Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

That Other Time a Subway Rider Turned a Swastika Into Message of L-O-V-E

The New Yorkers who erased racist and anti-Semitic graffiti from a subway car this weekend weren’t the first ones to stand up to hate speech underground.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo praised the riders who went the extra mile to remove hateful messages — and revealed a similar incident in which a straphanger turned a swastika into a message of love.

“This is what New Yorkers do – we turn hate into love,” Cuomo wrote on Twitter.

Cuomo was initially reacting to New York attorney Gregory Locke who enlisted fellow subway riders to clean up the messages of hate using hand sanitizer on Saturday night on a Manhattan train.

Locke posted about the incident on Facebook — and the post had been shared more than 354,000 times as of Sunday afternoon.

Cuomo said a passenger on a different train spotted a swastika scrawled over an image of an American flag a few days ago.

The passenger, whom Cuomo did not name, used a marker to turn the symbol into a box with four quadrants. He wrote the letters L-O-V-E in the boxes, effectively turning the hate speech on its head.—With Reuters

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.