Hatred arrived in Brooklyn Heights at 4 a.m. Wednesday when at least two masked individuals walked through the early morning darkness brandishing red spray cans.
Just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Lower Manhattan, this neighborhood of elegant brownstones and stately apartment buildings was once home to literary giants like Wirt Whitman, WH Auden and Norman Mailer, and is now home to an A-list cast of actors, including Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Paul Giamatti.
The masked figures crept onto Hicks Street and into the courtyard of the six-story luxury apartment building where Lena Dunham, star of the HBO series “Girls,” lived until 2017. Current residents include figures from the arts world who should be celebrated by all who lived through the horror of the World Trade Center attacks, the most horrific hate crime in New York City history.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Creative Time, a non-profit public arts organization led by Anne Pasternak, commissioned a project called “Tribute in Light” to mark the six-month anniversary of the attacks. The project was done with two beams of light described as “the most powerful beams of light ever to emerge from Earth.” The beams shot up four miles into the night sky from Ground Zero, and to see them gives an immediate sense of how much was lost through blind hatred, and how much survived in spite of it all. The beams shone again on the one-year anniversary, and have continued to shine every year since.
Pasternak later became director of the Brooklyn Museum, which has recently been the target of pro-Palestinian activists whose complaints against the museum seem more like anti-Semitic rhetoric than legitimate protest.
Just read the nonsense posted on a website by an organization called Within Our Lifetime to explain the demonstrations that took place outside the museum last week.
“Although this museum claims to be a 'progressive' cultural institution, we know that through its leadership, board members, corporate sponsors and donors, it is deeply involved in and complicit in the ongoing colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.”
During the protest, several people broke into the museum and were arrested.
“The Brooklyn Museum's complicity in this carnage continues to escalate,” the group said.
“If you take peace from your people, we will take peace from you,” the group declared afterwards, without making many specific connections to the ongoing conflict.
Vandals target Brooklyn Museum's Jewish leadership house: 'Anti-Semitism is unacceptable'
At 4 a.m. Wednesday, Pasternak's apartment manager was woken by a resident on his way to the gym who saw vandals spraying red paint on the building's exterior. They had stenciled the message “Let it bleed” on the sidewalk and painted two upside-down red triangles by the entrance — such triangles are used by Hamas to mark targets for Israeli forces. They also hung a banner at the entrance.
Anne Pasternak
Brooklyn Museum
White supremacists
Zionist
Police responded, and a caretaker, who gave his name to The Daily Beast only as Daniel, showed officers security camera footage on both sides of the courtyard, which captured the full 90 seconds of the attack, though the suspect's face was obscured by a mask.
Daniel reported that Pasternak was not in the building at the time of the attack. He removed the hateful banner and hired a company that normally cleans up after fires to remove the red paint.
“Everybody should be outraged,” he told The Daily Beast.
He saw no connection between Pasternak or the Brooklyn Museum and Gaza.
“What does this have to do with what's going on right now?” he asked.
A neighbor named Stacey Manco also stopped to look over the scene while walking her dog, Wesley. She told The Daily Beast that in her 30 years in Brooklyn Heights, she had never encountered anti-Semitism until a few days ago. She was wearing a Jewish star on her way home from Trader Joe's when she passed a man wearing a kefir hat.
“I felt something wet,” she recalled. “He spat on me.”
A neighbor who lives off Furman Street, who would only identify herself as Katie, arrived with her 5-year-old daughter to report a recent encounter with anti-Semitism.
Witnessing a hate crime in Manhattan's liberal melting pot?
“Someone stole our mezuzah,” she said, adding that it had been a gift from her husband's grandparents in Minnesota and had been on their doorstep since they were married.
“It's very unfortunate,” Manco said.
As Katie and her daughter made their way down the tree-lined street to an apartment that no longer had a mezuzah, in a neighborhood known more for celebrity than hate, the camera crew continued to smear red paint on the exterior of the building of a celebrity worthy of a different kind of admiration.
Pasternak did not respond to phone and email requests for comment from The Daily Beast but did release a statement.
“For two centuries, the Brooklyn Museum has worked to foster mutual understanding through art and culture, and we have always supported peaceful protest and open, respectful dialogue,” she said. “Violence, vandalism, and intimidation have no place in such dialogue.”
The homes of three museum directors, two of whom were Jewish and the husband of another, was also Jewish, were also destroyed.
“Only Jews,” Manko pointed out, standing outside Pasternak's house, where hatred spread across the highlands.
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