NYC Against Hate

Joining With Our Neighbors To Stop Hate Violence

NYC Against Hate is where communities come together to protect each other and fight identity-based violence.

In addition to JFREJ, the NYC Against Hate coalition includes: the Audre Lorde Project, Arab American Association of New York, Brooklyn Movement Center, Center for Anti-Violence Education, Desis Rising Up & Moving, Global Action Project, Make the Road New York, and the New York City Anti-Violence Project. For the first time, a diverse coalition of community-based organizations — representing Jewish, immigrant, Latinx, Muslim, Arab & South Asian, Black, and LGBTQGNC populations — will coordinate their responses to incidents of hate violence and equip New Yorkers with the tools we need to keep each other safe in interactions with ICE, the police, and bigoted harassers on the streets and the trains.

New York is experiencing a surge in hate violence that mirrors the rising tide of hate nationwide. According to the FBI, hate violence reached a 16-year high in 2018 and reports of antisemitic crimes specifically rose by 24 percent in 2019, while gender-related hate crimes nearly doubled. Nationally, hate violence against Latinx people is at 10-year high. However, the city’s responses to incidents of hate violence over-emphasize policing and hate crimes prosecutions, which data suggests are some of the least effective ways to prevent hate violence — the criminal legal system is not the right tool for this problem.

The profound threat of antisemitic violence, and the very real fear and pain our community has felt since 2016 demands action, but we believe that there is a better way for the Jewish community to protect itself — we will never arrest our way out of antisemitism.

We need stronger, more effective solutions for hate violence: we have to divest from policing and carceral responses, and invest in approaches that prevent violence through education and community-building, interrupt violence through community-based "upstander" trainings and rapid response at the local level, and repair damage through restorative justice, counseling, and peer-support. Policing and prosecution cannot prevent hate violence

Our vision is a New York City that is free from hate violence, because we have bound together all of the communities impacted by bigotry, and rejected any approach that pits us against each other.

In Spring 2019, JFREJ members and the NYC Against Hate coalition fought for and won an unprecedented victory: more than $1 million from the New York City Council in the 2020 budget to respond to and prevent hate violence in our communities.

NYC Against Hate is piloting:

  • Bystander/upstander intervention trainings to empower community members to ally themselves with victims when an incident of hate or harassment is underway in public.
  • Community-based, culturally competent reporting of hate violence incidents. Marginalized communities feel safest reporting incidents to community-based organizations, which can help them to make a safety plan and determine whether or not they would like to report to law enforcement or another city agency.
  • Community care, including community-led transformative justice processes that focus on challenging and transforming the perspectives of people who do harm in our neighborhoods, as well as counseling and peer support services for survivors of violence.
  • Rapid incident responses that may include community alerts, town hall meetings, neighborhood safety events, and will also create space for targeted school-based and neighborhood education across multiple identities.

You can read the complete NYC Against Hate Policy Platform here.

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