Jacob Burns Staffer Out After Box Office Clash; Hard Feelings, Questions Linger

By Andrew Vitelli

A box office clerk accused of verbally attacking a Jewish couple at Jacob Burns Film Center is no longer with the theater, according to the couple’s daughter. The staffing change follows a heated confrontation over tickets to a documentary about antisemitism.

The clerk’s departure came after the couple, Pleasantville residents Robert and Francine Goldstein, met with a senior HR associate and an employment attorney working with JBFC to investigate the allegations. The family was notified on Thursday that the clerk had separated from the theater. It is not clear whether he was fired or ended his employment with the theater voluntarily. 

Burns officials did not respond to inquiries from The Examiner. 

The Goldsteins and their daughter, an attorney and Pleasantville resident, were joined by Jonathan Goldberg, a family friend and labor attorney. 

The daughter said the family was shown footage of the encounter and given the chance to share their account with the theater’s attorney, who had just been retained by the Burns to investigate in the days before the meeting. 

Despite the clerk’s departure, the Goldsteins told The Examiner they are still awaiting a public statement from JBFC on the matter, noting that it took almost three weeks and significant community pressure before any action was taken. 

The clerk’s departure came after weeks of growing community frustration with the Burns – first, over its initial reluctance to screen October 8, then over its silence following the Goldstein’s allegations.

While Burns executives have held at least a couple meetings with concerned members of the community to discuss the incident, the theater has maintained its relative public silence. The JBFC’s public statement referenced a review of security footage and appeared to imply shared responsibility between the employee and the Goldsteins – though The Examiner has learned the footage lacked audio, raising questions about the basis for that assessment.

A Heated Exchange

The encounter between the Goldsteins and the ticket clerk took place on March 28, a Friday. The couple stopped into the theater after dinner to see whether tickets for a just-announced May 1 special screening of October 8 had gone on sale. They hadn’t – but according to the Goldsteins’ account the clerk became belligerent and said that he would never sell tickets to the film, which documents the rise in antisemitism after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.

A heated exchange ensued; according to Robert Goldstein, the clerk called the couple “murderers,” a remark Goldstein took to be about Jews in general. Goldstein said he responded by calling the clerk a Nazi. 

Robert Goldstein reported the incident to another employee, apparently the manager on duty at the time, and left the theater. Robert then emailed the theater reporting the incident, with CFO Patrick Saxton responding with a promise to investigate. Goldstein said at the time he would not speak to Saxton until the clerk was fired, and did not receive a response from Saxton. 

In response to numerous inquiries, the Burns issued only a three-sentence statement. The statement said nothing about disciplinary actions being considered against the clerk and said, “we require both our staff and patrons to treat each other with respect.” 

Many interpreted this as the theater blaming the Goldsteins, at least in part, for the confrontation, especially as the statement continues, “we immediately conducted an investigation, including reviewing video footage of the incident.” 

But the video largely tracked with the couple’s account, according to the daughter of the Goldsteins present at the meeting, and was shot from behind the ticket clerk. She said the video even showed the clerk coming out from behind the counter and following the couple as they walked away. 

The Burns’ statement does not mention that there was no audio recorded during the incident. 

The Goldsteins did not immediately file a police report but eventually did last Wednesday, April 9, the daughter said, after being encouraged to do so by the Pleasantville Police Department. 

Growing Frustration

While maintaining public silence – a spokesperson for the theater did not respond to inquiries for this article – the Burns began meeting with community members last week. In addition to the Goldstein family, Executive Director Mary Jo Ziesel met with Sena Baron, a Sleepy Hollow resident who helped lead the push for October 8 to be screened. 

During the conversation, Baron says she suggested that Ziesel meet with local rabbis and establish a liaison committee to rebuild trust with the community. Ziesel appeared receptive to these suggestions, Baron said, and has since begun corresponding with at least one rabbi in the community.

Still, community frustration mounted, with public officials and other community leaders criticizing the theater’s leadership for its silence. 

