More Swastikas Found on Manhattan’s Upper West Side
Image by Lora LaVon
The swastika sighted this week on 104th Street and Broadway in Manhattan was one of several hateful scrawlings in the neighborhood, according to local reports.
A number of buildings and phone booths between 104th and 105th Streets on Broadway were tagged with swastikas, “KKK” and “Nazi,” DNAInfo reported. All the graffiti appeared to be done in blue marker.
Drawing a swastika on a building without permission is a felony in New York.
All the graffiti appeared to be drawn in the same blue marker.
Hate crimes have been on the rise since Donald Trump’s election, with the New York City Police Department saying that bias incidents spiked by more than a third in November. Anti-Semitic vandalism has been found in several Brooklyn parks, the lobby of New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman’s apartment building, the lobby of an apartment building in the Hasidic section of Williamsburg and on the side of a No. 1 train in Manhattan.
In response to the incidents, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo created a new unit within the state police to investigate hate crimes, which said he said his administration will not tolerate. “We will prosecute, to the fullest extent of the law, the perpetrators of any of this ugliness and divisiveness. Because it’s not happening in this state,” he promised, speaking at a black church in Harlem in November.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter, @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
