The post-Oct. 7 anti-Semitism crisis has hit institutionally assimilated American Jews especially hard. By “institutionally assimilated,” I mean that the physical spaces where they spend their time are more likely to be secular in nature: public schools, nondenominational youth groups, etc. And that has left these young Jews isolated.
On this score, the situation in K-12 public schools is especially alarming. Over a period of about two months after the Hamas slaughter, for example, dozens of Jewish families in Oakland applied for permission to transfer their kids to a different public school. The Oakland teachers union had spent those two months justifying the attacks against Israel and rallying the schools to the cause of Palestinian “liberation.” Some Oakland schools held unauthorized anti-Israel teach-ins.
When a reporter from J. Weekly asked the district for comment, a spokesman responded with a statement of delusional denial that has been typical of school officials’ dismissiveness toward the problem nationwide: “OUSD is a sanctuary district, inside Oakland, a sanctuary city, inside California, a sanctuary state, which means we support all students, families and staff, regardless of religion, heritage, ethnicity, where they came from, or how they got here.”
It can’t be true because we’re good liberals, in other words. Similar situations developed in Ann Arbor and other progressive cities, enabled by this narcissistic sense of enlightenment.
The problem quickly metastasized. The Free Press’s Frannie Block had enough examples to fill an essay a mere two months after the attacks. There was the California high-school curriculum calling Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and another teaching about “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.” Similar lessons permeated secondary curricula in all 50 states, with the help of activist educators and Qatari cash.
Big-city public-school teachers helped organize mass anti-Zionist walkouts within weeks of the Hamas attacks. The result: Jewish teachers fearing for their safety and Jewish students around the country relentlessly hounded by their peers for the crime of being Jewish. Two-dozen Jewish parents of public-school kids told Block they feared for their children’s safety at school immediately after the attacks.
It has been more than a year since then, and the tide shows no sign of subsiding. To the contrary—the anti-Semitic lesson plans have only gotten worse, as evidenced by the repeated scandals of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which has approved the use of terrorist propaganda in the classroom and backed the use of workbooks that require grade-school kids to pledge allegiance to Palestinian “liberation.” Popular culture, led by singers and movie stars these kids might look up to, normalizes the erasure of Jews as well as violence against them, whether it’s anti-Zionist anthems by Macklemore, social-media rants by Kanye West or Intifada-celebrating pins worn by Billie Eilish.
This affects every Jew in America. But it’s worth considering the specific ways it affects a subset of young American Jews who were arguably least-prepared for it. Consider the experience of a Jewish kid who isn’t taunted or bullied by anti-Semitic classmates: He and his peer group are still subjected to lesson plans permeated with conspiratorial Jew-hate. Should he respond? If so, how? His friends are unlikely to have their intellectual guard up, so they are spending their formative years imbibing bigoted assumptions about him and his family, perhaps without even realizing it.
Let’s say the hypothetical young Jew is a boy in lower elementary school: Would he have the wherewithal to object to any of this, or at least tell his parents? Let’s say it’s a girl in her pre-teen years: Is she going to want to have a bat mitzvah? Or will she be too self-conscious to share her Jewish rites of passage with her peers? How will a teenager deal with the social anxiety of being put in this position? And what is this doing to the self-image of a kid whose own schoolbooks tell him that he’s evil?
We lament the growing distance between American Jews and Jewish institutions—day schools, Jewish Federations, youth groups, synagogues—and rightly so. Perhaps the rude awakening of Oct. 7 and its aftermath will serve to strengthen these institutions and their connections with the young American Jews of the future. But the young American Jews of the present have been unceremoniously thrown into the maelstrom and they need a hand right now. The battle against anti-Semitic classroom indoctrination in public schools and mass media and popular culture has never been more urgent.
