New York Radio Yutz Has Had It With Mr. Met’s Antisemitism

Were it not for the virtual certainty that he will be cast in a Safdie-directed film at some point, Sid Rosenberg is not a person who should be known by anyone who does not live in or around New York City. He is a type of public figure that every city has, although the fact that he's this particular city's version makes him maybe a bit ruddier and cruder than the average. Most of those guys will never get to meet or be photographed with Donald Trump, and so will have to settle for spending their lives acting as much like him as their specific material circumstances allow. That's been kind of a chancy proposition for Rosenberg, who currently hosts a radio show on a conservative talk radio station operated by the owner of the city's most widely reviled grocery store chain. (That owner, John Catsimatidis, has already been in a Josh Safdie movie.) Rosenberg has been a public figure in the city for a long time, growing larger and more distressingly toasted-looking along the way; the moment that Sid Rosenberg became capable of "taking it easy," he would be out of a job. There might be something half-tragic about this purgatory if Rosenberg didn't seem so comfortable there, and even if he had to wind himself up like a wrung-out pro wrestler before going on the radio every day to call Muslims parasites and talk about how no one respects the cops anymore, he'd still be doing all that and so fairly difficult to pity. The idea that there is anything that itches at Rosenberg about the sour sort of fame he has built for himself, as the voice of the city's aggrieved homeowner set and other local excessive force aficionados, is assuming facts not otherwise in evidence. As it stands, Rosenberg has spent a lot of time cycling in and out of local media jobs, first due to addiction issues and then just due to his personality. He was fired from Don Imus's morning show on WFAN for "tasteless comments he made on the air about the singer Kylie Minogue's battle with breast cancer" in 2005, and then from his job at the station later that year when he no-showed a Giants pregame show he was supposed to host after attending an FHM magazine event in Atlantic City earlier in the weekend. This came after he was fired from Imus in 2001 for being extremely racist about Serena and Venus Williams, then rehired after apologizing, and then again in 2004 "referred to Palestinians as 'stinking animals' and said, 'They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill 'em all right now.'" By 2007, he was once again appearing on Imus.