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Hundreds Gather in Brooklyn’s Adam Yauch Park to Protest Hate

‘I reject Donald Trump’s vision for America,’ said Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys. ‘New York City, I’m asking you to do the same.’

by
Jonathan Zalman
November 21, 2016
Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horovitz of the Beastie Boys speaks as activists protest racism and hate after swastikas were found in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn, New York, November 20, 2016. Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horovitz of the Beastie Boys speaks as activists protest racism and hate after swastikas were found in Adam Yauch Park in Brooklyn, New York, November 20, 2016. Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

Last Friday, anti-Semitic graffiti was discovered at Adam Yauch park—a children’s playground—in Brooklyn Heights. That swastikas and Trump tags were drawn on a park named after the founding member of a Jewish rap group was no coincidence. The vandalism was covered up with hearts.

The small park was named after the late Beastie Boys rapper, or MCA, who was “a model of how to live as a humble yet active and entirely responsible citizen of the world,” wrote David Samuels after he died in May 2012. “Adam Yauch was a rare mensch in a world populated by natural-born assholes and egomaniacs and by people who are high or scared or both.”

Over the weekend, hundreds of people gathered in protest, including Ben Stiller. Yauch’s bandmate Ad Rock took the mic. “We have elected a president who has given the message that it’s OK to write ‘White Power’ in high school hallways, that it’s OK to attack women and girls, and that Latinos and Muslims and Jews are bad people, and that you can electroshock ‘the gay’ out of somebody. Come on! This is homegrown terrorism… I reject Donald Trump’s vision for America. New York City, I’m asking you to do the same.”

The incident is currently being investigated by the NYPD.

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.