Jersey City’s mayor called on Tuesday for a school board member to resign over a Facebook post in which she called Jews who had moved to the city “brutes” and suggested a deeper “message” to the deadly attack at a kosher market there last week.
The mayor, Steven Fulop, was reacting to remarks posted online over the weekend by the board member, Joan Terrell-Paige, who is black. In her post, she questioned the outpouring of fellowship and support for Jersey City’s Jewish residents in the wake of the Dec. 10 attack.
“Where was all this faith and hope when Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the jewish community,” Terrell-Paige wrote in the post, which has since been deleted. Terrell-Paige was elected to the school board in November 2018.
Such an attitude, Fulop wrote on Twitter, was unacceptable.
“My opinion is she should resign,” he wrote. “That type of language has no place in our schools and no place amongst elected officials.”
The mayor also characterized Terrell-Paige’s remarks as well outside the mainstream.
“Her comments don’t represent Jersey City or the sentiment in the community at all,” he wrote in a separate post. He did not respond to requests for further comment.
The president of the school board, Sudhan Thomas, said that Terrell-Paige’s statements did not reflect the Board of Education’s “outlook or value system.”
“There is no room for any kind of hate or bigotry in Jersey City,” he said in a statement.
Terrell-Paige ended her post by saying that she was “speaking as a private citizen not as an elected member of the Jersey City Board of Education” and that “these beliefs are mine and mine alone.”
Terrell-Paige could not immediately be reached for comment. Asked by Politico whether she regretted her Facebook post, she said, “No, I don’t.”
Late Tuesday, Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey also called on Terrell-Page to resign. “We will not let anti-Semitism and hate go unchallenged in our communities,’’ he wrote on Twitter. “In light of Ms. Terrell-Paige’s comments, I urge her to immediately resign from the Jersey City Board of Education.
The uproar over Terrell-Paige’s remarks came a week after Jersey City was plunged into a panic after two people fatally shot a police officer before mounting the deadly assault on the kosher market. It also coincided with the funeral for the slain officer, Detective Joseph Seals, a grim occasion for a city still reeling from one of the most violent days in its recent history.