“I understand that Jacob Burns is making no comment and so forth, but I don’t agree with that,” Assemblymember Chris Burdick said this week on the Local Matters Westchester podcast co-hosted by Examiner Publisher Adam Stone. “I have great regard for Jacob Burns. I think they are a terrific institution that has done terrific good for Westchester County, and I would urge them to try to make some kind of statement to allay concerns. And I think they are valid concerns that the community has.”

Peter Rogovin, who is part of the leadership team of the Pleasantville Farmers Market, the Pleasantville Music Festival and formerly Pleasantville Day, said in an email to Ziesel that the organization’s silence risked damaging the theater’s brand and standing in the community. 

“Your silence makes the entire JBFC seem complicit in this clerk’s antisemitic act, and in so doing, your organization looks racist, shameful and unrepentant,” the letter stated. “This is a self-inflicted wound; to support an employee who makes an antisemitic rant is to endorse it.”

Congressman Mike Lawler, a Republican whose district includes Pleasantville, issued a statement before the incident with the Goldsteins criticizing the theater for its initial reluctance to screen the documentary. 

‘Check their Zionism at the Door’

The Burns was already under pressure prior to the Goldstein’s experience. The theater’s leadership initially said it had no plans to show October 8, despite a letter-writing campaign urging the film to be shown. 

Released March 14, October 8 depicts the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses, social media, and elsewhere following Hamas’s attack on Israel. Directed by filmmaker and journalist Wendy Sachs, the film has a 72 percent critic score and a 99 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregation site.

When the documentary hit theaters, several Jewish community members, including Baron, pushed for the film to be shown at the Burns. The theater, which holds an annual Jewish film festival, had screened several movies critical of Israel and its government, including the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. 

With No Other Land screening multiple times per day, the Burns’ resistance to show October 8 angered many members of the local Jewish community. 

“This is a movie that is of critical importance and interest that would be garnering significant ticket sales,” Rabbi Jonathan Jaffe, the senior rabbi at Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester in Chappaqua, told The Examiner. “It just seems a strange choice that the Burns Center would decide not to show this movie, originally.”

For Jaffe, the theater’s delay in showing the film and eventual decision to hold just one screening did not take place in a vacuum. Expressions of hostility towards Israel have become expected, he said, across the culture, from the Oscars to Coachella. 

In response to letters calling to screen the film, Ziesel noted that the theater would be holding the Jewish Film Festival this month. This response, Jaffe said, just bolstered the feeling that some kinds of Jewish cultural expressions are acceptable while others – namely those tied to support for Israel – are not. 

“The message is that Jews are welcome in progressive spaces,” Jaffe said, “so long as they check their Zionism at the door.”

“The Spidey-sense of many members of the Jewish community is dialed up at the moment,” he added. “It just seems like every week, it’s another thing.”

Jaffe also pointed to the theater’s recent appointment of Eric Hynes as director of film curation. Hynes has a history of making statements critical of Israel and downplaying the threat of anti-Israel activists. 

“A lot of our congregants, they think of the Burns, after maybe the synagogue, being their second communal place of belonging,” Jaffe said. “For some members of our community there is a real feeling of betrayal.”

Failure to Communicate

When the JBFC has commented, its statements have often fueled further anger and confusion. After the theater initially agreed to screen October 8, a spokesperson reportedly told News 12 Westchester that the views expressed in the film do not reflect those of the center. 

Readers were left to guess whether this was a general statement explaining that no film screening should be read as an endorsement, if the theater was specifically distancing itself from the documentary’s concerns about rising antisemitism, or if the statement was taken out of context. The Examiner reached out to the spokesperson to ask for clarity on this point, but received no response.

Some Burns members have cancelled their memberships over the theater’s handling of the situation. Gregg Hamerschlag, a Pleasantville resident, wrote a letter to Ziesel asking to cancel his and his wife’s membership. He suggested that the theater would have acted with greater urgency had the clerk been accused of offending another minority group.   

“You can dance around the issue all you want, but this is pure and simply another case of antisemitic acceptance that all Jews are facing today,” asserted the letter, which Hamerschlag shared with The Examiner. “I’d suggest you and your board do some deep soul searching and you change your pathetic policies, as it will be proven that you are on the wrong side of this issue and history.”

Others have said they would wait to see whether the theater finally takes the necessary action to earn back their trust.