Joan Terrell Paige, a trustee on the Jersey City Board of Education, did the world a favor with comments she posted on Facebook as reaction to a column published by InsiderNJ.

Her remarks went a long way to proving the extreme level of rage that had largely remained hidden by a community unwilling to admit a growing dislike of a population of newly arriving Hasidic Jews.

For a community that had previously prided itself as being accepting of all cultures, Paige’s rant was indeed eye-opening, showing that perhaps Jersey City was not nearly as tolerant as it professed.

Not only did these comments engage in gross stereotyping of the Jewish community in general, but they seem to support – in theory – the violence inflicted, as if the actions of two domestic terrorists could be justified simply because there are fundamental disagreements between African Americans and a particular sect of Jews relocating to Jersey City.

Perhaps the more frightening part was the huge outcry in support of Paige’s comments by members of the community that recently led the Board of Education to cancel a meeting at which Paige was expected to be censured for her comments.

Paige’s comments – which showed an extreme insensitivity to the victims of the Dec. 10 shooting on MLK Dr. (two of whom are Jewish) – are protected under the First Amendment’s free speech provisions. So, despite calls for her to resign from the board, other officials may be helpless to do anything about it, and perhaps rightly so.

Free speech is free speech – although some local officials took note of the role Paige played two years ago when some members of the community sought to have a local reporter fired over poetry he posted on his personal website, the author of which happened to be the same reporter who authored the InsiderNJ column to which she responded.

“We pointed out to her that she can’t have it both ways,” one local official said. “We told her she can’t hide behind the First Amendment now after trying to get the reporter fired for private speech.”

As with all great conflicts, the issue involves truths, half-truths and outright lies. Paige is not completely wrong in her protest – but her outrage has caused her to use rhetoric unbecoming a public official, and language that incites rather than solves these problems.

The curious part is that the InsiderNJ column largely agreed with the fundamental principles Paige raised but offered a coming together of community leaders seeking to resolve it.

Yet as a story in the Jewish Standard pointed out, “Paige… who is African American, did not like the unity and sympathy that she saw have a huge interfaith meeting,” which was the basis of the InsiderNJ story.

Aside from the scapegoating of Jews, Paige’s post did raise a legitimate conflict over the attempted acquisition of property by Hasidic Jews in the predominately African American community, using tactics that the city attempted to curtail through a “no knock” law.

A Hudson County realtor who was involved in these transactions early on said people on both sides got greedy.

“I brought the Hasidics to Jersey City after they were being priced out in Brooklyn,” he said. “I told them they could get some good deals. But I said they needed to go slowly, and quietly. I knew they could buy property there pretty cheap, maybe $80,000 to $100,000. But then they started grabbing up property and the price went up sometimes as much as $350,000.”

Paige raised legitimate concerns about tactics used in intimidating property owners into selling. But her primary mistake was to lump all Jewish people together, and to assume that two terrorists bent on killing Jews operated out of some sense of community.

She called Jewish people “brutes” and attempted to justify murder, which led to the potential conflict on the board of education, calls from some of the most powerful leaders in the state for her to resign.

The conflict over Paige’s comments apparently divided the school board as well as the community

Fear of violence contributed to a last-minute cancelation of the Dec. 19 meeting at which the board was scheduled to vote to censure Paige and ask for her resignation.

But the meeting would have likely reflected the sharp divide in the community and risked a confrontation between Paige supporters and those who found her remarks offensive.

There is no provision under local or state law to force Paige to resign – even though the mayor, board president, governor, chair of the state democratic party and others have asked for her to do so.

This as resulted in a promise by a prominent Jewish billionaire to fund a campaign against her when she runs for reelection in 2021.

The board may be split along racial lines, partly because African American board members may not want to risk the rage of the community who is backing Paige’s statements or her freedom of speech rights.

While this has been brewing for years, the murder of innocent people in the Jewish supermarket has exasperated the situation, pushing people to take sides.

Paige’s statements appear to defend the two killers, shaping them into people with a message rather than vicious murders most of the world sees.

Members of the Jewish Community – local as well as beyond – were planning to bring a contingent to the meeting to demand Paige’s resignation. But if social media is any indication, Paige has supporters as full of rage as she is, and they promised to attend the meeting as well.

Fearing that the confrontation as the board meeting might lead to additional violence, board president Sudhan Thomas attempted to cancel the meeting, but required the approval of the majority of the board.

But some on the board who disapproved of Paige’s statements wanted to hold the meeting in an attempt to force Paige out and only last-minute pleas from Thomas allowed the meeting to be postponed.

The next scheduled meeting of the board will be the Jan. 6 reorganization meeting at which newly elected trustees will be sworn in.

Local officials are hoping the two-week respite and the holidays will allow cooler heads to prevail.