The American schools spreading antisemitism in the classroom

Lori Lowenthal Marcus is legal director of the Deborah Project, which combats antisemitism 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 of the North American Values Institute and author of Woke Antisemitism, agreed Jew-hatred in schools is widespread. Bernstein said there are no statistics, but it’s common in large, heavily Democratic cities. He framed antisemitism as “a function of a larger problem – the spread of radical [anti-Western] ideology in schools that neatly divides the world into oppressed and oppressors,” with both Israel and Jews judged “victimisers.” This ideology has entered schools through “postmodern academic trends” that created Liberated Ethnic Studies, “the radicalisation of teacher's colleges,” and ideologically captured teacher’s unions.

Jay Greene, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, saw the problem’s source differently. Greene explained, “Liberated Ethnic Studies and the unions have definitely been compounding the problem, but they may be more symptom than cause. Antisemitism is more salient on the Left and among immigrants, especially from Islamic countries. The unions and Ethnic Studies are more likely to be embraced in areas where those groups are more powerful.”

Jewish parents fight discrimination in schools with the law. However, “litigation alone cannot address the rising tide of antisemitism,” Greene said. “In general, we should think of antisemitism as something that benefits in the antisemite in some way …To fight antisemitism we need to raise the costs and reduce the benefits for the antisemite. Litigation does this, but so do electoral defeats for Jew-hating candidates, military defeats for Jew-hating countries and terrorist organisations, and removal of Jew-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 schools remains its own thorny problem, and it won’t simply disappear. To successfully combat it, Jewish parents will need a broad coalition of Americans fighting to preserve all that’s good about Western civilisation, including America’s embrace of its Jews.