A small group of neo-Nazis crashed the debut of a Broadway show, about a Jewish lynching victim, to scream at attendees that they supported pedophiles and hand out racist flyers.
Outside of New York’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Tuesday night, the neo-Nazis attempted to intimidate attendees of a play about Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 after he was wrongfully convicted of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl in Georgia. The group handed out pamphlets that declared Frank a pedophile and screamed slurs at people entering the theater.
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Video taken from the evening show protestors outside of the theater holding signs, and a neo-Nazi walking along the line trying to get the attendees to take a pamphlet. The man is wearing a skull mask which has become an international symbol of neo-Nazism. Another man wearing a suit is likewise handing out pamphlets.
“You’re paying $300 to go fucking worship a pedophile,” the man in the skull mask says in the video.
The sold-out play went on as scheduled despite the neo-Nazi’s actions.
Parade first premiered on Broadway in 1998 and won several Tony awards during its initial run. Tuesday night was the first night of its revival. Frank’s lynching was a flashpoint in the fight against American antisemitism and led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization, and the resurgence of the KKK. Frank, who was posthumously pardoned in 1986, has long been a subject of derision by American neo-Nazi groups.
According to Forward who spoke to a person in the line, two people were handing out the pamphlets—when a man in the line told the two to leave the Nazi said “shut up k***.” They also said the man in the skull mask took someone’s phone who was attempting to film and threw it into the street.
A small online neo-Nazi group claimed responsibility for the stunt on the messaging app Telegram. Pamphlets handed out, images of which were tweeted about by some play attendees, featured the logo of said group. The Nazi group, which VICE News won’t name as not to drive attention to them, is associated with a man that has been active in the far-right for years and is known for attention-seeking stunts
The Nazis also held up a banner that contained the URL for a much larger neo-Nazi group and again made claims that Frank was a pedophile. The pamphlets also attempted to drive people to their online spaces.
“This action by several neo-Nazis was a stunt designed to get maximum exposure. An affiliated communications channel has been gloating over the event and mocking individuals who made social media posts condemning them,” Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst for the Counter Extremism Project, told VICE. “At least one individual who was present has protested drag events and has a long history of in real life trolling in order to spread his antisemitic message and get media attention.”
In recent months neo-Nazi groups have become more and more prominent at events in which they protest things they deem “pedophilic” or “degenerate.” This has included protesting outside of gay bars and locations holding drag events.
Ben Platt, one of the stars of Parade, posted a video on Instagram after the show in which he said he became aware of the protest after checking social media after the show. He said that while the scene “was definitely very ugly and scary” it was “a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story.”
“(It) just made me feel extra, extra grateful to be the one who gets to tell this particular story and to carry on this legacy of Leo,” said Platt.
One of the theater-goers outlined their experience at the play, which they described as “ chaotic, heartbreaking, beautiful, cathartic, and a little scary,” on Facebook.
“Our audience stared the hate that the musical condemns square in the eye before curtain,” wrote Jamie Lee. “We saw the Nazis – because that’s what they are, plain and simple – making fools of themselves spewing falsities and displaying/attempting to distribute garish propaganda… misspelling Leo Frank’s name among other evidence of poor research and stupidity.”
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