JTA — Recently Nick Fuentes, the far-right influencer and unrepentant antisemite and misogynist, did something unusual for him: He apologized to a Jew.

The apology was court-ordered, and Fuentes himself was not present for it. His attorney handed a note to the recipient, 59-year-old Marla Rose, and quickly demanded it back before it could appear in public.

And it had nothing to do with Fuentes’s hate speech, but rather with a misdemeanor battery charge stemming from the 27-year-old streamer’s assault of Rose in late 2024 as she approached his front door.

Yet the incident and its aftermath have become one of the few ways in which Fuentes has been held accountable for some of his actions as his public influence has continued to grow. And for Rose, a freelance writer and self-described “jack-of-all-trades progressive activist” who does not typically foreground her Jewish identity, her up-close encounters with Fuentes have proved an education in other ways.

“My Jewish identity is also forged by social justice, of the history of speaking up for those who are oppressed,” she said in an interview. “I think that Jewish people have a long and beautiful history of social justice.”

Rose grew up in a family of “High Holiday Jews,” as she describes it, who came originally from Russia and Ukraine. While her mother held a leadership role with the sisterhood of their local synagogue, today she doesn’t involve herself much in religious life; she also identifies as agnostic. And despite Fuentes’s constant torrent of antisemitic invective online, Rose said her own Jewish identity had little bearing on her decision to walk up to his door — though it wasn’t entirely absent, either.

“My culturally Jewish background is very aligned with what I did,” she said. “My heroes are people like Emma Goldman” — the Jewish socialist leader of the early 20th century.

Instead, it was the realization that the two lived in the same town — revealed when a Fuentes tweet after US President Donald Trump’s reelection (“Your body, my choice”) led to his........

© The Times of Israel