'EndJewHate': Group Launches Billboard Campaign To Denounce Antisemitism

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- ABC News/MSN, Feb. 12, '22. Ed.

A nonprofit organization is tackling growing attacks on the Jewish community in a splashy way – by installing bright pink billboards across the country that denounce antisemitism. The New Jersey-based organization, JewBelong, launched the #EndJewHate campaign last June with billboards in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Las Vegas and now, Miami, after flyers blaming Jews for Covid-19 were found distributed in two South Florida cities last month.

With messages like “I promise to love being Jewish 10x more than anyone hates me for it," “3,500 years of antisemitism doesn’t make it right," and “Does your church need armed guards? ‘Cause our synagogue does,” the organization hopes to spread awareness of antisemitism around the country. Archie Gottesman worked in branding and marketing for over 15 years before co-founding JewBelong.

Now the self-proclaimed Co-Chief-Rebrander-of-Judaism is taking notes from her previous experience designing witty billboards to draw attention to antisemitism. “Jews belong in the conversation. Hate is painful. Hate is scary. It's painful. It doesn't allow us to become who we are,” said Gottesman. “It just makes us feel less than like all of those terrible things about marginalized groups, which again, this country is trying to work on and should be working on.” According to a 2020 Pew Research Center report, there are 5.8 million Jewish adults in the U.S., accounting for 2.4% of the U.S. adult population.

“One of the reasons that JewBelong is doing the campaign is not everybody realizes this, Jews are only 2% of the population in the U.S.,” said Gottesman. “We're so tiny that it's like, we need some help in terms of being able to get the message out there.” According to the NYPD Hate Crimes Dashboard, there were 198 confirmed hate crime incidents against Jewish people in 2021, up from a still-alarming 121 incidents in 2020. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism recorded 2,024 antisemitic incidents in their 2020 annual audit, making it the 3rd-highest year on record since 1979...

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/group-launches-endjewhate-billboard-campaign-to-denounce-antisemitism/ar-AATLZ29