School board member under fire for Facebook rant about Jewish community in Jersey City

Political leaders throughout New Jersey are calling on a Jersey City school board member to resign after she posted a long rant about the Jewish community and its interaction with the black community.

News 12 Staff

Dec 19, 2019, 2:25 AM

Updated 1,834 days ago

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Political leaders throughout New Jersey are calling on a Jersey City school board member to resign after she posted a long rant about the Jewish community and its interaction with the black community in Jersey City.
Jersey City School Board President Sudhan Thomas says that fellow board member Joan Terrell Paige should resign.
"Offer an apology and to tender to her resignation,” says Thomas.
Terrell Page posted comments on Facebook that ignited a firestorm - considered anti-Semitic by many in the days following an attack on a kosher grocery store in Jersey City's Greenville neighborhood. It is a neighborhood that is becoming home to a growing number of Orthodox Jews.
"Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated and harassed by ‘I want to buy your house’ brutes of the Jewish community." Terrell Paige wrote in a now-deleted post.
“As Jersey City, we are still in mourning. We lost a lot of lives last week,” Thomas says. “This was a completely uncalled-for situation."
Gov. Phil Murphy and Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop are also calling on the school board member to resign.
"The same standards should apply if this was comments about the African American community, the gay community, the Muslim community or in this case the Jewish community,” says Fulop. “There's no place for that in elected office."
Some say that Terrell Paige's comments may be reflective of underlying tensions between African Americans and Orthodox Jewish residents in Jersey City.
“No ethnicity or religion has birth rite to any specific area. That doesn't exist, right?” says Fulop. “And so, if you have Orthodox Jewish people coming in there or Latinos coming in there, it doesn't mean that you should create division on this."
A school board meeting is scheduled Thursday at 6 p.m. at Dickinson High School. School officials say that they are expecting a large turnout.
News 12 New Jersey did briefly speak with Terrell Paige about the situation. She expressed concerns about how her post was interpreted and said she will comment more on the matter later.