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A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’
(JTA) — Magda Teter’s new book, “Christian Supremacy,” begins in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 11, 2017. Hundreds of white nationalist neo-Nazis who ostensibly gathered to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a local park broke into a chant: “Jews will not replace us.”
Other writers and scholars would note how antisemitism shaped white nationalism. But Teter, professor of history and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University, saw something else: how centuries of Christian thought and practice fed the twin evils of antisemitism and racism.
“The ideology espoused by white supremacists in the US and in Europe is rooted in Christian ideas of social and religious hierarchy,” she writes. “These ideas developed, gradually, first in the Mediterranean and Europe in respect to Jews and then in respect to people of color in European colonies and in the US, before returning transformed back to Europe.”
In the book, subtitled “Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism,” she traces this idea from the writings of the early church fathers like Paul the Apostle, though centuries of Catholic and Protestant debates over the status of Jews in Europe, to the hardening of racist attitudes with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Antisemitic laws and theology, she argues, developed within Christianity a “mental habit” of exclusion and dominance that would eventually be applied to people of color up to and including modern times.
Teter is careful to acknowledge the different forms antisemitism and racism have taken, distinguishing between the Jews’ experience of social and legal exclusion and near annihilation, and the enslavement, displacement and ongoing persecution of Black people. And yet, she writes, “that story began with Christianity’s theological relation with Jews and Judaism.”
Teter is previously the author of “Blood Libel: On The Trail of an Antisemitic Myth,” winner of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award. At Fordham, the Catholic university in the Bronx, she is helping assemble what may be the largest repository of artifacts and literature dedicated to the Jewish history of the borough.
We spoke Thursday about how groups like the Proud Boys embrace centuries-old notions of Christian superiority, how “whiteness” became a thing and how she, as a non-Jew raised in Poland, became a Jewish studies scholar.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Your book was conceived and written during the COVID lockdown. Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s an accidental project. I’ve been teaching the history of antisemitism for years, and I live in Harlem so questions of race and racism are very stark in my daily life. And since I grew up in Poland, and American history was not something we were taught or studied, I’ve never been satisfied with the various explanations for the strength of antisemitism and history of racism. And as I mentioned in my prologue, I watched the Raoul Peck documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” which has a clip with James Baldwin saying that white people have to figure out why they invented the idea of the N-word and must “embrace this stranger that they have maligned so long.” You could also say that the European Christians created the idea of “the Jew” and that sort of caricature had absolutely nothing to do with flesh and blood Jews. I kept noticing these parallels, as an outsider, reading American and African-American history.
I was also thinking about this idea of servitude that was attached to Jews in Christian theology, and then in law.
You write in your book that “Over time, white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” What do you mean by servitude in this context?
In Christian theology, from the earliest Christian texts, the idea of servitude and slavery is attached to the concept of Jews and Judaism. Paul does it in his Epistles. He uses this quote from the book of Genesis that “the elder shall serve the younger,” which becomes really embedded in Christian theology. It is the Jews, the elder people, who should serve the Christians, the younger people. Later on in medieval theology and canon law, Jews are in a servile position, consigned for their sin of rejecting Jesus to perpetual servitude. So even though Jews were free people and could live mostly where they wanted to live, marry whoever they wanted to marry — nobody was sold and some even had slaves — that idea of Jews as confined to perpetual servitude to Christians created a habit of thinking of Jews as having an inferior social status.
That language became secularized in modern times, and we see the development of the [antisemitic] trope of Jewish power: that they are in places where they shouldn’t be. I worked on fleshing out the parallels between the idea and then legal status of Jewish servitude and the conceptual perception of Black people in servile and inferior positions.
Magda Teter’s new book explores how “white European Christians branded both Jews and people of color with ‘badges of servitude’ and inferiority.” (Chuck Fishman)
What other kinds of parallels did you find between racism and antisemitism?
In the Christian theology, Black people, like Jews, will be seen as cursed by God. Jews were [portrayed as] lazy because they didn’t work physically — they made money and exploited Christians. Black people were [portrayed as] lazy because they were trying to avoid physical labor at the expense of white men. Both people were seen as carnal, both as sexually dangerous, and so on.
