A Brooklyn legislator was accused Wednesday of delivering a bizarre tirade against Jews, while ripping Mayor Bill de Blasio as a sellout, during a local community board meeting this week.
Assemblywoman Diane Richardson’s 50-minute rant during the Board 17 meeting Monday night faulted Jews for gentrifying in her district, which includes East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens, according to an eyewitness.
During a rezoning talk, a board member complained that people constantly ring her doorbell to ask if she’s interested in selling her home.
“It must be Jewish people,” Richardson responded, according to Lew Fidler, a former City Council member who is Jewish and attended the meeting as a representative of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
“As a Jew, I found that to be offensive,” Fidler told The Post.
“That was dripping with anti-Semitism. That’s when smoke came out of my ears.”
Before faulting Jewish interlopers, Richardson snidely referred to Brooklyn state Sen. Simcha Felder as “the Jewish senator from southern Brooklyn.”
Richardson said she was tired and sleep-deprived because Felder briefly held up passage of the state budget last week in a spat over the regulation of yeshivas.
“I found it gratuitous when she referred to Simcha Felder as ‘the Jewish senator from southern Brooklyn.’ It was inappropriate, ” Fidler said.
Richardson apparently knew her remarks were controversial because she had board officials shut off the board’s tape recorder before her comments.
Richardson also invoked race when discussing what she called the city’s uneven placement of homeless shelters.
She initially asked to address the board about a planned shelter in her district at 200 Linden Blvd. and pointed to Maspeth, Queens, as the “white” neighborhood where residents fought placement of a homeless facility.
Richardson then complained that the de Blasio administration had proposed five homeless shelters in her predominately black district.
She also suggested that the mayor’s claim of addressing inequality — the “Tale of Two Cities” — was a crock, a source said.
Her diatribe continued as she promoted her re-election bid toward the end of the meeting — when she also attacked Adams.Richardson suggested that the real estate industry is gunning for her but developers had the mayor and the borough president in their pocket, an attendee said.
“All they have on me is a broomstick,” Richardson reportedly said.
That was a reference to her 2016 arrest for allegedly beating her son with a broomstick — a charge that was later dropped.
Richardson, in a statement, did not deny making the offensive remarks.
She said she works closely with Jewish constituents on a daily basis and “if by any chance or for any reason something I relayed or repeated was misconstrued, and as a result I offended anyone in any way, I sincerely apologize. I see us, all of us as human beings, and at the end of the day, we all bleed red, it was never my intention to insult or hurt anyone nor would it ever be.”
Board chair Barrington Barrett told The Post he made a mistake in not recording the session and that he heard the term “Jewish people” uttered during a discussion of gentrification, but not by Richardson.