By: Fern Sidman

The scourge of antisemitic harassment that has increasingly plagued Jewish communities across the United States reached a chilling climax this week with the sentencing of an Arizona man who orchestrated a months-long campaign of violent, antisemitic threats and intimidation against Jewish New Yorkers.

As The Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday, 49-year-old Donovan Hall was sentenced to 49 months in federal prison by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York after pleading guilty to transmitting thousands of threats across state lines targeting Jewish families, business owners, and institutions in New York. The case, which prosecutors described as one of the most extensive antisemitic harassment operations in recent years, underscores the dangerous intersection of online hate, real-world violence, and the growing climate of hostility toward Jews in America.

Federal prosecutors detailed a harrowing timeline: over a three-month period in 2024, Hall issued more than 1,000 threats against his victims — men, women, and even children — in a campaign that blended obsessive stalking with explicit threats of murder, torture, and sexual violence. His communications, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York noted, were “saturated with antisemitic slurs and fantasies of violence,” amounting to a digital terror campaign designed to instill fear in every facet of his victims’ lives.

“This sentence demonstrates that hate-fueled crimes will be met with the full force of the law,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement quoted in The Jerusalem Post report. “Hall’s calculated, prolonged, and sadistic threats against Jewish citizens represent not only an assault on his victims but on the values of safety, tolerance, and freedom that this nation stands for.”

The campaign’s escalation began in August 2024, when Hall directed dozens of threatening phone calls at the Blue Moon Hotel, a small boutique hotel located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side that is known for housing the only kosher-certified hotel restaurant and café in New York City, as reported by The Jerusalem Post.

Hall targeted the hotel’s owner, Randy Settenbrino, as well as his family and staff, delivering a torrent of antisemitic abuse. According to federal court filings, Hall’s messages included detailed threats to kill, rape, and mutilate members of the Settenbrino family, often invoking classic antisemitic tropes and accusing them of being “terrorists” and “Zionist murderers.”

In one especially chilling escalation, Hall sent text messages containing photographs of firearms and a machete, accompanied by promises to use the weapons against his victims. “You and your terror family are next,” one message read, followed by a photograph of a Glock pistol and a loaded magazine.

As The Jerusalem Post report recounted, law enforcement later discovered that the weapons shown in those messages were real. During a November 22, 2024, raid on Hall’s home in Arizona, federal agents seized multiple firearms, including the pistol depicted in his messages, which was loaded and unregistered. They also recovered the machete seen in the threats, along with ammunition and digital evidence tying Hall to hundreds of threatening calls.