I was struck by the fact that the racist turn of Christian supremacy — justifying the enslavement of Black people on theological grounds — is a fairly late development, taking hold in the early modern period when Europeans established slaveholding empires.
That’s right. In the summer of 2020, the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, we were all thinking about these issues of race and racism and America. And as I was in the middle of writing the article that became the book, I felt that there was a deeper history that needed to be told, and that slavery is not bound by color until the enslavement of Black Africans by Europeans during the colonial expansion of Europe.
After the French Revolution, when Jews were offered “emancipation” in much of Europe, there were deep debates about whether they could be citizens and be entitled to the same rights and protections as Christian citizens of France and England and other countries. How was that debate informed by Christianity?
In pre-modern Europe, there was obviously both a religious and legal framework under which Jews existed. They had their place in a social hierarchy. After the French Revolution, people are creating a new political reality. The idea of equality obviously challenged the social hierarchies that existed, including the idea that Christians were the superior religion. And that begins to play a role on two levels. One is the level of, well, “how can you be equal and be our judges and make decisions about us?” It’s fear of power — political power and political equality. That challenges the habit of thinking that sees Jews as inferior, in servitude and otherwise insolent and arrogant.
The other level comes from Enlightenment scholars who begin to place Jews in the Middle East and in the Holy Land, in Palestine. Jews are no longer seen as European. They are seen as “Oriental,” and they are compared to the non-European religions and practices that these Enlightenment scholars have been studying. Their differences are now also racialized. “They are not like us, they can’t assimilate. They can never be Frenchmen, they can never be Germans.”
And I guess it’s a short step from that to regarding people with dark skin as inferior and subordinate.
That’s right. Enlightenment scholars are also trying to to understand why it is justified to enslave Black Africans and they do it through “scientific” and other means. They classify Africans as inferior intellectually and they create this idea of race.
I began to think about these European politicians and intellectuals in terms of creating their identities, and what I ended up arguing is what we saw in Charlottesville, what we’re seeing in Europe. It’s not necessarily just about hate, but it’s about exclusion and rejection of Jews and people of color from equality, from citizenship.
And the common thread here is that whiteness and Christianity become inseparable. You write that “freedom and liberty now came to be linked not only to Christianity, but to whiteness, and servitude and enslavement to blackness.”
That’s right. White Christian “liberty” becomes embedded and embodied in law.
Did you see any pitfalls in drawing parallels between the Black and Jewish experiences? I am thinking of those in either community who might say, “How dare you compare our suffering to theirs!”
Yes, I was tempered. I think what some call “comparative victimhood” has paralyzed conversations about this subject, and I kept it in my mind all the time. What I hope comes through is that there’s incredible value in a comparative approach. Coming from Jewish studies as my primary field, the comparison with the Black experience gave me clarity on the nature of antisemitism as well as on the nature of the Jewish experience, and vice versa: The Jewish experience can also give clarity to some of the aspects of anti-Black racism.
What’s an example?
So, for instance, questions like, “Are Jews white? Are they not white? When did they become white?” That’s a whole genre of scholarship. And when you look at it through the lens of law and ideology, you begin to see that from a legal perspective, Jews were considered white in the United States because they could immigrate and they could be naturalized according to law. They did not have to go to court to become American. Their rights to vote were not challenged. There was discrimination, they couldn’t stay in hotels and in some places they couldn’t find employment, but by law, they were considered citizens. The debate about the whiteness of Jews is creating a fog of misunderstanding.
Black Americans were targeted by specific legal statutes from the very beginning in the Constitution and then in naturalization law and so on. And then there was the backlash even after the Civil War to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments [aimed at establishing political equality for Americans of all races].
Statues at the Strasbourg Cathedral depict Ecclesia and Synagoga, representing the triumph of the church, at left, and the servitude of Judaism, which is represented by a blindfolded figure, drooping and carrying a broken lance. (Edelseider/Wikimedia Commons)
How much do modern-day white supremacists, like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, see themselves as Christian? Or is this a kind of white supremacy that doesn’t name itself Christian but doesn’t even realize how many of its ideas are based in theology?
