Manny’s — a café, bar, and social gathering space on Valencia and 16th streets — was hit with graffiti and smashed windows Monday night following a thousands-strong anti-deportation march through the Mission.
Two windows were smashed. Others were tagged with phrases targeting the cafe’s owner, Manny Yekutiel, who is Jewish: “Fuck Manny,” “Zionist Fucks Gentrifyers” (sic) and “The only good settler is a dead 1” were scrawled in pink and black graffiti.
Yekutiel first learned about the graffiti last night at around 7:30 p.m. According to him, the cafe was holding a San Francisco politics boot camp, a staple of the venue’s event coordination, when a participant texted Yekutiel to tell him that someone was breaking and spray-painting his windows.
Yekutiel rushed over from his home in the Castro, and stayed with the attendees of the event. Staff painted over the graffiti once protesters had moved on. But two hours later, at approximately 9:45 pm, Manny’s was vandalized again.
Yekutiel said that he’s received a lot of support from community members. Mayor Daniel Lurie, who has previously spoken at Manny’s and partnered with Yekutiel to create the Civic Joy Fund, wrote Yekutiel when he heard. Lurie came to the cafe early Tuesday morning to visit.
In a press conference this morning, Lurie thanked the organizers of yesterday’s protests for their efforts to keep the crowd peaceful, but condemned the acts of a small group that he says broke off and began damaging property.
“Vandalizing local businesses with hateful language, damaging property, is unacceptable,” he said. “When that happens, law enforcement will take action.”
The Monday night protest came in response to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement arrests around California. The march, which started at 24th and Mission streets, eventually made its way to Valencia Street and continued late into the night.
Officers arrested perhaps 80 people late at night on Market Street, according to police sources.
On Tuesday morning, a private security guard paced outside. Passing pedestrians stopped to read the graffiti with quizzically titled heads before taking photos on their phones.
Yekutiel was busy, however. “My phone’s been blowing up a lot this morning,” he said, speaking from the back room of his cafe. He sat on a velvet couch in the corner, lying down between back-to-back interviews. “I’m still kind of processing everything.”
This isn’t the first time that Manny’s has been graffitied or threatened. One customer who arrived mid-morning on Tuesday said casually to the baristas, “I see you’ve been decorated again!”
A boycott against Manny’s was announced in 2019 by multiple queer and anti-Zionist San Francisco groups that accused Yekutiel of gentrification and Zionism because he posted celebrations of Israel on his personal Facebook account and asked for recommendations of “Zionist organizations” when he first moved to the Bay Area. Yekutiel’s paternal grandfather fled to Israel after expulsion from Afghanistan.
Manny’s replaced a high-end sushi shop with its front cafe in 2018, and the backroom events space replaced the restaurant’s fish-storage room. Yekutiel supported a ceasefire in Gaza, in exchange for the release of hostages, as early as November 2023 through an Instagram post.
His cafe offers free community space and “moderate price points,” as a result of an agreement with United Save the Mission, a community nonprofit.
“I think that my work speaks for itself,” Yekutiel said, when asked about the accusations leveled at him. He added that, though he has been targeted before, this time it is more directed — and violent.
“There’s a difference between writing political statements about ending a military conflict and what I’m seeing right now in front of my eyes,” said Yekutiel. “Which is very ‘fuck Manny.’ It’s personal.”
Yekutiel anticipated that Manny’s will be packed at 4 p.m.; he expects customers to come for what he called an “eat-in.”
Around 11 a.m., two San Francisco police sergeants arrived to speak with Yekutiel in the back room and to review security footage.
Twenty minutes later, Yekutiel asked his staff to turn the cafe’s music off. “It just doesn’t feel right,” he said.
As a Palestinian I condemn this act of vandalism and hatred. Besides being illegal, it’s hurtful and unjustifiable for the vandals to express their anger in this way. The Palestinians I know would agree and stand up for our brothers and sisters, jewish and otherwise, when theses acts are perpetrated. Crime is crime, racism is racism, and genocide is genocide. They should all be renounced and acted upon with justice.
There is a shocking amount of justification for this hate crime in the comments. “Die Manny” is not some righteous protest against a war. I think some of you are losing your minds – please regain your senses and focus on your city. Sad to ever see something like this in tolerant San Francisco.
