A lawyer and honoree of the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union who worked in the State of Illinois Comptroller’s office has been fired after expressing extreme antisemitic views in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.
Sarah Chowdhury was also the president of the South Asian Bar Association of Chicago, a position she also lost because of the controversy.
Chowdhury posted the antisemitic comments on her Instragram account around 12:30pm on Thursday, October 19. During an exchange on the platform, she referred to a poster as a “[expletive] Jew” and said “Hitler should have eradicated all of you.”
In another exchange she taunted her interlocutor saying “I’d rather put you in a gas chamber, bet you’d like that.”
Chowdhury had previosly been praised by the ACLU Il “Next Generation Society” for “unwavering passion for justice and access to justice.” Ironically, in her comments quoted by the organization, she mentioned that she had “just finished watching ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,'” a hit comedy-drama on Amazon Prime that focused on the life of a Jewish-American woman in the late 1950s.
According to a statement from Illinois State Comptroller Susana Mendoza, Chowdhury admitted to making the posts and was fired the same day.
