“A swastika was drawn on the bleachers near the football field of a high school.” — Oct. 30, 2023
“A middle school teacher found a swastika drawn on a desk. One student admitted to drawing ‘something that looks like a plus sign.’ The student admitted he did not know the significance of the swastika and only drew it because he kept seeing it on TikTok.” — Feb. 27, 2024
These are reports, just a few among dozens over past months, of antisemitic incidents logged at schools in Montgomery County, Md., one of the D.C. region’s most progressive and diverse areas.
They fueled a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday: “Confronting Pervasive Antisemitism in K-12 Schools.”
And “confronting” was about all the Republican-led questioning did.
The legislators grappling for a cultural wedge issue now that their hyperventilating over critical race theory and sweeping book bans has sputtered called the leaders of school districts in three largely liberal regions to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Education and the Workforce subcommittee on early childhood, elementary and secondary education.
“As a dad, I can hardly fathom sending one of my sons to school knowing he will be exposed to vile, hate-filled discrimination,” said the chairman of that subcommittee, Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.), in opening the hearing about antisemitism on campuses in New York City, Berkeley, Calif., and Montgomery County.
The rise in anti-Jewish hatred is real and alarming; we’ve been watching this disturbing renaissance of old hatred for nearly a decade.
It’s an “unprecedented spike in antisemitism” that Guila Franklin Siegel didn’t see when her three kids were little and growing up in the area.
“The first time we first began seeing signs of it was, frankly, after the 2016 election” said Franklin Siegel, who manages school-based programs and advocacy for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
She’s one of the people trying to get to the root of why this is happening so often, in a population so young, in an area with one of America’s most vibrant Jewish communities.
In December 2022, someone painted “Jews Not Welcome” on the entrance sign on the campus of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest the message.
Right after that, two students from the school’s debate team made some seriously heinous and historically detailed jokes about their Jewish teammates.
And here’s what’s even more disturbing: While the roiling college campus protests are a complicated challenge to the blurry lines of free speech and hate speech, the added concern in Montgomery County is that antisemitism is appearing in ever-younger populations.
“For the first time, for the first time ever, in the last year, we have been responding to incidents in elementary school,” Franklin Siegel said.
“These elementary school principals, this was not on their bingo card, dealing with antisemitic incidents among second-graders.”
What’s happening?
A survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany last year pinned the rising hate on education.
The poll alleged that almost two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 39 contacted for the survey didn’t know that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. That poll’s methodology was largely debunked, and some media outlets that wrote about it walked back their stories because of the way the questions were presented.
But the results echoed what a solid poll conducted by the Pew Research Center four years ago learned — a shocking unfamiliarity with the Holocaust among young Americans.
“Most U.S. adults know what the Holocaust was and approximately when it happened, but fewer than half can correctly answer multiple-choice questions about the number of Jews who were murdered or the way Adolf Hitler came to power,” the 2020 survey found.
Meanwhile, as kids are carving swastikas into bleachers, Bean’s home state has the second-highest rate of book bans in the nation, and one of his counties leads the state. They are attacking the very things that may prevent the “vile, hate-filled discrimination” that Bean fears his son will encounter — education.
Bean is a professional auctioneer, and he grilled those embattled school leaders as though he were auctioning off reason and responsibility, trying to corner them into “yes” or “no” answers on issues that are wrenching a nation.
The legislators demanded explicit details about how teachers and principals were punished. They wanted to hear the word “fired.”
Then, New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks gave lawmakers the word they were really looking for.
“The ultimate answer for antisemitism is to teach,” Banks said.
From Montgomery County, the legislators heard about these efforts.
“We have enhanced our Jewish experience education starting younger, going into the elementary grades, training teachers so they can implement Holocaust education in the sixth grade,” said Karla Silvestre, president of the Montgomery County Board of Education.
Because for this generation, the Holocaust seems like ancient history.
“As we move farther and farther from the Holocaust, understanding not just the facts of the Holocaust, but understanding Jewish identity as a people who carry with profound intergenerational trauma and have a history of marginalization and persecution is being lost,” Franklin Siegel said. “And you see the actual tangible results of that on a daily basis.”
Let’s go back to that logbook of Montgomery County hate and bias incidents, because it shows us how clueless some of these kids are, parroting what they see on TikTok. It also demonstrates how far-reaching ignorance and hate can be.
In February 2023, there were 20 reported cases of antisemitic acts recorded in schools, and February of this year saw eight.
Looking at the same month, there were 23 anti-Black incidents last year and 16 this year in Montgomery County schools. We also see anti-Asian, Islamaphobic and homophobic incidents recorded each month.
But where is the congressional hearing on education and punishment for those hatreds?
The congressional theatrics are hypocrisy and noise, bills and hearings meant to impress, not empower. The culture wars on teachers and librarians these same lawmakers launch are attacking the very answers they’re allegedly looking for.
The real work in combating hatred and bias in schools is being done by people like Franklin Siegel and the educators who stood up to the congressional variety show, who are giving America the only legitimate answer to the problem — education.