Please do not use Jew and Zionist interchangeably…..They are not the same thing. As we should all understand by now, anti-Zionism does not equal antisemitism. There are more Christian than Jewish zionists in the world, and many of us Jews have been opposed to Zionism since it was proposed in the 1800s up to the present.
Why didn’t you ask Manny what he thinks of the state of Israel and the genocide it is carrying out? Does he support Zionism? When he was criticized about this in 2019, the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) came to support him. Who are they? (Hint: one of their main functions is to generate support for the state of Israel).
You may decry breaking windows and graffiti but let’s be clear-anti-Zionist graffiti is not antisemitic graffiti. I totally reject the comparison to Kristallnacht. No relationship.
I hope Mission Local can do a more detailed report next time, and not play into Trump and the other Zionist’s plot to equate anti-zionism with anti-semitism.
Do you demand your Chinese and Russian friends to denounce their countries? Or what about Americans in this age of Trump? Are we going to march around synagogues and hold people for their views? I thought this was San Francisco…
Which Christians in San Francisco have had their business graffitied & threats made against them over Israel?
Are you saying Jew and Zionist settler means the same thing?
What do anti-zionists propose should happen with Israel?
It might live under existing international law and norms? Basically?
Kristallnacht in the Mission?
This is not about ICE or immigrants; it’s hateful antisemitism. These vandals are playing right into Trump’s hands. There’s nothing he would like more than to declare martial law in time for his birthday.
Manny praises zionism and Israel while Palestinians are suffering a genocide. Every poll, including those in Israel, acknowledge the overwhelming support of the Israeli people; and the zionist movement declared just what is happening as its intention for over a century. And you compare the plight of Jews during Kristallnacht with zionists instead of Palestinians? You think broken windows and graffiti are worse than the many thousands of murders of Palestinians, specifically stated by those who ordered them to be for the purpose of eradicating a people – in other words, a deliberate genocide? The graffiti stated a political target, settlers who are the vanguard of a fascist movement, not a religious or ethnic one. Let’s put these incidents into a realistic context. The decency of humanity depends on it. Zionism and its supporters have none.
Yea! Why not just round up those people and stick them in camps? Oh wait…someone already did that. Incredible to watch people who think they’re progressive justifying vile racism in our midst. Proves clearly what the Jewish community feels about the antisemitic “peace” marches which call for their destruction.
There are zero swastikas. It refers to zionism and settlers and Israel the state.
If Trump thinks he can declare martial law because windows were broken and some spray paint was put on a wall during a protest, there’s really no circumstance where he’s going to restrain that urge and it has nothing to do with what 50-60 people in SF actually do or don’t.
Meanwhile, 55,000 civilians have been wiped out as Israel’s government openly calls for ethnic cleansing and total displacement of millions of people from their ancient homelands – you would think the irony wouldn’t be lost as they claim the same thing?
As terrible as the events of Oct. 7 were and are, those exploding pagers were over a decade in the making. Nyetanyahu’s military intelligence knew about the plot – and were told to stand down and do nothing for half a day. No questions regarding this, or how every single school, hospital, university and 90% of homes belonging to civilians can ever be justifiable to target terrorists. Only Manny, crying with the Mayor at his side about some broken windows and spray paint.
I live in a part of SF where we love and protect all people including our Jewish friends.
I want to see more concern about people who aren’t just being vandalized, or “hated” in an abstract sense. They are being wiped out with our DONATED weapons, against our laws and norms, values and historic practices. This is bigger than Mannys and it’s bigger than the spectre of Anti-Semitism. Evil anywhere is evil everywhere, eventually, if you condone it long enough.
The Mayor has visited and Manny’s gofundme has reached over 40,000$.
I think they’ll make it out alright. If they want to change minds about this conflict, they have a bully pulpit to do so right now – and put their voice strongly against what is going on in Gaza, with our government’s material and tacit blessing : Genocide.
Death threats convey the message as effectively as do swastikas.
Yeah – let’s keep up the progressive racism and attack people for their ethnicity! If a black or brown business attacked with ethnic slurs, people would be up in arms.
This may or may not be anti-semitism; through its consistently 75-year vile behavior, leading up to the current genocide in Gaza, Israel has undoubtedly created legions of new anti-semites among those too ignorant to know the difference between decent Jews and sociopathic Zionists. So Manny is known to be a supporter of Israel, and likely a Zionist himself. Will he come right out and condemn Israel over Gaza? Will he be able to place his human identity ahead of his Jewish identity?
