Violent language aimed at Jewish people has been spray-painted around Lake Merritt several times recently, according to witnesses and photographs reviewed by The Oaklandside.<\/p>\n
In October 2025, someone scrawled \u201cKill Jews!\u201d on the exterior wall of a charter school building on 12th Street.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In January, someone sprayed a similar message, along with an obscenity and a swastika, on a retaining wall along the Lake Merritt pedestrian bridge. In late February, there were two more incidents in the same location using similar phrasing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Zoe Levine, a member of the advocacy organization Oakland Jewish Alliance<\/a>, paints over graffiti at the lake through the city\u2019s Adopt-a-Spot<\/a> program. She told The Oaklandside she\u2019s removed numerous incidents of antisemitic graffiti, but the recent spate has stood out. Her group believes these messages were written by the same person, since they use a similar lettering style and language.<\/p>\n One included graphic sexual language, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason we focused on this particular set of incidents is it started at a school, which is really unacceptable and horrifying,\u201d said Levine. \u201cNow they\u2019re perpetrating it in the public sphere.\u201d<\/p>\n Members of the Oakland Jewish Alliance, which formed following the Hamas attack in Israel in October 2023, and others have reported these and other incidents to the Oakland Police Department and Oakland Public Works, said Levine. She said the police have met with the group and seem to take the events seriously, but she finds it disheartening to see no arrests made.<\/p>\n \u201cThat tells [people] that Lake Merritt is the place they can go and commit hate crimes \u2014 this time against the Jewish community, but really against anybody \u2014 with no consequences,\u201d Levine said.\u00a0<\/p>\n An OPD spokesperson said the department is investigating the latest incident of anti-Jewish graffiti from Feb. 24, and said it\u2019s \u201ctoo soon to say if this is connected to other incidents,\u201d like the message sprayed on the AIMS charter school building last October.<\/p>\n An AIMS spokesperson did not respond to a request for more information about the school system\u2019s handling of that case.<\/p>\n The Oakland Jewish Alliance and attorney Marleen Sacks filed a lawsuit<\/a> against OUSD in April 2025. Their suit, which is ongoing, claims that the district blew past deadlines for investigating complaints of antisemitism and created a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students and staff.<\/p>\n Sacks previously made similar complaints to OUSD, but the district did not make a determination on whether discrimination occurred. She appealed to the California Department of Education, which largely substantiated the allegations<\/a>, finding last fall that the district discriminated against Jewish students and did not appropriately investigate claims. One of the complaints included reference to the graffiti at AIMS \u2014 and to other topics, such as an informal teach-in on Palestine and a school displaying a Palestinian flag. The state ordered corrective actions, including anti-bias training for staff and assemblies at schools. Some groups representing Muslim and Arab American communities have expressed criticism of the state findings, saying many falsely conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.\u00a0<\/p>\n People in California<\/a> and across the U.S.<\/a> have also reported an uptick in Islamophobic incidents since the Oct. 7 attack and Israel\u2019s ensuing bombardment of Gaza.\u00a0<\/p>\n Terry Friedkin, another member of the Oakland Jewish Alliance, said she no longer brings her nine Oakland grandchildren to walk around Lake Merritt because she doesn\u2019t want them to read hateful messages.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t like seeing Oakland being defaced by any graffiti,\u201d she said, but messages referencing \u201ckilling\u201d can especially \u201clead to violence and stimulate people to act. That\u2019s my concern.\u201d<\/p>\n Friedkin said she\u2019d like to see the city respond by placing more nighttime patrols or cameras around the lake or issuing a statement.<\/p>\n “*” indicates required fields<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Violent language aimed at Jewish people has been spray-painted around Lake Merritt several times recently, according to witnesses…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[36698,143,145,94052,144,407],"class_list":["post-202681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-hate-crime","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-jewish-alliance","tag-oakland-news","tag-oakland-police-department"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}