By: Fern Sidman – Jewish Voice News

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 and messages.

“These were not idle threats,” said Special Agent in Charge Stefanie Roddy of the FBI’s Newark Field Office, whose statement was cited in The Jerusalem Post report. “Hall’s messages were methodical, sustained, and explicit. He sought to terrorize a Jewish family, to destroy their business, and to instill fear across an entire community.”

The Blue Moon Hotel, nestled on Orchard Street in the heart of the historic Lower East Side, has long been a symbol of Jewish resilience and revival in New York. Its owner, Randy Settenbrino, a preservationist and artist, painstakingly restored the 1879 tenement building into a boutique hotel that celebrates the neighborhood’s immigrant and Jewish past.

“This hotel is filled with love — love for New York City and for the Jewish life that once flourished here,” Settenbrino told The Media Line at the height of the harassment campaign, in comments later cited in The Jerusalem Post report.

But that love was met with hate. The Settenbrino family believes that Hall’s campaign began after their eldest son, Bram Settenbrino, a dual American-Israeli citizen, was doxxed on social media for his service in the Israel Defense Forces. Photos of Bram in uniform were circulated online alongside captions accusing the family of running a “Zionist terror operation” from the Blue Moon.

Soon, coordinated online campaigns followed. Flyers began appearing around the neighborhood reading, “Boycott the Blue Moon Hotel: No racists, Islamophobes, or Zionists.” Other posters labeled Bram a “war criminal.”

One Instagram account, Stop Arab Hate, shared videos of Bram serving in the IDF and even published the family’s personal contact information. The Blue Moon’s online review pages were flooded with hostile comments, and in September 2024, vandals defaced the hotel’s exterior with graffiti.

According to the information provided in The Jerusalem Post report, the harassment caused the hotel’s business to plummet by nearly 30%, devastating what had been a rare success story for Jewish entrepreneurship in the city’s post-pandemic recovery.

“We’ve faced challenges before,” Settenbrino told reporters. “But nothing like this — this was designed to break us, to make us live in fear for being Jewish, for being proud of Israel, for existing.”

As the threats escalated, the case drew the attention of federal authorities, who traced Hall’s messages to multiple phone numbers and encrypted messaging platforms originating in Arizona. Using advanced digital forensics, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force linked the IP addresses and timestamps to Hall’s personal devices.

When agents executed a search warrant at his property, they found not only the weapons but also detailed notes chronicling the harassment campaign — including screenshots of online posts about the Blue Moon Hotel and lists of Jewish-owned businesses in New York.

“The meticulousness of his records suggested intent, planning, and ideological motivation,” prosecutors said in court filings cited in The Jerusalem Post report. “This was not impulsive rage. It was a calculated attempt to weaponize fear against a religious minority.”

After his arrest, Hall admitted to investigators that he had been “angry about Israel’s actions in Gaza,” claiming that he “wanted to make Jewish people in New York feel what Palestinians feel.” Prosecutors dismissed his justification as an attempt to disguise antisemitic hatred as political protest.

“This was not activism,” U.S. Attorney Clayton said bluntly. “This was hate, pure and simple.”

In announcing the sentence, Special Agent Roddy of the FBI delivered a stark warning to others who may believe they can hide behind the anonymity of the internet. “If you think you can sit behind a computer screen or a phone line and terrorize others, think again,” she said, as reported by The Jerusalem Post. “We will find you, and we will bring you to justice.”

Roddy added that the near-maximum sentence — imposed despite Hall’s guilty plea — reflects the government’s recognition of the “extraordinary cruelty” of his campaign.

“Hall’s actions crossed every conceivable boundary of decency,” she said. “He didn’t just target individuals; he targeted the essence of what it means to be Jewish in America — to live openly, proudly, and without fear.”

The sentencing comes at a time when antisemitic incidents in New York City have surged to their highest levels in decades, a phenomenon The Jerusalem Post has documented extensively since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic harassment and assault in New York rose by more than 320% in 2024, with Jewish-owned businesses and institutions facing near-daily threats.

The Blue Moon Hotel case, in many ways, encapsulates this climate. What began as digital doxxing and social media incitement metastasized into real-world harassment, vandalism, and death threats — culminating in a federal terrorism investigation.

“The Jewish community is on edge,” The Jerusalem Post observed in a recent editorial. “When an ordinary hotelier can become the target of a campaign of hate because his son served in the Israeli military, it speaks volumes about the corrosive normalization of antisemitism in Western society.”

In sentencing Hall, Judge Katherine Polk Failla called his crimes “an assault on the moral foundation of civil society.” While she acknowledged his expression of remorse, she emphasized that “freedom of speech is not freedom to terrorize.”

For the Settenbrino family, the ruling brought a measure of relief — but not closure. “We’re grateful for justice,” Randy Settenbrino said in a statement shared with The Jerusalem Post. “But what happened to us could happen to any Jewish family, any business owner, anywhere. We can’t pretend this is over.”

As the Blue Moon Hotel slowly rebuilds its clientele, its once-beleaguered owner remains defiant. “Our doors are open,” Settenbrino said. “We’re still here. And we’re still proud to be who we are.”

In the end, the Hall case serves as both a triumph of law enforcement and a cautionary parable about the ease with which hatred can metastasize from the digital realm into acts of real-world terror.

As The Jerusalem Post report observed, “Antisemitism may have found new platforms, but its old poisons remain unchanged — and in the hands of the wrong man, they can still be deadly.”