Antisemitic graffiti has been daubed on the wall of the Washington DC headquarters of the American Federation of Teachers, whose leader is a prominent Jewish figure in the US labor movement.
On Tuesday night or Wednesday morning areas around the AFT, including the AFT building, were defaced with the spray-painted phrase “I want Jexit”, an antisemitic play on the phrase “Brexit”.
The graffiti was documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The AFT leader Randi Weingarten is president of the 1.7 million-member union andone of the most high-profile Jewish labor leaders in the country. Weingarten is married to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of Congregation Beth Simhat Torah in New York and has frequently led trips of Jews and Muslims to Israel as part of intercultural dialogues.
In addition, Weingarten has led high-profile campaigns to get banks to divest from the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers. Weingarten has also helped support organizing efforts by those affected by school gun violence, using this summer’s teachers’ union convention in Pittsburgh to highlight the voices of Parkland students.
Here is the picture: pic.twitter.com/HyhsCnHKPZ
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) December 12, 2018
In a statement Weingarten said that neither she nor her union would be deterred by the attack.
“We will stare all bigotry in the face, whether it is anti-Jew, anti-Islam, anti-black, anti-brown, anti-native, anti-LGBTQ or any other hate directed at people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation,” Weingarten said.
“Defacing our community with hateful rhetoric is meant to intimidate, otherize and sow fear, and to divide our community and make people feel unsafe and unwelcome where they live and work. But this type of hate crime does just the opposite: It mobilizes us to come together and unite around the common causes of tolerance and peace, and to continue fighting for a more inclusive, more just world.”
In November an FBI review found that hate crimes in the US had jumped in 2017 by 17%, including a rise in antisemitic attacks by the same percentage. The number of incidents involving attacks on Jewish people had risen from 834 cases to 976 cases.
The new FBI figures were released after 11 people were killed at a synagogue in Pittsburgh by a gunman who shouted antisemitic slurs.