I think they might not be conscious of this legacy, but neo-Nazis take from the legacy of the Nazis who themselves were not thinking of themselves as Christian necessarily. But what I argue in the book is that white Christian supremacy becomes white supremacy. It never discards the Christian sense of domination and superiority that emerges from its early relationship with Jews and Judaism.
In the United States, Black people serve as contrast figures to whiteness, in the law and in the culture. You cannot have whiteness without Blackness. For Christians, Jews serve as that contrast figure. Consciously or unconsciously, the Proud Boys are embracing that. They talk of “God-given” freedoms for white people. That is the Christian legacy.
You said that the Nazis didn’t necessarily see themselves as a Christian movement. But I must ask, even though it is not the scope of your book, was the Holocaust a culmination of white Christian supremacy? Because I think many Christian theologians would want to say that Nazism was godless, and a perversion of the true faith.
I’ll say that when exclusionary ideology is coupled with the power of the state, that’s where it can lead.
In the years since the Holocaust especially, there have been many efforts by Christian leaders to address the ideological failings of the past. You write about Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration by the Catholic Church absolving Jews of collective guilt in the death of Jesus and some Protestant documents of contrition. But I got the feeling you were disappointed that many denominations haven’t gone far enough in reckoning with the past.
There was a sort of a moral sense that something needs to be addressed after the Holocaust. But then it is not fully addressed. I don’t think anybody has addressed the issue of power — the roots of hate, yes, but not the dynamics of power. We’ll see where the book goes, but maybe theologians will begin to grapple with this legacy of superiority and domination, and the way hierarchical habits of thinking have been developed through theology and through religious culture.
What other impact do you hope the book may have?
White supremacy is very much in the air. We need to speak up against it, and make connections and allyships. I hope that maybe because the book deals with law and power, it may create bridges among people who care about “We the People” as a vision of people who are diverse, respectful and equal, and not the exclusionary vision offered by white and Christian supremacy.
A cross burns at a Ku Klux Klan rally on Aug. 8, 1925. (National Photo Company Collection)
I’d love to talk about your background. You’re not Jewish but you are chair of Jewish Studies at Fordham, a Catholic university. What drew you to the study of Judaism and the Jews?
I grew up in Poland with a father who from the time I was a little girl would point out to me that there had been Jews in Poland. We would drive through the countryside, and he’d say, “This used to be a Jewish town and there used to be a synagogue and there was the Jewish cemetery.” I grew up being very conscious of the past’s presence and this kind of stark absence of Jews in Poland, where in the 1970s when I grew up Jewish history was taboo.
As soon as Jewish books on Jewish subjects began to be published, including those that dealt with antisemitism, we would read it together. We would talk about it. He wouldn’t just shift the destruction and murder of Jews in Poland on to the Nazis.
There was no Jewish studies program in Poland when I was applying to universities, so I studied Hebrew in Israel, and then studied Yiddish in New York at YIVO. I came to Columbia University to get my PhD in Jewish history and my career went in the direction it did. I was a professor of history and director of the Jewish and Israel studies program at Wesleyan University. I came to Fordham eight years ago and created a program in Jewish studies.
Your previous book was about the blood libel, the historic canard that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood. This one’s about antisemitism. I don’t want to presume, but is your interest in these subjects in any way an act of contrition?
I grew up in a very secular household. I did not grow up Catholic. But I think growing up in Poland made me very, very aware of antisemitism and the history of antisemitism. I got my PhD from Columbia University in Jewish history, which did not emphasize Jewish suffering, but Jewish life, and I have studied Jewish life and teach about Jewish life — not just about Jewish suffering.
However, in the last few years, antisemitism has certainly been on the minds of many of us. I also am committed to the idea of shared history, and therefore all my scholarship, as much as it is about Jews, it is also about the church and Poland and the law. Jews are an integral part of that history and culture. And, as such, I’m committed to that, to teaching about the vibrancy of Jewish life as much as the dynamics of what made that life difficult over the centuries.
