In a ceremony earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg and other officials hailed the rebuilding of CUNY's Fiterman Hall, a Borough of Manhattan Community College building on West Street, which was badly damaged on September 11, 2001. However, more people may remember it for the part when City Councilman Charles Barron and CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld got into a shouting match that included "You shut up!" "You're a disgrace!" and "You're a sickening racist!"
Apparently Barron felt disrespected that he wasn't originally seated front and center with other officials (he had to sit in the audience) and that Bloomberg didn't acknowledge CUNY students or the City Council. The Daily News offers this exchange between Barron and Wiesenfeld, which started after Barron expressed his unhappiness:
This prompted CUNY trustee Wiesenfeld to shout down Barron from his seat in the front row. "You're a disgrace!" Wiesenfeld shouted.Barron then yelled back, "You just be quiet. Ain't nobody talking to you. Whether you like it or not, I'm here and I'm not going anywhere. You sit there. You shut up!"
Wiesenfeld, a former staffer for Mayor Ed Koch and Sen. Al D'Amato, was a senior aide to Governor Pataki, who appointed him to the CUNY board.
A principal with the firm of Bernstein Global Wealth Management, Wiesenfeld was confirmed by the state Senate in 1999 despite allegations that he referred to blacks as "savages" and Hasidic Jews as "thieves."
And here's video of the shouting:
Wiesenfeld later told the News, "This individual has no civility. He has no personal decency. All of us can have a persecution complex. My parents, my wife's parents were in concentration camps, I'm sure his ancestors were subject to slavery, but that is no excuse for his ill-fitting conduct in public, the way he deals with other public officials." And Barron said Wiesenfeld was "a right- wing, racist, ignorant fool," who "should not be sitting on the board of trustees of CUNY."
