“There is a class warfare going on,” says comedian Judah Friedlander of '30 Rock' fame. 'It's mostly the billionaires against everyone else.' Equipped with food and water to give to migrants, here's how he addresses what he calls 'a failure of society.'
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2023.Amid the motley crew of investment bankers, office workers, tourists and others scurrying from point A to point B in Midtown on a recent morning, one man stood still on the sidewalk. He reached into the little cart he was wheeling, and pulled out a pair of granola bars.“Do y’all need food at all?” he asked a group of two women and four children outside the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street.
Since asylum-seekers began arriving in New York en masse in spring 2022 -- often after being bused here by border-state governors -- an untold number of New Yorkers and aid groups have stepped up to help. But not many of them are as well known as Friedlander, who claims some 400,000 followers on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
In real life, Friedlander is more serious and attuned to the world. His concern and anger as he describes them, are fueled by the gap he sees between the powerful and the powerless, the haves and have-nots. “Our political leaders, they’re like, ‘Yeah, us political leaders, the ones with the most power in the country,not f----d up. It’s those people who just crossed the border here 30 minutes ago,’” he said to the crowd.Arun Venugopal / Gothamist
Periodically, Friedlander interrupted his own flow so he could offer a bagel or a face mask to the migrants he encountered.He said he was heartened by the work of immigrant rights groups like the New York Immigration Coalition, NYC ICE Watch and South Bronx Mutual Aid. But beyond the need to build more affordable housing, he said he had no specific policy prescriptions aside from urging that more had to be done in support of asylum-seekers.
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