The antisemitism virus starts in K-12

The anti-Israel protests roiling American college campuses have put the spotlight on efforts to defund them, but higher education is merely the capstone of the issue. Antisemitism is a virus that has spread beyond the universities and into the K-12 education system.

It’s often stated that students must be taught how to think. But this is not what happens in K-12 education because children must first be taught what to think. Before they can learn to judge the morality of a situation on their own, children must be given a framework for what is right and what is not. They must be taught that two plus two always equals four; they must learn to define the color blue before they can identify that the sky is blue and not green, that boys and girls are distinct and unchangeable, and that discriminating against people purely because of their skin color or religion is wrong. Elementary school is not the place to present students with multiple perspectives that they must parse out on their own.

Yet teachers are becoming increasingly vague when it comes to presenting objective truth, and the rise of antisemitism at the K-12 level is one result of that. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) documented a 135% increase in antisemitic incidents at K-12 schools in 2023. A small handful of these incidents were put in the spotlight at a recent hearing in front of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.  

Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) has curriculum available that teaches “for some Palestinians, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a call for freedom and peace.” Enikia Ford Morthel, testified that so long as it’s presented as “perspective,” this curriculum is acceptable. But can every 8-year-old be trusted to have the moral clarity to know that calls for genocide are never appropriate, regardless of “perspective?”

The President of the Montgomery County School Board in Maryland also appeared before the committee after a middle school teacher in her county made several Facebook posts claiming that the October 7 attack had been a hoax. Rather than being immediately fired, the teacher was placed on leave. Without swift and unequivocal punishment, the public school administrators sent the message to students that there would be no consequences for enabling hatred against Jews.

These are just a small sampling of the abuse that Jewish students regularly face. A lawsuit filed by the ADL earlier this year cites dozens of instances of students shouting “f--- the Jews,” graffiti stating “Kill Jews,” teachers indoctrinating students with anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Israel “curriculum.” Most of these incidents pre-date the October 7 attack in Israel, evidence that antisemitism in K-12 education has been on the rise for some time.

It’s important that Congress continues exposing the problem through these public hearings, but the problem is that hearings cannot force schools to change.

The solution, then, must be found elsewhere. Since colleges are partly subsidized by student tuition, it’s feasible that legislators could restrict their funding without collapsing the entire higher education system. But the publicly funded K-12 institutions are another matter.

At the top of the list of priorities, both Congress and state governments should aggressively pursue school choice legislation. If parents have more educational options available to them, they will not be forced to choose the public school that teaches students to hate Jews. If public schools are forced to compete with other options, they’ll be less likely to engage in the activities that drive families away.

But for the millions of students who have no other options, antisemitism must be directly addressed in public schools. The bipartisan Countering Antisemitism Act is one approach. If passed, it would commission a study on Holocaust education efforts in the schools and determine where improvement is needed.

In the past seven months, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has opened over 100 Title VI investigations, which includes the incidents highlighted in the aforementioned House hearing. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, any educational institution or program that receives federal funding cannot discriminate based on national origin. Because Congress appropriates the amount of funds that OCR receives to conduct these investigations, they should ensure that the DOE investigates each claim.

As education is mostly a state and not federal purview, what is taught in the classroom is largely decided at the state level. Thirty-nine states currently mandate that the Holocaust be part of K-12 curriculum. Some states, such as Virginia and North Carolina, distribute a teacher’s manual on the Holocaust and genocide generally that provides resources from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that teachers can use in their classrooms. That way, states know that teachers are using reliable materials when discussing the topic with their students. States without such a provision should follow their lead.

There are also a plethora of private Jewish organizations willing to work with their local schools, to help educate teachers and students to combat antisemitism. For example, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington has partnered with a number of schools in Montgomery County to conduct antisemitism training. Agudath Sholom Congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia, created lists of books on antisemitism for every grade level to ensure the local schools had reading material appropriate for every age. Teachers and Jewish communities should look for more ways to collaborate.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of solutions. Antisemitism is widespread in the American public education system; uprooting it will take hard work from multiple factions. But it must be done. In a country founded on the idea that every man is inherently equal, this sort of hatred and discrimination is not just anti-Jewish, but anti-American.