Manny is apparently the wrong kind of immigrant. If those who wrote the graffiti were in power, they’d have their ICE deport him from San Francisco (or worse).
I agree, and it’s been my home since 1975. I also never thought I’d see the day ICE agents were leading immigrants into vans here in San Francisco. Our country is falling apart so quickly I can barely keep up with what’s happening.
Anti-zionism and Anti-genocide is not Anti-semitism.
Graffiti and broken windows isn’t great and nobody condones that.
But starving and bombing and shooting children for their land is much worse.
Somehow Manny never gets around to acknowledging the real depth of the situation, the real desperation and existential concern of a bully superpower dropping US made weapons on the heads of civilian women and children by the tens of thousands.
Maybe he should. He’s raised 40,000$ to repair the vandalism – now he can repair his reputation, if he chooses, by acknowledging the true victims of zionist fervor. They don’t just get their windows broken. The distinction needs to be addressed, IMO.
This reminds me of comments people used to make in the South about black people….not sure when it became progressive to be a racist.
Manny is not just Jewish. He is a Zionist. He supports a state that believes in full rights for only people of one religion. Jewish nationalists if you will.
I am Jewish as are many of my friends. We are not Zionists. We deplore the fact that Europeans were “given” (by the British and later the UN) land that belonged to other people. The pre WWII % of Jews In Palestinian was less than 8%. The British mandate called for the sharing of the land, yet the Israelis stole Palestinian land and killed or drove out the owners.
Manny supports the genocide occurring now. The criticism of him is not because he is Jewish, but because he supports decades of the violation of human rights in Palestine.
Again , I am Jewish and part of Jewish Voice for Peace. The fastest growing organization in the Us. We honor Jewish ethics which condemn Israel and its’ supporters like Manny.
There is a lot of nuance to unpack from the relationship between Judaism and Zionism; reasonable minds can disagree on that topic. I will tend to agree with you that hawkish supporters of Israel and the Likud party are a little too quick to conflate criticism of Zionism or the state of Israel with Antisemitism. On the other hand, when vandals tag “DIE ZIO” on the storefront of a Jewish owned business that’s thousands of miles away from the Middle East, it doesn’t really leave much room for nuance or reasonable disagreement. In this case, it’s really hard for me to not hear “zio” as a thinly veiled substitution of the word “jew”. This and all the years of harassment that Manny has had to put up with is supposedly because he expressed general support for Zionism in a social media post from years ago. He hasn’t exactly been a cheerleader for Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir. It’s enough to make me wonder about the true animus that’s motivating these “activists” to target Manny.
Manny has said multiple times he has complicated feelings about Israel and criticized the actions of the Israeli government. His business has no material relationship to the Israeli government. He is also not Israeli. The continued targeting of his business in the name of “anti-Zionism” at this point is obvious anti-Semitism, and if you can’t see that, you need to maybe sit this conflict out because you are doing more harm to the cause of Palestinians than good. Have the geniuses at Gay Shame or the other groups that targeted him bothered to check in with the Christian churches of the Mission on their stance on Zionism/the state of the Israel? I can guarantee you there are multiple that actually fit the mold of being a staunch Zionist but they mysteriously get a constant pass. What makes this location different? It’s such a mystery! The Pro-Palestinian left in the San Francisco have taken a just cause and made a mockery of it again and again and pushed headlong into virulent anti-Semitism either out of hatred or ignorance, and they need to come to terms with the damage they are doing to our city and the cause they supposedly care so much about.
There seems to be a lot of vandalism directed at that particular business. It’s a shame.
https://www.thejc.com/news/world/british-left-wing-activists-discussed-poisoning-israelis-at-a-portuguese-music-festival-avn75dwb
Let’s see how you supposed progressives try to rationalize this one. There is a phenomenon called the horseshoe effect in terms of anti-Jewish hatred. Jews are the only minority that is equally hated by the far right and the so called progressive left. I noticed that the graffiti on Manny’s used the term Zio. That is a term that was coined by David Duke a Nazi. So congratulations Zionism is hated by the Nazis and the “progressive “ left. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism no matter how much you try to make the distinction with silly rationalizations for your hatred.
Hello!
I am turning off the comments on this article. This is not a productive exercise, especially for editors who have to take time out from their jobs to monitor what’s written here.
