On Tuesday, the advertisement at one Brooklyn subway stop included another message: an anti-Semitic slur and a swastika scrawled over her face.
The New York Police Department’s hate crimes unit and officials at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority were investigating the incident, which came to wider attention after it was reported by a commuter on Twitter, officials said.
The vandalism, which was swiftly condemned by city officials, came amid a rise in hate crimes in New York City, driven in large part by anti-Semitic attacks and incidents. In 2018, hate crimes in New York City rose by 5 percent; anti-Semitic crimes alone rose 22 percent last year compared with the year before.
The poster, which was hanging at the Nassau Avenue stop on the G line in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, was defaced with the phrase “Die, Jew” and another profane slur written in capital letters in what appeared to be black marker. Underneath the expletive, which was punctuated with an exclamation point, was a swastika drawn over Ginsburg’s lips.
The graffiti was removed from the poster Tuesday afternoon, the transit authority said.
“We have zero tolerance for hate and violence, and this is a horrendous example that has no place anywhere,” an agency spokesman, Shams Tarek, said in a statement.
Officials said they would share any available surveillance video with the police to assist them with their investigation.
The Police Department confirmed Wednesday that its hate crimes unit was investigating the incident.
The subway poster was advertising the book “The Unstoppable Ruth Bader Ginsburg: American Icon,” a photo history released in 2018 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Ginsburg’s appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993.
When she was confirmed, Ginsburg, a Brooklyn native, became the second woman and first Jewish woman to serve on the Supreme Court. During her confirmation hearings, she spoke about facing anti-Semitism in her past.
At one point during the hearing, she recounted a childhood experience of seeing a sign in front of a restaurant that read, “No dogs or Jews allowed.”
“One couldn’t help but be sensitive to discrimination, living as a Jew in America at the time of World War II,” she said.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2015, she also spoke about facing anti-Jewish sentiment when she was trying to find a job after she graduated from Columbia Law School in 1959.
“I had three strikes against me,” she said. “First, I was Jewish, and the Wall Street firms were just beginning to accept Jews. Then I was a woman. But the killer was my daughter Jane, who was 4 by then.”
In a tweet Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that Ginsburg represented “the very best” of New York City and vowed that city officials would find and punish whoever defaced her portrait.
The vandalism was the latest in a string of high-profile, anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City in the past month. At the end of February, a 12-year-old boy was arrested and charged in connection with swastikas and other Nazi symbols on a public school playground in Queens.
Weeks earlier, two men threw an object into the front window of a synagogue in Brooklyn about 2 a.m. No one was injured, but the attack, which broke the window, was being investigated as a possible hate crime.
The Jewish community in Brooklyn has been particularly on edge after a set of videos that showed Orthodox Jewish men being beaten, chased and choked in Crown Heights.
The graffiti found this week also came a week after a chalk drawing depicting a noose showed up on a wall at another Brooklyn subway station. Transportation authority officials worked quickly to clean it up and denounced the drawing as hateful imagery.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.