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The post A scholar sees a common root for antisemitism and racism: ‘Christian supremacy’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus
(JTA) — Cornell University is condemning viral antisemitic remarks made by an undergraduate student who appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” earlier this week, but the school’s president says no further action is planned against the student.
During his appearance, the student, Austin Franco, defended his statement in June that he did not want to work with Jews, saying that he did not like most of the Jews he had met. The remark was made in a private message that the company that received it publicized.
“As a university built on the solid foundations of our nation’s democratic freedoms, Cornell has an obligation to fiercely defend freedom of speech — even when we find that speech abhorrent,” Cornell’s president, Michael Kotlikoff, said in a statement issued late Wednesday, shortly after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reached out to the school for comment on Franco.
“The student’s public comments invoked hateful generalizations and uninformed tropes with a long, ugly history of harm,” Kotlikoff said, adding that “antisemitism generally” is “detestable, ignorant, and fully at odds with the values of the Cornell community.”
Kotlikoff, who is Jewish, did not mention Franco by name in his statement, citing federal privacy law, nor did he specify which of Franco’s comments about Jews the school found objectionable.
His comments once again place Cornell on the front line in tensions over antisemitism at colleges and universities. The school reached a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration last year to resolve antisemitism claims and regain $250 million in funding that had been frozen over campus unrest in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Cornell was one of the earliest schools to face antisemitism allegations after Oct. 7, 2023, when a professor spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally and said he had been “exhilarated” by the Hamas-led attack against southern Israel, in which more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
But the latest incident involving Franco had little to do with the subsequent war in Gaza until Tuesday, when the student told Morgan on his YouTube show that he objected to Jews in part because of Israel, which he deemed “a genocidal country.”
The controversy over Franco, a rising junior at the Ivy League university in Ithaca, New York, began in June when he wrote in an internship application that he was “not interested in working for a jew.”
His name and remarks were publicized by the Jewish co-owners of Handshake, the tech company to which Franco had applied for an internship, though Franco has claimed he’d already turned down an offer. His comments prompted online backlash — including from Leo Terrell, the Trump administration’s antisemitism czar, who posted dozens of times about the 19-year-old.
Franco has garnered significant support from the far right, including through a crowdfunding campaign initiated by a YouTuber who had previously drawn criticism for saying he hoped to see “another Hitler.” Franco’s comments to Morgan included positive references to “America First,” the Trump-led nativist movement embraced by the far right.
Cornell had announced it was opening an investigation into Franco when his comments were first publicized. He remained in the headlines after he was secretly filmed by an apparent sting operation led by Accuracy in Media, a right-wing activist group that has targeted pro-Palestinian students and university heads the group deems antisemitic on other campuses. Franco told a hidden camera interviewer connected to the group last week that the university’s investigation had amounted to little and that he would be returning to Cornell.
Asked by Morgan Tuesday to explain his beliefs, Franco said that a Jewish friend of his at Virginia Tech University, where he was enrolled before transferring to Cornell, “said we should genocide all Palestinians.” He named other “bad experiences with Jews” he claimed to have experienced in college, focusing on Jewish campus figures he said had “made things up about me,” and said Jews had “made my life a living hell.”
As Morgan pushed Franco to admit he was antisemitic, the student insisted he was not.
“Not wanting to be around Jewish people does not mean you don’t like them,” he said, adding that one of his exes “was half-Jewish.” He returned to Israel later in the conversation, chargingthat it is a Jewish-led “genocidal country” that insists upon “killing Palestinians and reporters and dragging America into wars abroad.” He concluded, “No, I am not going to want to associate with those people.”
“This is a common sentiment that is held,” Franco said. “If you think this is just me, you are completely wrong.”
Morgan, for his part, concluded, “You kind of made yourself unemployable.”
Franco is facing more immediate consequences, he announced on X on Wednesday. “My parents are kicking me out,” he tweeted, drawing offers of support from a handful of prominent far-right personalities.
Like many other schools that faced unrest after Oct. 7, Cornell has taken steps aimed at countering campus antisemitism while attempting to balance academic freedom concerns, in part as a result of its settlement with the Trump administration. The university commissioned an antisemitism task force and has undertaken several initiatives, including new campus climate surveys and stricter Title VI enforcement. It has also enforced a range of disciplinary actions against pro-Palestinian students.
