RANDOLPH - What has stunned Maureen Kenney's critics is how she just sits there and takes their abuse in meeting after public meeting. They call her a symbol of racism, and she takes it. They call her a bigot, and she does not react. They call her a disgrace to Randolph and carry signs calling on her to resign from the town's Board of Selectmen. And still, Kenney says nothing.
"It's amazing to me that she can sit there, and not even make a comment, not even twitch an eyelash," said Bill Ander, who is working with others to recall the first-term selectwoman from office.
Kenney's problems began three months ago when she admitted to making inappropriate comments, including one mentioning Jewish "side curls," to the schools superintendent, Richard Silverman, in a closed-door meeting. Accused of anti-Semitism, she apologized and resigned from the School Committee and, in doing so, received the support of the rabbi at the largest synagogue in town.
But that has done little to appease Kenney's critics, who have launched an effort to remove her from the Board of Selectmen, her other elected position, and it has taken a toll on Kenney herself. Sometimes she cries under the weight of the anger directed at her - though never in front of her critics. She says she no longer does her grocery shopping in Randolph to avoid being accosted in the aisles, and she has received letters and phone calls so threatening that she reported them to police.
Kenney, a 58-year-old Randolph native, has learned the hard way that the spotlight - even in a town as small as Randolph - can burn the local selectman serving for just $1 a year as easily as it does a politician on the national stage. But still, she vows not to resign. In an interview with the Globe, she said she has not even considered it.
She believes her resignation from the School Committee was interpreted by many as an admission of anti-Semitism, but she does not believe she's guilty of anything but being insensitive. Having apologized for that, she refuses to step down a second time. Doing so, she said, would just give her critics fodder and let the anti-Semitism allegation linger over her head.
"You Google Maureen Kenney and it will be there forever," she said. "For 100 years, it will be up there."
So, believing she can still help the town, Kenney is determined to stay, even if it means facing her critics in silence week after terrible week.
"In the beginning, I thought, it's just going to be once or twice - these one or two meetings. It would go away," she said. "But it didn't go away. So I just sit there and say to myself, 'This isn't who I am. These people don't know me. This isn't who I am.' "
These are troubled times in Randolph, a town of 30,000 south of Boston where financial woes have the schools in crisis and town officials struggling for answers. But for the last three months, the big topic of conversation has been Kenney and her comments last October to Silverman, who did not return calls for this story.
Kenney, a self-employed marketing consultant, had been in office for just six months when the episode with Silverman unfolded. The two were working, along with another School Committee member, on the superintendent's contract, when the topic of bereavement leave came up. At that point, according to a complaint Silverman filed last fall, Kenney asked, "Don't you Jews plant them within 24 hours?" - a quip that fell flat, Kenney said in an interview with the Globe.
In his complaint, Silverman said he objected to her remark and Kenney countered by making a reference to the traditional hairstyle of male Hasidic Jews, saying, "I don't see any side curls on your head, so what the hell do you need five days of bereavement leave for?"
Kenney, who had been critical of Silverman's performance prior to that meeting, acknowledged in an interview with the Globe that she mentioned side curls. But she said the remarks were not uttered with malicious intent. And she did not learn the magnitude of her words' impact, she said, until after Silverman filed his complaint, the complaint leaked to the press, residents began criticizing her, and she met with Rabbi Loel Weiss of Temple Beth Am in Randolph.
Without a doubt, Weiss said, Kenney's comments were anti-Semitic. But after meeting with Kenney, the rabbi said it was clear that the selectwoman herself was not anti-Semitic, and could continue to serve the town in other capacities, including on the Board of Selectmen.
"One of the concepts of Judaism is the concept of repentance - Tshuvah, in Hebrew," Weiss said. "And I really feel Maureen was doing that in terms of resigning from the School Committee and taking responsibility for her words."
Others disagreed, and began calling for Kenney to remove herself entirely from public office. When she refused, they began a recall effort that has now advanced further than any previous such effort since the town enacted the recall provision in 1993. If Kenney's foes can gather the signatures of 20 percent of the electorate by 5 p.m. Monday - 3,638 signatures in all - then the voters will be asked this spring to decide whether Kenney deserves to keep her seat on the board.
"This is not a hate campaign," said Jack Smolokoff, a Jewish attorney in Randolph who has never been involved in local politics until now. "We're not looking to have her drawn and quartered. We're not looking to tar and feather her and drag her through the town square. We just want her gone from the board."
The recall effort, according to Kenney's critics and supporters, has energized locals like never before in recent memory, and many, including Weiss, think that is a good thing. The more that people get involved in the Kenney fight, they argue, the more likely they might be to get involved in other town issues.
"People, I think, have had enough," said William Alexopoulos, the only member of the five-person Board of Selectmen who has called for Kenney to step down. "They're saying, 'You work for us. We don't work for you.' . . . that's why they're coming out in full force."
But the controversy has become a distraction, according to Alexopoulos and other selectmen. At many meetings, comments about Kenney have dominated the portion of the meeting devoted to public comments. There is the matter of money - a recall election would cost the town more than $20,000. And many Kenney supporters question the motives of her foes, some of whom backed Paul Fernandes, the incumbent Kenney defeated last March by winning 52.6 percent of the vote.
Jerry Richman, a Jew who owns a dry cleaning business in town, said some Kenney critics are interested in only one thing: filling her seats on the School Committee and Board of Selectmen with political allies. "They have no interest in what she said at all," said Richman. "They only care about those two seats."
For comments like these, Richman said, he has received hate mail and lost customers. And others who support Kenney do so in silence, for fear of being targeted as well. But for Kenney, there is no avoiding the criticism.
"People, strangers, come up to me," she said, adding: "They say that I represent everything that's hated in the world. It's just amazing."
This is, after all, her town: where she was raised and where she returned several years ago to take care of her father, now deceased. Single, and with no children, Kenney ran successfully for School Committee in 2006 and then for selectman last year, thinking she could make a difference, she said, and not aspiring to higher office.
Even now, she does not think of herself as a politician. But if her critics succeed in putting forward the recall vote this spring, Kenney said she plans to do what any seasoned politician might do.
"I will just start campaigning."
Keith O'Brien can be reached at kobrien@globe.com.
