By Melissa Langsam Braunstein
School’s out for summer in America,but news stories about Jew-hatred poisoning primary andsecondary education keep coming. You know it’s toxic, because families arebraving social pressures and going public.
At June’s end, KIRO 7 News reported that Seattle Public Schools and a high school principal are being sued foralleged “antisemitic harassment against a student . . . throughout the 2023-24school year, culminating in a hate crime on May 22, 2024.” Journalist Michael Ames noted this very principal won Washington State Secondary Principal of the Year in November 2023.
July opened with The Free Beacon reporting parents had filed acomplaint with Virginia’s attorney general. Their elite Washington, DC-areaprivate school allegedly ignored antisemitic bullying “'of their 11-year-olddaughter’” after October 7. When the parents again raised concerns with thehead of school in March, he allegedly said the tween “should 'toughen up’” andexpelled the family’s three children via email two days later.
The Jewish News Syndicate reported onJuly 2 that a complaint filed with the US Department of Education alleged“an ‘alarming pattern of antisemitic bullying, slurs, threats and retaliation’”in two Concord, Massachusetts, public schools. A middle school vice principalallegedly told parents concerned about antisemitism that their son “could beremoved from the district if he continued to report harassment.” When thatharassment intensified in high school, the “school’s diversity, equity,inclusion and belonging director” allegedly minimised it. By September2024, administrators suggested remote or independent learning, but the boy“transfer[red] to a private school” instead.
Lori Lowenthal Marcus is legal director of the Deborah Project, which combatsantisemitism in education. Marcus told me these stories reflect a familiar pattern, “as I encounter aggrieved Jewish families seeking legal support for overt hostility in public school districts across the US,” and such situations have “not yet begun to slow down.”
David Bernstein, founder and CEO ofthe North American Values Institute and author of Woke Antisemitism, agreed Jew-hatred in schools iswidespread. Bernstein said there are no statistics, but it’s common in large,heavily Democratic cities. He framed antisemitism as “a function of a largerproblem – the spread of radical [anti-Western] ideology in schools thatneatly divides the world into oppressed and oppressors,” with both Israel andJews judged “victimisers.” This ideology has entered schools through “postmodernacademic trends” that created Liberated Ethnic Studies, “the radicalisation ofteacher's colleges,” and ideologically captured teacher’s unions.
Jay Greene, Senior Research Fellow atthe Heritage Foundation, saw the problem’s source differently. Greeneexplained, “Liberated Ethnic Studies and the unions have definitely beencompounding the problem, but they may be more symptom than cause. Antisemitismis more salient on the Left and among immigrants, especially from Islamiccountries. The unions and Ethnic Studies are more likely to be embraced inareas where those groups are more powerful.”
Jewish parents fight discrimination inschools with the law. However, “litigation alone cannot address the rising tideof antisemitism,” Greene said. “In general, we should think of antisemitism assomething that benefits in the antisemite in some way …To fight antisemitism weneed to raise the costs and reduce the benefits for the antisemite. Litigationdoes this, but so do electoral defeats for Jew-hating candidates, militarydefeats for Jew-hating countries and terrorist organisations, and removal ofJew-haters from positions of authority and respect in leading institutions.”
Bernstein agreed litigation “is probably not enough. It will take parents running for school boards. It will take assertive legislative advocacy. It will take training of parents to recognise the various versions of this ideology and to push back. It will take policy changes at the federal, state, and local levels, and it will take systemic university reform.”
For her part, Marcus commented, “The only realistic way to bring about serious change would be for either a state or the national government [to] not only threaten, but actually withhold government funding.” Marcus observed such a policy “would be vilified as attacking Free Speech, and” should the government have to enforce the threat, it would “create enormous disruption in the education of so many entirely innocent school students. It's a terrible problem.”
Jew-hatred in American schoolsremains its own thorny problem, and it won’t simply disappear. To successfullycombat it, Jewish parents will need a broad coalition of Americans fighting topreserve all that’s good about Western civilisation, including America’sembrace of its Jews.
