The rise in antisemitic incidents since October 7 has prompted the familiar demand that the government must “do something”. One proposal now circulating is mandatory antisemitism education in schools. Will that work?
The honest answer is: not by itself. Once antisemitic attitudes take hold, they can be deeply resistant to correction. If children grow up with little or no understanding of Judaism as a living civilisation of Am Yisrael, then a lesson or two on antisemitism is unlikely to shift much.
Our focus should instead be on prevention. That means taking religious education (RE) seriously and ensuring that Judaism is taught well, accurately and by people who actually know it from the inside. For most children in this country, RE is the single most important influence on how they come to understand Jews and Judaism.
Many other faith communities devote real resources to RE. Jews should be no exception. Some valuable work has been done, including by the Board of Deputies, but too much of what schools use is still produced by non-Jews, shaped by non-Jewish priorities, and detached from what Jewish children and Jewish communities need others to understand. Meanwhile, the Jews who go into non-Jewish schools to teach Judaism often receive little or no financial support, despite the specialist knowledge required for that work.
There is a broader problem too. Secondary pupils may learn very little about Judaism itself, while lessons on Christianity and Islam can sometimes include narratives that are historically damaging to Jews, yet are taught without sufficient explanation of their impact. Once a distorted picture of Jews and Judaism has taken root, what good is a corrective lesson on antisemitism on its own?
Holocaust education remains essential, but it cannot do the whole job. If children learn about the Holocaust without learning properly about Judaism, they may come to see Judaism as a dead religion, or antisemitism as just the Nazi horrors.
Contemporary expressions of antisemitism such as double standards applied to Jews, particularly with regard to the State of Israel, appear irrelevant. Worse, some may absorb the notion that centuries of hatred against Jews must somehow be justified. That is an easy misconception to develop if you have never positively engaged with Jews or with Judaism.
Rather than instituting separate antisemitism education, which may further exceptionalise Jews, we need a total rethink of how so‑called “anti-racism education” is conducted in schools. It is too often framed in terms of privilege and power, through the lens of critical race theory (a US import). This framework leaves little space for hatred such as antisemitism, which is itself fuelled by such narratives, and may in fact deepen the problem. Activists are even now lobbying to embed this approach in a new national curriculum for RE.
Under a critical race theory framing, there are two kinds of people: oppressors and oppressed, privileged and underprivileged. For antisemitism to matter, Jews must show that we belong to the oppressed class, which means that we cannot, like the IDF, fight back when we are attacked.
The very actions we take to be resilient against antisemitism become evidence of our supposed privilege and of the claim that we cannot be victims. It is easy to forget how quickly one can lose such “privilege”. Jews are not the only group to have experienced this.
Correctly taught, rather than standing alone and exceptionalising Jews, antisemitism should be an integral topic within politically neutral anti‑bigotry education that teaches that all bigotry is wrong; that any person (white, black, Jewish, Muslim…) is capable of being bigoted and also of facing bigotry; and that Jews, like any other group, can face bigotry and are entitled to the same respect and understanding as everyone else. Such equality, after all, is all we are asking for.
Dr Shira Solomons is the co-ordinator of the Association of Jewish Religious Education Professionals (AJREP.UK)
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