Documented incidents from Jewish Parents, Teachers and Students in Berkeley United School District, NYCDOE and Montgomery County Public Schools expose shocking discrimination and bias at the heart of the Committee on Education and the Workforce’s k-12 investigations.
May 6, 2024 – JewsInSchool seeks to amplify the voices of Jewish parents, students, teachers and organizations including Berkeley JewsInSchool, NYCParent Alliance and Jews4Change, whose experiences with antisemitism and discrimination initiated Congressional investigations against three of the nation’s most embattled school districts. In its mission to advocate for the platforming of Jewish experiences and perspectives in the education space, JewsInSchool is profiling and promoting the important stories and work of these individuals and organizations to the public, and encourages the media to do the same.
Their testimonies compelled members of Congress to schedule the hearings taking place May 8 as Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) chairman of the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education’s holds their school district’s chancellors and administrators accountable during the hearing on "Confronting Pervasive Antisemitism in K-12 Schools." Though Jewish victims of antisemitism will not be invited to share their testimonies publicly, they are eager to bear witness to the systemic antisemitism in k-12 schools in their districts in their courageous search for justice and equality in schools.
Many schools who claim that prioritizing activism is at the root of their actions are frequently refusing to be accountable for their outright antisemitism.
Leah Fink Wiseman states, “The NYC Public School Community Board of District 14 has been overstepping boundaries, including posting political statements on social media and promoting a citywide school walkout that included distributing a toolkit that included antisemitic chants to be used at the walkout as well as instructions on what to do if one was to encounter police. In addition, Jewish and Israeli families have deliberately been blocked from social media and blocked and removed from what are legally public meetings.”
This kind of targeting and exclusion is not rare, but commonplace in these districts.
“As a freshman last year, two of my teammates from the debate team made a plan to lure all the Jews to a remote cannibal island with challah, a traditional Jewish food, and then burn all the Jews at the stake with mosque music in the background. On top of this, they made a hit list of specific Jews that they would burn first, I was second on the list,” says now-sophomore, Rachel Barold.
As a proud Jewish student, she pursued change in her school not just for herself, but others, even organizing a walkout in support of Jewish students. But despite her courageous efforts, her appeals were met with a cruel response. “We were literally laughed out of this meeting by administrators. As two 14 year old girls who had just experienced more school sponsored anti-Semitism, we felt hopeless.”
Sadly, Barold is not alone.
“My daughter said that being a Jewish student in Indonesia (the largest Muslim country on earth) was more comfortable than in Berkeley,” said parent Chiara Juster “She was called a “midget Jew” in the hallway between classes. But worse, after changing classes to avoid bullying, her new homeroom teacher displayed a Palestinian flag and posters calling for a cease-fire and urged students to join the after-school ‘watermelon club’.”
Mimicking the disregard of current university administrators, school officials were both dismissive and even complicit in their response to Jewish parents’ and students’ concerns.
Ilana Pearlman whose son is a student at Berkeley High School reported a teacher whose anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric was pervasive in her classroom teaching. “After this incident, I both met with and wrote to the Principal and was told that they would not remove the teacher and that the only option was to put my child in a new class. However, the Principal stated there were no classes available and their solution was to place my son (and other Jewish students) in the library or student health center for an entire week without any supplemental instruction.”
Despite parent advocacy and activism, the lack of recourse and the system of delay, deny, deflect and gaslight, as well as the toxic “restorative justice” methods were mentioned in numerous accounts of district mismanagement.
Barold recounts, “The restorative justice circle was by far the worst day of my life. In this circle, upper MCPS officials traveled to our school to lead us in a conversation about how the incident made us feel, all the while the two perpetrators were in the circle. The MCPS officials prevented eye-witnesses of the incident from telling their account of the incident and instead relied on a lawyer prepared account by the perpetrators, where they lied about what they did – MCPS denied affected Jewish students the opportunity to share our experience.”
JewsInSchool is a coalition of Jewish students, families and teachers in the education space from pre-k- college. The mission of JewsInSchool is to ensure equal opportunity, representation and a safe environment for JewsInSchool. JewsInSchool delivered a petition for k-12 education reform to the Federal Department of Education, and is currently promoting a fact-based unbiased curriculum for Jewish American Heritage Month.
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For more information, please contact:
info@JewsInSchool.org
