Over 200 activists with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), including artists Nan Goldin and Molly Crabapple and filmmaker Laura Poitras, were arrested for participating in a sit-in for Palestine outside the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, October 14. The action criticized the rising stock prices of weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, the biggest arms maker in the United States, amid Israel’s ongoing attacks against Gaza and Lebanon.
The action drew around 500 protesters, including descendants of Holocaust survivors, JVP said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic. Starting when the stock exchange’s trading floors opened at 9:30am, activists wearing “Not In Our Name” t-shirts fitted the red garments over Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” (1989) and “Fearless Girl” (2017) bronze sculptures and unfurled banners that read “Gaza Bombed, Wall Street Booms,” “Stop Arming Israel,” and “Fund FEMA Not Genocide.”
The Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of women and nonbinary singers, performed a call-and-response song. “Oh Palestine, you are not alone,” they sang. “We will be with you, until you’re safe at home.”
At least six activists also chained their bodies to the building’s main entrance gates. Photos and video from the action show police officers forcibly removing them from the site by carrying and dragging them away.
“I’m proud to be arrested with them if it helps amplify our message,” Goldin told Hyperallergic.
The New York Police Department told Hyperallergic that the group dispersed around 12:30pm with “multiple people taken into custody.”
The protest coincided with the US observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day yesterday as well as this weekend’s observance of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It also came at a time when viral video footage from an Israeli airstrike that hit and ignited a Gaza hospital complex yesterday, killing at least four people and injuring dozens more, appeared to show one man identified as 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou with an IV drip being burned alive, causing uproar on social media.
“Every day we see a new, unspeakable Israeli war crime on our smartphones,” Crabapple, a New York-based artist who participated in the action, told Hyperallergic. “Israeli bombs flatten apartment buildings in Beirut and burn Palestinian patients alive in Gaza.”
“With their genocidal campaign, Israel is destroying the people and places I love, with the enthusiastic help of the US government,” Crabapple continued. “To protest is the very least I can do.”
Calling out the lack of government aid to Southern communities hit by the recent hurricanes Helene and Milton, the action also referenced the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP’s 1987 protest at the stock exchange, which pressured pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices for AIDS medication.
“ACT UP’s first action took place on Wall Street to protest the lack of funding for AIDS care and medications. Today, a growing anti-war movement returns to this street to demand healthcare not warfare,” said artist and ACT UP activist Gregg Bordowitz, who participated in a lock-on action at the stock exchange two years later, disrupting the opening bell for the first time in history.
“For those of us still alive today the continuity of struggle and commitment remains clear,” Bordowitz said.
Candice Breitz, a Berlin-based artist who was not in attendance but shared photos online in solidarity, told Hyperallergic that protests like this weekend’s are “heartening.”
“As progressive Jews (alongside Palestinian, Muslim and/or Arab allies who are likeminded), we are smaller in numbers and immediately stigmatized when we stand behind protests that are critical of the ongoing carnage of Palestinian civilians, ongoing Israeli policies in relation to Palestine and Israeli state violations of humanitarian law,” Breitz said.
Valentina Di Liscia contributed reporting.
