CINCINNATI — Hate groups are targeting Ohio neighborhoods with racist propaganda, but one group saw it as an opportunity to fight back.
Rabbi Ari Jun said he wasn’t surprised when he saw the hate-filled flyers.
“We’ve been having issues with firing antisemitic specifically, but certainly it also includes anti-Black, anti-LBGTQ flyers, in particular in Cincinnati for many years now,” said Jun.
It doesn’t make him any less frustrated when the hate-filled flyers kept popping up in area neighborhoods and online.
“A pretty common refrain that we hear is what can I do? And for a long time, the answer was throw out the flier, move on with your life. That wasn’t a good enough response,” said Jun.
It’s part of the reason that in the last few months, the group he runs, Cincinnati’s Jewish Community Relations Council, started keeping track of every time one of those flyers pops up and where they turned up.
“There’s been a big, big uptick in those recent months. I would say in the last six months or so, we’ve seen more firings than we had in prior years to the point where this is basically a weekly occurrence,” said Jun.
Armed with envelopes, signs and magnets, they’re fighting back. They go straight into neighborhoods that were the target of hate messages with their own messages.
“We came up with this campaign allies against antisemitism because we wanted to give people something proactive they could do to take them from feeling hopeless and victimized to being empowered,” said Jun.
So far, he said they’ve sent out hundreds of the positive messages in the Cincinnati region, and as long as there’s still hate, he says they’re not stopping.
“My dream is that eventually there will be enough of these signs up in the community that when an antisemitic person decides they want to distribute flyers like they have around town, it’ll be like crossing a picket line. Every time they decide to walk up to somebody’s house, they’re going to have to visually encounter the fact that our community is more filled with love than hate,” said Jun.
If you or someone you know has been targeted by hate groups, you can also report it to the Jewish Community Relations Council group and request positive signs.
