When Sarah W. let her daughters walk around the block last weekend, it was hardly an odd experience in their very walkable St. Paul neighborhood. Nor was stopping to see what books could be picked up at the Little Free Library on the 1000 block of Ashland Avenue.
What Sarah’s 12-year-old brought home, however, was completely unexpected: a flyer reading “Jacob Frey is a rat-faced Kike”; the second line read: “Liberate Minnesota from his sickening Jew face.” The note was signed by a group called the “Nick Shirley Fan Club,” and the “disclaimer” at the bottom says “Flyer spread randomly and without malicious intent by concerned citizens united for a Jew free Minnesota.”
An antisemitic flyer targeting Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (left) and a racist flyer were left at homes and neighborhood spots throughout the Twin Cities.
“My daughter said it was in a plastic bag, and she opened it and saw the flyer,” Sarah said. “My 7-year-old said that her older sister started to cry right away, and asked her what was going on. [The older one] said that she had to wait to ask me all the questions she had.”
Sarah answered her kids’ questions, which ranged from very basic for the younger child to the more existential for the older one.
“She asked, ‘Why would anyone say something like that?’” Sarah said. “I’m not sure I can answer that question, but we can talk about it.”
Sarah reached out to her friend Iola Kostrzewski, who works for the ADL, and also to the Jewish Community Relations Council, which tracks antisemitism in Minnesota. Officials from the JCRC said it’s important for the recipients of these or other bias incidents to report them right away so they can be tracked and investigated. It is also recommended that if citizens find the baggies, they not handle the paper inside to not contaminate it.
These flyers are not new to the area; one that showed up in Bloomington at the end of January had read “Are you tired of [expletive deleted]? We can help.” The same disclaimer was on that one, and it was signed as being from the same group. Nick Shirley is the YouTube content creator whose videos went viral after alleging fraud at Somali child care centers in Minneapolis.
There have also been reports online of both flyers being dropped in South Minneapolis recently.
The flyers have been left of plastic bags with rice to help weigh them down. It’s a tactic that has been seen in Minnesota, with the first reports of it happening in 2022. At that time, separate incidents saw flyers distributed in St. Paul, Hopkins, St. Louis Park and Edina from the Goyim Defense League, a hate group that started in Petaluma, Calif., and is known for spreading antisemitic materials across different states. It’s not known if the latest flyers are associated with that group.
One of the QR codes goes to a “satirical” website called the Holocaust Task Force, which is what the letters HTF in the bottom corner of the flyer stand for.
Having difficult conversations
Sarah said that while her daughter was dry-eyed by the time she got home, she still had big questions about what she found.
“I feel like they’ve been so inundated just over the last couple of years,” said Sarah, whose family regularly sees the anti-Israel protests at Summit and Snelling Avenues. “I want to be sensitive to the fact that they’re already pretty touched by everything that has happened and that they’ve been dealing with and seeing.
“She’s in public school in Saint Paul, and so she’s had to field a lot of challenging things with what she hears about, how Jews and Israel are depicted or spoken about. [But] I didn’t want to like, really fixate on this with her either.”
Sarah said that part of her conversation with her oldest was turn from the negative to a positive.
“It’s like this is an ongoing thing, but now we’re seeing it in front of us in our neighborhood, and it’s very upsetting,” she said. “Our response to that is to embrace our Jewish community and our Jewish identities, and realize that the pivot here is to the joy and love we feel for our Judaism.”
Well, Frey is objectively hot; so, that’s just stupid.