Best,
JE
“Act of terror” – by which you mean one or a handful of people damaged property for a political cause. No one was physically hurt.
Compare to Gaza or the West Bank on any given day. Which situation do we condone?
Bigger question, why exactly?
Failure to condemn the racist attack on Manny’s is just ethnic hatred.
“You cannot negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you.” – Golda Meir
There is no peace option being given.
Most SF protests in the social media era have been useless and counterproductive, but this one is proving to be especially dumb. At least we don’t have the National Guard sicced on us (yet).
To manny : Huge bummer!! Your incredibly productive and giving business only gets us closer to a world where that’s true in my opinion, by encouraging conversation, critical thinking, and action. Its clear to me is Manny is an articulate, intelligent, and most importantly loving person who gives so much back to SF and the Mission. Love you Manny!
To the people who did this: Huge bummer!! But I love you too! I personally think these actions were a big whiff and more hurtful than helpful, but truthfully I believe your heart is in a good place. But we choose the road to peace and we choose how to get there and I question the road you’re on. I hope you keep working and keep engaging. I’d break windows too if I thought it moved us towards a better world — but I don’t think it does. Maybe check out the group Combatants for Peace — a group for former Hamas and IDF fighters working together for a ceasefire peacefully. If they can protest peacefully, can’t we all?
The people muddying the immigration/ICE issue with Palestine are alienating a lot of people who could otherwise be allies.
No one was “Attacked” unlike Gaza’s food distribution lines. It was graffiti.
It was vandalism.
Property was damaged, but money has already been raised to pay for it.
It targeted an outspoken face of PR presumably for his pro-Israel statements.
No Jewish Americans were physically attacked here for being Jewish. That is not the case in Israel’s illegal settlements in Palestinian, Druze and other territories.
Nor is noticing that difference “condoning” vandalism – but a distinction must be made between actual Genocide and violence vs broken windows and spray paint.
Trying to put this all at Jackie Fielder’s feet is about as simplistic as one could be.
Israel is committing genocide. The US is actively supporting the genocide. The vandalism against Mannys is antisemitism.
Disgusting. The progressive left deserves to be in the wilderness for a Long time.
Starting to look like these protests aren’t really about Trump or immigrants after all. I hope we can get some discipline and common sense into this all before public opinion shifts in favor of heavy handed policing.
Manny’s produced a statement titled “Zionism” in 2019:
> “Manny stands in solidarity against the unilateral annexation of the West Bank and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Manny’s, and Manny, believes in freedom for the Palestinian people. They deserve to live with economic security, full lives, their own state and home and capital and for all this horrific violence to end.
There has been a persistent misunderstanding, specifically of Manny himself’s views on Israel + Palestine. He supports Palestinian liberation.”
I have no idea why the statement is titled “Zionism” given that it doesn’t address Zionism. Other than that, I’ll resist scrutinizing and people can decide for themselves.
Putting the whole issue of the occupied territories aside (gross omission, but for simplicity’s sake) and looking at Zionism as it pertains to Israel proper, I see it playing out as follows:
– Jewish census majority is paramount.
– Jews hold all prominent Knesset cabinet positions.
– Israel Lands Authority holds 93% of the land, overwhelmingly set aside for Jews.
Liberal US Zionists claim to want equal rights and a fair democracy for all Israeli citizens, but that’s impossible while implementing the principles of Zionism — the core tenet being the upholding of Israel as a Jewish State. Thus, the assertion of Jewish supremacy in Israel becomes hard for a Zionist to argue against; they generally end up arguing the necessity of, while dismissing the classification. Still, to many Zionists, rejection of Israel as a Jewish State (anti-Zionism) is tantamount to antisemitism:
https://youtube.com/shorts/Ms8tGyopFrQ?feature=shared
And in Pakistan, you have to be a Muslim to be a president of the country. What’s your point ? I don’t see anybody smashing windows at Pakistani stores in San Francisco.
> “It’s unfortunately been kind of the price I’ve paid for operating as a Jew in politics in the city,” said Yekutiel.
It’s not reality that it is difficult for a Jewish San Franciscan to get a leg up onto the political pony.
How many victims of a broken retail window get an hour with the Mayor?
Not a lot.
How many biz owners have suffered a racist attack? Shame on those who support racism
So Manny gets to live in the Castro. They evicted me with Ellis Act even though I never missed paying rent in 49 years!