A JewBelong billboard in Porter Square, a shopping area near Harvard and MIT. Photo by Mira Fox
By Mira Fox
June 25, 2025
Since Oct. 7, JewBelong — the organization behind the hot-pink antisemitism billboards — has taken a turn. Its ads, which once addressed antisemitism in a broad way, began to narrow its focus to progressives and pro-Palestinian activists. Their ads took on a far more hostile tone, placing the blame for antisemitism today squarely on the left.
“Radicals ruin America,” read one recent billboard in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard and MIT.
“Protesting Israel but silent on Congo? Makes you wonder why,” says another large sign in San Francisco.
On Instagram, the posts are even more aggressive with messages like: “Why wear a keffiyeh when you can just put ‘I love terrorists,’ on your forehead” and “There are two groups of people who protest with their faces covered. White supremacists and junior jihadists.”
JewBelong’s hot pink billboards have always been spicy. The organization’s early ads riffed about nasty mother-in-laws and accusations that Jews of refused the measles vaccine. Quickly, though, they shifted their focus to antisemitism, their slogans said things like: “We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jew hate isn’t an overreaction.”
I first wrote about JewBelong in 2022, after a few of their earlier antisemitism billboards had gone viral online. At the time, the organization’s co-founder, Archie Gottesman told me JewBelong’s main mission was engaging disaffected Jews through accessible holiday programming, offering a big tent that would be welcoming to Jews of all persuasions; the antisemitism ads were an addition to that agenda, but not the main thrust of it.
“Originally, and it still is very much so, our mission is for welcoming Jewish people who feel like they don’t belong,” she said.
Still, at nearly every Jewish gathering I attended, young people would ask me what was going on with the brightly-colored billboards; few knew about JewBelong’s other offerings. Some people just found the ads cringe, while others felt that the organization’s strong stance against anti-Zionism excluded a large group of Jews who otherwise fit JewBelong’s target demographic of Jews who do not feel like they belong in Jewish spaces. If anything, many said the messaging made them feel even less welcome in Jewish spaces, and less interested in engaging in a Judaism that JewBelong was defining as more rooted in Israel than in rituals like keeping kosher or Shabbat.
Criticism of Israel ranges, especially among Jews, so I asked Gottesman back then how the divisive messaging around Israel fit in with JewBelong’s message of, well, belonging.
“Listen,” she said, “when people are anti-Israel, I don’t think JewBelong is for them.”
Today, in the post-Oct. 7 landscape, JewBelong’s website still features its haggadah and Shabbat booklets, and they still promote their Jewish resources in emails and on social media. But the organization’s main mission has clearly shifted to strident pro-Israel advocacy.
Nearly every media mention of the organization is about their billboards, and Gottesman regularly gives interviews about the ads. Once, those interviews were with outlets like CNN. Now, the most recent hits are in conservative-learning publications like The New York Post or even Christian ones like the Christian Broadcasting Network.
This is all the more surprising because Gottesman has a long history of advocating for liberal causes. She was the brains behind viral billboard ads for Manhattan Mini Storage, one of her family’s businesses; those ads managed to connect temporary storage units to LGBTQ+ rights and abortion access by joking about closets and coat hangers. The Christian Broadcasting Network, meanwhile, is a conservative evangelical outlet.
Perhaps that’s because mainstream media has joined the ranks of groups that draw JewBelong’s ire. When The New York Times’ editorial board published an op-ed, warning their readers not to dismiss rising antisemitism, JewBelong posted on Instagram that the piece was “inauthentic.”
“The NY Times helped light the match of antisemitism, poured the gasoline and wants credit for noticing the smoke?” the post said. “Please.”
Gottesman has never been shy about her criticism of Palestinians, or the level of her support for Israel. It’s only the tone that has escalated. But that’s still notable; after all, the billboards are hot pink, among the most visible and public representations of Jews, particularly in places where there aren’t as many. (They have a billboard campaign in Kansas City, as well as running ads near music festivals like Bonnaroo, in Tennessee.) Her representation of Judaism to those communities is a religion in which support for Israel is a main tenet, never mind the young Jews who feel otherwise.
In a statement, JewBelong agreed that their tone has escalated. “How could it not? Over 1,200 Jews were butchered in a day — and instead of global outrage, antisemitism increased,” the organization said when I reached out about the shift in messaging.
The statement reiterated that the organization stands “for peace and belonging,” but did not specify how they were working for that goal, or how the messaging served to facilitate those values aside from saying that “peace doesn’t mean silence.”
“Jewish lives are more at risk than ever. So yes, we’re louder now; we’re provocative in our messaging and always have been,” the statement said. “When people show up in keffiyehs chanting ‘Death to Jews,’ that’s not activism. It’s hate. We’ll keep calling it out — wherever it hides. We stand with Israel and with Jews. That hasn’t changed. The world has.”
Regardless of the reasons, the tone of JewBelong’s messaging has transformed the organization. Once it was a place to connect to your Judaism through welcoming, if schlocky, resources like a haggadah that talks about characters being “bummed” and guests getting “buzzed.” Now, even its ritual resources are as focused on fighting anti-Zionism as they are about Jewish participation; its latest haggadah has multiple sections about standing up for Israel.
Like Trump, who called Chuck Schumer a “Palestinian” who is “not Jewish anymore” over their political disagreements, JewBelong decries out any person — Jewish or not — who attends a protest as a Jew-hater. “Make no mistake,” says one post. “If you screamed ‘Free Palestine,’ you helped pull the trigger.”
