One of our responsibilities in the post-Oct. 7 world is to pay attention to the ways anti-Semitism has complicated everyday activities and obligations. Take, for example, the increased anti-Semitism in America’s K-12 schools. It doesn’t usually show up in national headlines, so if you don’t have a kid in those schools, or if you’re lucky enough to send your children to a school where that isn’t a problem, it can be easy to forget that young Jews are being harassed with some regularity.

A piece by Alina Adams in JTA does a great service in drawing attention to the toll this takes on parents, not only out of worry for their own kids but the added burden of school-shopping—which, in New York City, is infamously stressful already.

Readers may know Adams as a novelist, but she also happens to have been, for the past twenty years, a New York City schools consultant who guides parents through the application process. As Adams explains, “there are tests, grade tiers and ranked-choice strategies to contend with—and it’s not uncommon for kids to be rejected from a public school, sometimes even their zoned, local public school.” Her work involves “factoring in a student’s academic strengths and weaknesses” as well as “assessing the school’s sports and arts offerings, say, or their support for students with disabilities” and other factors.

Now, she writes, parents have a new category of concern: “just how safe a school’s climate is for Jewish students.”

Some choice quotes in the piece:

“I’ve had students call me a ‘dirty Jew.’ I’ve had students draw swastikas on my desk and bulletin boards,” global history teacher Daneille Kaminsky told CBS. “I’ve had students tell me they wanted to kill my family.”

From the mother of a Manhattan public school student: “On Monday, Oct. 9, my child came to school and found their teacher chanting, ‘Palestine all the way! Israel is going to get what they deserve!’ When my child complained to the administration, they were accused of harassing the teacher.”

The mother of a student at a “coveted” public high school, also in Manhattan: “In math, the better performing kids were sitting at one table, and classmates were calling it ‘Jew table,’ She was sending me pictures from the bathrooms of stickers that said ‘resistance by all means.’ The school was covered in swastikas and graffiti. When I emailed the principal, the response was, ‘Your daughter is wrong about the swastikas and graffiti, and we already called the police and we are wiping everything every day.’ She finished 9th grade but didn’t want to return to school this year.”

Adams adds a caveat: As a schools consultant, she’s not going to be hearing much from happy parents. Her clients are much more likely to be unhappy parents seeking to transfer their children to another school. But it is undeniable that the reasons for parents seeking her out have shifted to include the outbreak of Jew-hatred.

What to make of all this?

First, this sort of behavior is not just, or even mostly, about other students. It’s about the administration at each school and the citywide bodies overseeing education. The reason anti-Semitism has reached crisis levels in some school systems is because of the failures of adults, not students. What goes on in these institutions is what’s permitted to go on in these institutions.

Second, there’s a temptation to see the above quotes as evidence of so much schoolyard bullying or kids-will-be-kids teasing. But that again lets the grownups off the hook. How many New York grade-schoolers are watching Al Jazeera or the BBC or Sky News reporting on the conflict every morning before shuttling off to the bus? The contextualizing of much of this Jew-baiting means it’s coming from somewhere.

Sometimes, that’s the faculty—the teacher who chanted “Israel is going to get what they deserve!” at young students is not the only one behaving like a raving lunatic and passing that behavior on to their students. Sometimes, it’s the curriculum—that is, it’s not the personal beliefs of the teacher but the actual textbook or common lesson plan. That’s a structural problem, and it is only going to get worse.

Sometimes, perhaps much of the time, it’s coming from other parents. Socially, this is taxing both for the Jewish kids and their parents.

Adams includes in her piece some tips for parents looking to scout out schools ahead of time. And they are practical suggestions. But the overall picture is a reminder that American Jews’ daily lives have been made more stressful and more complicated in ways that are quickly becoming part of a new normal.