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Antisemitic flyers appeared last month around the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses in Manhattan, blaming the public housing complex’s redevelopment on “Zionists,” The Times of Israel reported.
One warned that “Talmudists are trained to cheat,” while another invoked a longstanding antisemitic conspiracy trope with the slogan “Locals vs. Rothschilds.”
The Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses are public housing developments operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The planned renovation will refurbish more than 2,000 affordable apartments and add thousands of new units.
Other flyers read “Stop Zionist occupation of Manhattan,” denounced “dirty zionist [sic] money” and compared the redevelopment to the “Nakba,” the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians use to describe establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Another referred to a “NYCHA Holocaust battle.” It was unclear who had posted the flyers.
The rhetoric in Chelsea fits a broader pattern of blaming “Zionists” and Israel for New York’s housing problems. Last year, Crown Heights Bites Back distributed flyers in Brooklyn claiming “Zionist white supremacists” would “kill us, exploit us, raise our rents and evict us.”
Nerdeen Kiswani, head of the anti-Zionist group Within Our Lifetime, made a similar claim in 2024. She said “Zionist landlords” were “exploiting Black communities here and building settlements with it in Palestine.”
Last month, Brooklyn Democratic district leader Carmella Charrington blamed people she called “Zionists” for a Brooklyn property dispute. She described her Jewish opponents as “predators” who “steal properties” and alleged that the same people were seizing property in Brooklyn and what she called the “West Bank.” Charrington had previously shared an Instagram post promoting Henry Ford’s notorious anti-Jewish pamphlet, The International Jew.
Professor Jeffrey Gurock, a scholar of New York Jewish history at Yeshiva University, placed the rhetoric in historical context. “There’s always been tension, but the explicit nature of the antisemitism is new, part of the period we’re living through right now,” he said.
“SOS NYCHA HOLOCAUST BATTLE”
Horrifically antisemitic, racist, and homophobic posters have cropped up around a proposed affordable housing redevelopment project in NYC.
Antisemitism is becoming normalized and weaponized about totally unrelated issues. pic.twitter.com/KJEOdDFkJF
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) August 17, 2026
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