NEW YORK — The flyers went up in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood last month, plastered onto lampposts, bollards, building walls and traffic control boxes.

“Beware: Talmudists are trained to cheat,” said one of the flyers posted in opposition to a housing redevelopment project.

“Locals vs. Rothschilds,” another said.

While those flyers echoed age-old antisemitic tropes, others deployed Israel-related or anti-Zionist rhetoric, decrying “dirty zionist money” and comparing the redevelopment project to the Nakba.

“Stop Zionist occupation of Manhattan. NYCHA residents must keep their homes,” one said, referring to the New York City Housing Authority, at the entrance to an apartment building.

The flyers were the latest in a series of recent statements attributing housing disputes in New York City to Israel or “Zionists.” The rhetoric appeared to mark a growing new front in anti-Zionist activism in the city, despite a history of disputes between Jews and their neighbors, including about housing.

“There’s always been tension, but the explicit nature of the antisemitism is new, part of the period we’re living through right now,” said Prof. Jeffrey Gurock, a scholar of New York Jewish history at Yeshiva University.

‘Greedy Jewish landlords’

There were scattered examples of New Yorkers blaming Jews or Israel for real estate disputes in the years before the October 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel and war in Gaza.

In 2017, a candidate for city council, Thomas Lopez-Pierre, accused “greedy Jewish landlords” of conspiring to conduct “ethnic cleansing” in the city, using funds from Israel.

Protesters who were rallying against a property dispute in Brooklyn in 2022 reportedly also railed against “greedy Jewish landlords.”

The incidents appear to have picked up since the start of the war, though, as anti-Israel activism and antisemitic incidents increased.

Last year, an activist group, Crown Heights Bites Back, attempted to stir racial tensions in the Black and Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, handing out flyers that said “Zionist white supremacists” were going to “kill us, exploit us, raise our rents and evict us.”

Other leaflets distributed by the group decried “Zionism and racist landlords,” and the group said in a statement, “Black people in Brooklyn are violently exploited via rents to then feed their genocidal land grabs in Palestine.”

Local leaders and neighborhood residents largely rejected the group.

The Crown Heights Tenant Union and Within Our Lifetime, the leading anti-Zionist activist group in the city, have also connected New York housing to Israel in broadsides against “Zionist” real estate investors since the start of the war.

Nerdeen........

© The Times of Israel