But when it comes to Franco, one Jewish faculty member at Cornell theorized, the administration’s hands were tied.
“You sort of have to live with it,” Menachem Rosensaft, a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and former general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, told JTA. “He is engaging in obnoxious thought that is not harming anyone else.”
Rosensaft has been at the center of other antisemitism-related controversies at Cornell, including in 2024, when he prompted Kotlikoff to criticize another Jewish professor’s planned class on Gaza — an action that the school’s faculty union said was a violation of academic freedom.
In the case of Franco, Rosensaft argued that Cornell shouldn’t “turn him into a First Amendment martyr.”
But Rosensaft added that there could be grounds for discipline if Franco returned to campus and made harmful comments about Jews in the classroom or in other public spaces.
In 2025, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Kotlikoff for what he called “a comprehensive approach to countering antisemitism.” An ADL spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment on Cornell’s latest statement about Franco.
Franco himself has launched a second crowdfunding campaign to support his housing costs.
“I have reiterated that my parents do not share my views, and it seems they no longer wish to provide me with a home to live in,” he wrote in the description. “I know the road ahead will be difficult, but this is the path I chose. I could have lived a more conventional life, as my parents did, and perhaps in a different time I would have. However, that is not the world we live in today, and because of that, I chose a different path than most.”
This story has been corrected to reflect that the original comments Austin Franco made about not wanting to work with Jews were made in a private message rather than publicly.
The post Cornell condemns student’s viral antisemitic remarks, but won’t bar him from campus appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu showcases diplomatic victories that have expiration dates
(JTA) — A rejuvenated Benjamin Netanyahu returned home to Israel Thursday from Washington, having crossed off everything on his diplomatic shopping list.
Grinning photo op with U.S. President Donald Trump? Check. Iran still a top priotiry? Check. Conciliation with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and conflict with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Check and check. Meetings with top-level senators and with salt-of-the-earth pro-Israel Americans? Check, check and Check!
Had he checked his pen, however, Netanyahu might have found that the ink was running out. To the degree that the Israeli prime minister scored public relations victories during his visit to the U.S. this week, they all have impending expiration dates.
Netanyahu, who faces a tough reelection campaign for the elections to be held on Oct. 27, needs to show the Israeli voters that his claimed superpower, influencing Americans to support the Jewish state, is still potent. His rivals are already making the case that his power is spent.
“Netanyahu’s expectation and hope is that Trump will establish, figuratively speaking, a re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu headquarters in Washington for the next three months,” said Aaron David Miller, a veteran Middle East negotiator under Republican and Democratic administrations who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The prime minister seemed genuinely elated on Tuesday after he and the U.S. president met at the White House. Contrary to reports ahead of the meeting, Netanyahu said he was not seeking to pull the United States back into an all-out war. Instead, he wanted to see eye-to-eye with Trump on what happens if the talks to end the war fail.
He told ABC News in an interview he was in lock-step with Trump over the three options ahead: “One, to indeed succeed making a deal; two, to continue a blockade; three, to take military action,” Netanyahu said. “Anything that will produce the end of Iran’s nuclear program is what we want. That’s our common goal. We talked about it.”
The problem for Netanyahu is that the deal Trump seeks is anything but satisfying to Israel: The Memorandum of Understanding Vance reached in June, just weeks before the war resumed, allows Iran a stake in controlling – and even profiting from – the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s petroleum transits, a prerogative the Islamic Republic never before enjoyed.
Privately, Israeli officials have said they don’t expect the deal to happen, and that Trump will eventually turn to options two and three, which the Israelis favor. But Trump’s popularity is cratering ahead of critical midterm elections, inflation is not abating and even as Iran takes shots at ships in the Strait of Hormuz and its U.S.-allied neighbors, Trump keeps banking on a deal.
“There are very friendly negotiations going on,” he said Monday, the day Netanyahu arrived. “I think there’s a good chance that something could happen.”
