For Immediate Release

Jan. 7, 2019

In response to a Jersey City School Board Member’s anti-Semitic comments, last week New Tolerance Campaign began mobilizing concerned citizens to send messages to Jersey City’s Mayor and Board of Education calling on Board Member Joan Terrell Paige to resign. Terrell-Paige posted a now-deleted diatribe against the Jewish community after the December 10th shooting that took place at a local kosher market, calling some Jews “brutes” and sympathizing with the shooters. She has not apologized and refuses to resign.

So far, over 550 principled people (and rapidly counting!) have joined the NTC effort to force Terrell-Paige’s resignation. Already, we have seen progress. Following weeks of silence and inaction, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop responded to an NTC activist, affirming that “We will continue to put pressure and look for avenues as I feel it is unacceptable what [Terrell-Paige] said.” Later, he published a tweet on Jan 3rd reiterating that he viewed her words as anti-Semitic. 

We applaud Mayor Fulop for continuing to take a stand and have removed him from our list of people that we ask our supporters to contact. Nevertheless, NTC will not let this issue fall off the radar!

After this small early victory for the campaign, NTC has decided to enlist our members’ help in asking U.S. Senator Cory Booker to show principled leadership and support her resignation.

This past Thursday, a candlelight vigil was held in Terrell Paige’s honor. Since then, supporters have swarmed a Board of Education meeting to back her. This is an astonishing display of support for blatant anti-Semitism from a community leader. What a terrible example for the school system that Terrell Paige is supposed to lead!

With that in mind, NTC is calling on U.S. Senator Cory Booker to weigh in. As both a national figure and a representative of the state of New Jersey, we must provide the leadership needed to clarify that bigotry is fundamentally unacceptable and that our community leaders must be held to the highest standards of tolerance.

The campaign can be found here.

NTC is encouraged by the support we have received so far and will continue to put pressure on Terrell-Paige to resign.

###