Concert for the City event.

Yet while the current mayor of Boston was apparently spending a lot of her time in Boston's City Hall preparing for her two feature soloist performances at the BSO's Concert for the City events, by apparently practicing on the upright piano in her Boston City Hall office, "the number of families newly experiencing homeless" in Boston "over the course of a year has increased by 44.4 percent from federal [fiscal] year 2020 to 2023, and the number of people in families experiencing homelessness has increased by 43.5 percent," according to a June 14, 2024 press release of the Boston Mayor's Office of Housing.

And, according to an article by Mandile Mpofu that appeared in the Sept. 12, 2024 issue of the Bay State Banner, Boston now "has one of the highest rates of homelessness among metropolitan cities in the U.S."