California Police Say Hitler Graffiti Not A Hate Crime
(JTA) — Police have not classified graffiti referencing Adolf Hitler on a Northern California school as a hate crime.
The graffiti was discovered Saturday at the Edison Elementary School in Alameda, which has suffered several anti-Semitic incidents this term, the East Bay Times reported Wednesday. It was drawn in marker and quickly cleaned up, according to the report.
It was reminiscent of some dialogue from the popular sitcom “The Office.”
“It was a line said by the star of the series to one of his employees during season 6 episode 25,” Alameda Police Lt. Hoshmand Durani told the East Bay Times by via email. “It’s readily available on YouTube. Our case is closed and there’s no further police follow-up.”
The incident comes after racist phrases were spray-painted at five locations at the school in November.
In the same district, a Jewish student at Alameda High received a series of anti-Semitic text messages from a classmate. Meanwhile, recently at a nearby high school, students allegedly formed a swastika during a dance and offered a Nazi salute.
The Edison school hosted a meeting May 31 featuring Jacqueline Regev, an education director for the Anti-Defamation League, who talked about promoting tolerance.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO