AUSTIN (KXAN) — Three billboards popped up across Austin recently, and their messages have turned heads and sparked conversation. That was the point.
Each billboard is bright pink with messages in white font. One of them reads, “You don’t need to be a Jew to protect Jews.” The two others say, “They went to a music festival and didn’t come home.”
The billboards were intentionally placed beside major highways, Interstate 35 and State Highway 71.
The group behind the billboards, JewBelong, said in a press release that the billboards “feature a provocative, thought-provoking slogan to raise awareness about the dangers of antisemitism.”
JewBelong said the goal was to draw the attention of millions of people to provoke thoughts and raise awareness about the dangers of antisemitism.
“The billboard campaign is waking people up to the incredible rise in antisemitism across the country,” JewBelong co-founder Archie Gottesman told KXAN.
We bring the billboards to important cities across the country, where we will get millions of people to look at the billboards and to become aware that antisemitism is growing in the United States at ridiculously high rates,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know this.”
The two billboards that have the message, “They went to a music festival and didn’t come home,” refer to the Hamas-led attack at the Nova Music Festival in Oct. 2023, which is a large part of what prompted the current ongoing conflict in Gaza.
“You know, kids went to that music festival, just like they’re going to the music festival in Austin, and they’re going and they wanted to have fun,” Gottesman said. “And these kids were murdered in Israel, and it was horrible, and it’s heartbreaking to think about it. And it would be horrible if that were to ever happen again anywhere… And that’s why that billboard is up there, because it just reminds people, like, they didn’t come home.”
The other message, “You don’t need to be a Jew to protect Jews,” is pretty straight-forward.
“That’s really what is so at the core of what JewBelong wants to message,” Gottesman said. “It’s that you don’t need to be what you want to help.”
Community response
JewBelong’s billboards have appeared in 36 cities. News outlets in Florida, Kansas, and Wisconsin have reported the signs’ appearances in the last few months, and the billboard with the music festival message also appeared in California near the site of Coachella around the time of the fest.
Gottesman said the response to the billboards has been mostly positive, but “not everybody likes the billboards.”
In Austin, one of them was vandalized shortly after it went up. A photo of the altered sign was posted to Reddit, where it gathered nearly 150 comments. While some commenters were sharing photos of other seemingly political billboards they’d driven by recently, many shared opinions about the original message. One person called it “genocide propaganda b——-.” Another commenter pointed out that in the thread of comments, “you can’t tell who is genuinely angry about Palestine and who just hates Jews.” That comment continued, “Y’all realize that you can support Palestine without just being s—– to Jewish people right?”
When asked if Gottesman was concerned that the message of the billboard could be misconstrued or come across as threatening, she said, “I don’t think people will find it as threatening. I think the only question is like, will people remember the music festival? Will they remember Nova?” She added that the intention is just to spark conversation in general.
In light of an already volatile political climate, KXAN asked Gottesman whether she thought the billboards could further stoke the fire of that volatility, or if there could be unintended consequences because of the messages.
“I think that antisemitism is this growing like, horror, that people don’t need reasons for,” Gottesman said. “I think that hate will grow on its own, and it is not because of a billboard.”
Data on religion-based, anti-Jewish hate crimes
Gottesman said that while Jews only make up 2% of the country, more than 50% of religious hate crimes are against Jewish people.
According to FBI data, 20.45% of all 58,811 reported hate crimes over the last five years were religion-based — that’s 12,025 reported religion-based hate crimes. Of those, 7,469 were classified by the FBI as anti-Jewish hate crimes.
Last year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tracked 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States, a 5% increase from the previous all-time high set the year before. According to the ADL’s numbers, antisemitism has 344% over the last five years, and 893% over the last 10.
The FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program defines hate crime as “a committed criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”
The FBI’s Hate Crime Data Collection gathers data on the following biases:
- Race/Ethnicity/Ancestry
- Religion
- Sexual Orientation
- Disability
- Gender
- Gender Identity
Credit: Source link
