Antisemitic graffiti found in midtown Sacramento ‘represented a direct threat,’ mayor says

A piece of antisemitic graffiti was found in midtown Sacramento last Sunday, and city leaders are now handling an investigation into the “direct threat.”

Jenny Berg was walking out of her class at Club Pilates on the corner of 21st and N streets last weekend when she saw “Hunt the Jews” scrawled in marker on a wall nearby.

“It was really shocking to walk out of Pilates class on a Sunday morning and see that message written on a building,” she said. “Seeing kind of this message about hunting the Jews is really scary for me, and it brings back a lot of imagery from the Holocaust.”

Berg said she immediately took a photo of the graffiti and sent it to her family, then reported it to leaders at the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region, an organization that aims to connect members of the Jewish community to educational and cultural resources.

The federation receives reports of antisemitic incidents and connects with local authorities to respond to them. According to Mariela Socolovsky, the Sacramento federation’s CEO, the organization informed the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said the midtown graffiti was taken down before law enforcement even arrived to the scene. Steinberg has been working with Sacramento police to investigate the graffiti, which he called “pure hate.”

“On top of that, the message represented a direct threat — not to any individual, but to the Jewish community: ‘Hunt them down,’” said Steinberg, who is Jewish.

Steinberg and Socolovsky said there have been multiple incidents recently involving swastikas and other hate messages that the Jewish Federation and the city have responded to.

“There’s a lot of tension, and there’s understandable fear in the community,” Steinberg said.

The mayor said that he felt there was “a lot of messaging” that he considered antisemitic when he addressed the war in Gaza with a cease-fire resolution in March.

“There is, of course, a difference between being critical of Israel and Israel’s policies, and antisemitism,” Steinberg said. “The line sometimes ... in many communities is blurred in ways that are not right.”

According to previous Bee reporting, dozens of members of the public spoke against the mayor’s resolution ahead of a city council vote to adopt it. Numerous pro-Palestinian protesters preferred an earlier version of the cease-fire proposal written by councilmembers Katie Valenzuela and Mai Vang .

The Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region also opposed the mayor’s resolution , which proposed a two-state solution, with its then-interim CEO Pam Herman saying it could “continue to create unsafe spaces for our Jewish community and do nothing to create the lasting peace we all desire.”

Berg said she was not shocked to see pro-Palestinian messaging posted around the building where she found the graffiti, but that “Hunt the Jews” was shocking due to the hateful and personal nature of the messaging.

“People that I know are afraid to share their identity with people because of these types of signs,” Berg said. “To me, that means like, ‘Find the Jews and kill them,’ which is really, really scary as a Jewish person.”

Steinberg said it’s important for the Jewish community to be vigilant against antisemitic rhetoric, which he said is perpetuated by a “very, very small minority” of the Sacramento community.

“We need to make sure that the voices of the people who abhor this kind of hate are louder than those voices of hate,” he said.