There are two new billboards along Highway 65 near Branson aimed at getting people to talk about antisemitism. The message on the billboards is "An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us."
They are two of currently around 40 billboards across the nation aimed at preventing hatred towards Jews and were put up by the group JewBelong. Over the summer, there will be a lot more going up. There are around 650 in any given year.
The organization's co-founder Archie Gottesman said JewBelong began as a resource for Jewish people. Its website offers things like how to hold a Passover Seder and fun ideas for Hanukkah all in simple language and in a non-judgmental way. They used billboards to grow users to their website with messages like "So you eat bacon. God has other things to worry about." And it worked. They ended up with 700,000 unique users each year.
But when antisemitism began increasing in 2021, Gottesman said they decided they had to address it.
"This is before October 7th. And it was like, whoa, like here we are talking, you know, about Hanukkah, and someone's like, wishing that Hitler finished the job and we were all dead...it got to a point where it's like, well, wait a second, how can I, how can JewBelong be like sort of naively talking about Jewish holidays and how to, you know, maybe get more heart into them and enjoy them more when people feel like there's a target on their back and it's like frightening to be a proud Jewish person in America? So we said, okay, well, we can't, we can't just ignore this. This is just, you know, so that's when we started to do the campaign that you're seeing now."
The ADL reported that antisemitic incidents have increased 893% over the past 10 years. In 2025, an independent research study demonstrated that JewBelong's billboard campaigns increase awareness, shift perceptions, and spark real-world conversations among non-Jewish audiences, according to the organization.
Gottesman said they chose Branson because a lot of people travel through there in the summer, so the billboards will be seen by lots of people.
We thought Branson, we'd never been to Branson before," she said, "And, you know, there's just, it's like a huge, you know, it's an important place when you're sort of telling the American story of like where, people are visiting."
Gottesman hopes the billboards spark conversation as they have in other places with messages like "We're just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jew hate isn't an overreaction" and "Can a billboard end antisemitism? No. But you're not a billboard."
She remembers hearing from a mom who said she and her daughter had been driving and spotted one of JewBelong's billboards against antisemitism.
The mom told Gottesman the 10-year-old daughter started asking her questions about the message on the billboard, and they ended up having a nice conversation. She thanked JewBelong for allowing that to happen.
It's a multi-faith effort. Gottesman said they have Christian allies, the Christian Allies Collective, who support the work that they do. In fact, the billboards have both a JewBelong logo and a Christian Allies logo. Christian Allies, according to JewBelong, is a "growing network of churches and Christian leaders standing up against antisemitism alongside the Jewish community."
The billboards will remain up along Highway 65 near Branson through next April. One is located nine miles north of Branson Hills Parkway, and the other is a half mile north of Highway 176.
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