But diplomacy wasn’t the only concern during Netanyahu’s visit. Domestic politics dogged Netanyahu in the U.S. capital. Opposition leader Yair Lapid was also in town. Both were ostensibly there for the funeral of South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pro-Israel stalwart who backed the Iran war. Lapid in a talk to The Atlantic Council took shots at Netanyahu’s public diplomacy, saying his attacks on Democrats who were critical of Israel were making the country more isolated.
Press releases from Netanyahu’s office sought to reinforce his status as the explainer in chief: He met with prominent senators, he met with Cabinet officials, he met, above all, with Trump.
Yet these releases undercut any claim Netanyahu might have had to the prominence he once enjoyed in the American mind.
The single Democratic senator he met with was John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, whose robust support for Israel makes him an outlier in his party – something Fetterman repeatedly emphasized in the chat Netanyahu’s office posted. “It’s been disappointing as a Democratic politician, how our party continues to behave,” Fetterman said.
Lapid, by contrast, posed for a photo with Democratic senators, including some who have recently criticized Israel stridently, like Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. “Boycotting those who oppose you is not the way,” Lapid said on X. ”Repair relations with both parties. It’s not always fun, but that’s what it takes. Not by whining and not by boycotts.”
Netanyahu’s failure to engage with the American left also was evident in video of his meeting with evangelicals. “I’m very grateful to you for your consistent support, for the constancy of your friendship, and now it’s time to fight, fight, fight,” he said, evoking Trump’s famous call when he escaped an assassin’s bullet in 2024.
That prompted Mike Evans, an author who is an outlier among evangelicals for his stridency in advocating for extreme right positions, to lash out at the left using apocalyptic language. “We are fighting right now against the dark side, the leftist, godless dark side, but by the grace of God, we’re going to win this battle,” he said.
Netanyahu also took on Mamdani, who has called for Netanyahu’s arrest, likening his administration of the city to the Nazi era in an interview on Fox News. Mamdani’s wish was never going to come through – he ultimately acknowledged he had no power to arrest Netanyahu – yet his sentiment had staying power: A poll showed 49% of Americans agree that Netanyahu should be arrested.
Linsey Davis, the ABC reporter who interviewed Netanyahu, pressed him on Israel’s plummeting popularity. Netanyahu blamed the rise of social media and said it concerned him – but notably he did not explain how he planned to counter what he described as a propaganda threat to American and Israeli interests.
“I think there’s been a change because of the proliferation of social media and the fact that sovereign countries have manipulated bot farms and other things, and we can see a direct relationship between the proliferation of the social media and the decline in support for Israel,” he said. “Does it concern me? Yes, yes it does. And I want bipartisan support for Israel because I think that’s the fundament of our national security.”
Netanyahu could point to one seeming public diplomacy success: He met with Vance, likely to be a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, and the vanguard of the sector of the GOP that is growing disaffected with Israel. A U.S. official told Axios the meeting was “cordial and productive,” diplomatese for not warm.
As for the flurry of photo-ops the prime minister’s office sent out from the trip, the one on one with Vance was not among them.
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An Altadena synagogue’s mural was a symbol of community resilience after the LA fires. Antisemitic graffiti only proved the point.
ALTADENA, CALIF. – When Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center held services in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Chann and Christina An, who lived across the street, sometimes sat on their front porch and listened to the songs.
And when the Eaton fire flattened the PJTC campus last January — and the An home, too — the synagogue helped its next-door neighbors with food donations and gift cards.
“Ever since the fire, they’ve included us like one of their members,” Chann An said.
So when a vandal earlier this week spray-painted swastikas on a mural the synagogue had painted on its only remaining wall, it felt like an attack on them, too. On Thursday, when PJTC organized a community-wide solidarity event at the site, the Ans were among many non-Jewish residents in attendance.
“They’re part of our community, and they’re always welcome, and I want them to feel that way,” said An. “And I want them to feel that all the neighbors support them.”
What typically happens when a Jewish institution is tagged — an increasingly common story these days — is a familiar chain of events: Photos are snapped and posted online; Jewish leaders and local officials issue statements; the tag is covered up and people move on.
