On Wednesday morning, Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, awoke to find that the front of her co-op building had been defaced with red paint and accusations — attacks inscribed on a large banner — calling her “a white supremacist Zionist.” Trustees and the museum’s president also found their morning colored by similar angry disparagements in front of their own apartments...

To those who were targeted it must have also seemed profoundly confusing. Seven months ago, the museum was criticized not for a sympathetic view toward Israel but instead for antisemitic leanings. The turmoil in which so many universities and cultural institutions were now engulfed was playing out at the museum as whiplash.

At a fair held in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit called “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” printed materials had been sold bearing the controversial slogan “River to the sea, Palestine will be free.”