A New York City mental health nurse lost her job after she recorded herself berating a group of Israeli men in Times Square, calling them "baby-killers" and "terrorists" in a confrontation that ended only when a street performer dressed as Spider-Man stepped in and told her to stop.
Jennifer Koonings, who worked at Manhattan-based Inspire Mental Health Services, shared multiple videos of the encounter on Instagram over the weekend, the New York Post reported. The footage quickly went viral, drawing widespread calls for her termination. By Wednesday, her biography had been scrubbed from Inspire Mental Health Services' website, and Koonings herself bragged on Instagram that she had been fired.
She did not sound particularly sorry about it.
In the clips, Koonings confronted a group of Israeli men at the packed tourist hotspot. After asking where they were from and learning they were Israeli, she launched into a tirade. In one video, she shouted directly at them:
"You guys killed babies in Palestine... Slaughtered babies."
A second clip captured her escalating further, telling the men to their faces:
"We don't want you here, terrorists."
She also referred to the group as "baby-killers" and, in a moment captured on camera, declared: "They're f---ing Israelis." Several other women joined in shouting alongside her, though their identities have not been reported. The Israeli men, for their part, remained calm and did not visibly react to the barrage. One of them responded simply: "Oh, you don't like us now?"
The confrontation only stopped when a panhandler dressed as Spider-Man, a fixture of the Times Square performer scene, intervened. The costumed figure urged Koonings to back off and called for calm.
"You don't need to harass people. You don't know anything about them."
That a stranger in a Spider-Man suit showed more restraint and decency than a licensed mental health professional tells you something about the state of things.
Koonings, who had roughly 141,000 Instagram followers at the time, did not delete the videos or walk back her statements. Instead, she later posted on Instagram that she had been terminated from Inspire Mental Health Services, and appeared to treat the firing as a badge of honor rather than a consequence.
The Post reached out to Inspire Mental Health Services but did not hear back immediately. The facility has not publicly confirmed the termination on its own. What is confirmed is that Koonings' name no longer appears on the company's website as of Wednesday.
It remains unclear what sparked the outburst. The Post noted that investigators and reporters have not identified a triggering event, Koonings apparently walked up to a group of tourists in one of the most crowded intersections on earth and decided to unload on them for being Israeli.
The incident lands in a city already grappling with a surge in antisemitic harassment. New York has seen a steady drumbeat of public confrontations targeting Jewish and Israeli individuals since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, and the Koonings episode fits a pattern that should concern anyone paying attention: ordinary professionals, not fringe activists, carrying out open hostility toward Jews in public spaces, filming it, and posting it for applause.
That Koonings worked in mental health care makes the episode particularly troubling. A nurse entrusted with the psychological well-being of patients demonstrated, on camera, the kind of unhinged hostility that would alarm any employer, and any patient. The fact that she bragged about her termination suggests she views her conduct as righteous rather than reckless.
The broader pattern of anti-Israel hostility spilling into public spaces, from Senate hearing rooms to city sidewalks, has become impossible to ignore.
Koonings lost her job. That much is clear. But the open questions are worth noting. Did Inspire Mental Health Services fire her, or did she resign and spin it? The company has not spoken publicly. No arrest has been reported. No charges have been filed. The Israeli men who endured the tirade have not been publicly identified.
In other words, Koonings faced professional consequences, but whether she faces legal accountability for what many would consider targeted ethnic harassment in a public space remains an open question.
New York's political leadership has spent years talking about hate crimes and bias incidents. When the perpetrator is a progressive-coded activist targeting Israelis on camera, the silence from city officials is telling. Compare that to the swift institutional response when public figures face removal for far less inflammatory conduct.
The episode also raises a question about social media incentives. Koonings didn't stumble into this confrontation and get caught. She filmed it herself. She posted it herself. She had 141,000 followers watching. The performance was the point, and the applause she expected from her audience mattered more to her than the dignity of the people she was screaming at.
That calculation, harassment as content, bigotry as brand, is not unique to Koonings. It has become a recurring feature of left-wing protest culture, where public confrontation is filmed, posted, and monetized in a cycle that rewards escalation.
The most striking detail in the entire episode may be the simplest one. A costumed street performer, someone who makes a living posing for tourist photos in Times Square, saw what was happening and told Koonings to stop. He didn't film it for clout. He didn't join in. He told her she didn't need to harass people and that she didn't know anything about them.
No bystander intervention training. No institutional protocol. Just a man in a Spider-Man suit with more common decency than a licensed nurse with a six-figure Instagram following.
The collapse of basic civic norms, the expectation that you don't scream ethnic slurs at strangers on a public sidewalk, is not a policy failure. It's a cultural one. And it flourishes in cities where leaders treat antisemitism as a second-tier concern, where political consequences fall unevenly depending on who the target is and who is doing the targeting.
Koonings got fired. She seems fine with it. The Israeli tourists who came to see Times Square got screamed at by a stranger and called terrorists for the crime of existing. Nobody in city government has said a word.
When a guy in a Spider-Man costume is the last line of defense against open bigotry in the middle of Manhattan, the adults in charge have already failed.
