An individual was arrested yesterday, July 31, in connection with the vandalism of Brooklyn Museum Director Anne Pasternak’s home earlier this summer, the New York Police Department (NYPD) confirmed to Hyperallergic.
Pasternak was one of four museum leaders whose residences were graffitied with anti-Zionist messages on the morning of June 12, following a massive and heavily policed pro-Palestine protest at the Brooklyn Museum on May 31 that saw the arrests of dozens of demonstrators.
Photos of the incident showed the museum director’s front porch doused in red paint and a white banner with the words “Anne Pasternak Brooklyn Museum White-Supremacist Zionist” hanging across the entrance. Two inverted red triangles were spray-painted on her windows, a symbol that appears in Hamas military videos to indicate Israeli targets. In the aftermath of the incident, some also pointed to the Nazis’ use of inverted red triangles to classify their victims, though the red shape in particular was used to designate political prisoners. Others trace the symbol back to the red triangle that appears in the Palestinian flag.
The homes of Brooklyn Museum Board Chair Barbara Vogelstein, Board Treasurer Neil Simpkins, and President and Chief Operating Officer Kimberly Panicek Trueblood were targeted as well. In response to Hyperallergic’s request for comment, a Brooklyn Museum spokesperson said that “those affected are cooperating with the authorities.” The investigation is ongoing, NYPD said.
Reached by Hyperallergic, Pelton’s lawyer, Moira Meltzer-Cohen, said she could not comment on this specific case, but expressed concern over “the general trend toward alleging antisemitic hate crimes in the context of expressions of grief and rage over Israel’s attacks on Palestine.”
“Any time we see charging enhancements being applied in a politically motivated way, it should give us pause,” Meltzer-Cohen said. “The claim that the Jewish Peoples, who are historically oppressed religious groups, are synonymous with the state of Israel, which is a global nuclear power, is not historically accurate and it is not neutral. It functions to discourage criticism of the powerful by exploiting laws intended to protect the vulnerable.”
(photos Rhea Nayyar and Maya Pontone/Hyperallergic)
The characterization of the vandalism as an act of antisemitism by political figures such as NYC Mayor Eric Adams, and its investigation as a hate crime by NYPD, was immediately repudiated by pro-Palestine activists who denounced what they perceive as the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism amid Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza. Media outlets including the New York Times initially misidentified all four museum leaders targeted as Jewish; only Pasternak is Jewish, a correction in the Times’s report later clarified.
In a statement to Hyperallergic, an anonymous group claiming responsibility for the July 12 vandalism cited “the museum’s complicity in the Palestinian genocide,” including board members’ ties to weapon manufacturing and other Israeli military interests.
“Our action is a retaliation against the museum’s direct connections to the networks that materially support the genocidal entity as well as its collaboration with the fascist NYPD,” the statement said, referring to the police presence at the May 31 protest.
The Brooklyn Museum told Hyperallergic at the time that it did not call NYPD to the demonstration and that “the police brutality that took place was devastating.”