In Altadena, all of that happened. But so did something else: The synagogue was inundated with messages of support from surrounding faith institutions and Altadena residents, according to the temple’s executive director Melissa Levy. A few of those neighbors had offered to sand down the graffiti themselves.
“That kind of support has been really beautiful in the wake of all of this,” Levy said.
The Eaton fire devastated Altadena, killing 19 people and leveling cherished community institutions, including the temple’s 75-year-old campus and several other houses of worship. Dozens of congregants lost their homes in the blaze. Where PJTC’s sanctuary, chapel and religious school once stood, weeds now rise five feet off the ground.
The mural had been painted in May in response to graffiti on the same wall earlier this year. At the mural’s center was a fire poppy — a native flower known to rise from ashes — adorned with a message intended to be universal: We are all responsible for each other.
“When we look at the mural,” Christina An said, it reminds them: “We’re all going to be back.”
But this week, those inspiring words were painted over with another. Vandals painted more swastikas alongside the message: “Zionism is not welcome.” No arrests have been made in either instance, and it is unclear whether the same person was responsible for both incidents. LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger has called on the county to offer a $20,000 reward for information on the culprit.
“There’s an increased feeling of vulnerability after the fire destroyed our home,” said Rabbi Josh Ratner, the synagogue’s senior leader. “To have any stuff happen after that compounds our vulnerability.”
Rising from the ashes
The stone wall abutting Altadena Boulevard was the only one on the complex that remained fully intact after the fire. But it didn’t become a symbol until after it was vandalized earlier this year, when passersby noticed on Jan. 13 that the charred stone wall had been tagged.
That graffiti read “F— Zionism” and “RIP Renee,” the latter message an apparent reference to Renee Nicole Good, an anti-ICE protester who had been killed the previous week in Minneapolis.
In response, synagogue leadership decided to cover it with art. Working with a local group called Art Against Hate, PJTC commissioned a muralist who invited synagogue members to contribute ideas — and recruited their children to help paint it.
The mural was sectioned like stained glass, with Stars of David in the corners and a border containing the animal symbols for the tribes of Israel. A peacock adorned one side — the birds have thrived in the area for more than a century — and while the children were painting it, one approached the scene, seemingly to admire it.
“It was for Altadena as much as the synagogue, and the neighbors appreciated it,” said Judy Callahan, a longtime PJTC member. “I think looking out and seeing it — they still see this vacant lot, but it just made things cheerier.”
Coming together
Many of those neighbors — and a phalanx of local officials — were on hand Thursday to condemn the latest graffiti and watch Miriam Hellmann, the muralist, apply the final touches for a second time.
Barger spoke, as did Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and others. But just as important to the temple members in attendance were the locals who braved the scorching heat to embrace them.
After Ratner spoke, he invited the Rev. Amy Aitken to the podium. Aitken leads the First United Methodist Church of Pasadena, where PJTC has been holding their services for the last year.
After joking that most other Methodist churches don’t have a “campus rabbi” — that is, Ratner — she asked other clergy in attendance to stand up. Nearly a dozen did.
One of them was the Rev. Michael David Lewis of Altadena Community Church, who said he wanted to assure Jewish community members that he considered them family.
“When they are attacked, I want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them,” he said. “I want to stand against the hate that was expressed here and stand against the fear that was expressed here.”
Hellmann, who is not Jewish, said every muralist knows their work might get tagged — murals tend to be in prominent places, and vandals want their message to be seen.
But this target had broader resonance than other walls, or even other synagogues. “It’s not just about the Jewish community,” Hellmann said. “It was supposed to be a symbol of hope for a lot of people.”
When Hellmann first painted the mural, she applied a layer of anti-graffiti coating that prevents spray paint from bonding to the surface. But the graffiti was not cleaned off immediately, allowing it to set.
“I’ll keep repainting it every day if I need to,” Hellmann said.
This time, she added an olive branch, that ancient symbol of peace.
“I think that it’s important for non-Jewish people to stand with the Jewish community when there’s antisemitism,” she said. “So I’m happy to be a part of it. I think it’s a beautiful religion.”
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