House Republicans accused leaders of three large school districts Wednesday of doing too little to confront antisemitism in their schools amid a number of incidents and comments targeted at Jewish students, saying they had failed in their duty to protect all children in their care.
Antisemitism on college campuses has received enormous national attention, and the House education committee held two fiery hearings with aggressive questioning of university leaders that contributed to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. But a number of antisemitic incidents have been reported in K-12 schools across the country since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed.
School leaders have been left flat-footed at a moment of great peril, said Rep. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.), chairman of the K-12 subcommittee of the House education committee.
“This is happening without an appropriate or any response at all,” Bean said. “Jewish students in their districts fear riding the bus, wearing their kippa to school or just eating or breathing as a Jewish student.” He cited reports of students chanting “Kill the Jews,” of students deploying the Nazi salute, and an incident of Jewish students being told to pick pennies up off the floor.
Wednesday’s hearing is the committee’s first examination of antisemitism in K-12 schools, and the panel chose leaders from three liberal areas of the country: New York City; Berkeley, Calif.; and Montgomery County, Md., outside Washington. All three districts are facing related investigations by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which has looked at allegations of harassment, including antisemitism and Islamophobia, at more than 145 K-12 and higher education institutions in recent months.
New York City Chancellor David Banks addressed the committee’s concerns at the outset.
“There have been unacceptable incidents of antisemitism in our schools,” he said in his opening remarks. “When Jewish students or teachers feel unwelcome or unsafe, that should sound the alarm for us all.”
Enikia Ford Morthel, superintendent of the Berkeley Unified School District, defended her district’s approach.
“Antisemitism is not pervasive in Berkeley Unified School District,” she said. But she said school officials do respond when it occurs. “We do not publicly share our actions because student information is private and legally protected under federal and state law. As a result, some believe we do nothing. This is not true.”
Karla Silvestre, president of the Montgomery County Board of Education, said the school system doesn’t “shy away from imposing consequences for hate-based behavior, including antisemitism.” This school year, the district – Maryland’s largest – has received about three reports each day of hate-bias targeting race, religion, gender and sexuality, according to data reviewed by the school board in March.
She said the school system has imposed mandatory hate-based training for all of its staff and revised its curriculum to include more topics about Jewish history. “I want to do everything in my power to make sure all students can pursue their education without worrying about antisemitic racist or hateful threats,” Silvestre said.
Bean pointedly asked Silvestre whether any teacher in the Montgomery district had been fired; she said no, but that there had been disciplinary action.
The hearing follows similar grillings by the committee of leaders of prominent universities. In the first, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT came under enormous fire when they declined to say whether a call for the genocide of Jews would amount to a violation of their school policies. In a second, similar hearing, Columbia’s president took a strong stand against antisemitism.
The debate – both in universities and K-12 schools – is a difficult one for many school leaders, who have worked to support students’ right to protest Israel’s actions in the war while also protecting Jewish students.
At the hearing’s start, all three leaders said that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Asked by Bean whether the popular pro-Palestinian chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is antisemitic, Banks said that Jewish students experience it that way, so therefore it is. Silvestre and Ford Morthel said it was if the intent is the destruction of the Jewish people.
“It is,” Bean snapped back.
Banks was asked about a November incident at Hillcrest High School in Queens, in which hundreds of students filled the hallways after a Jewish teacher posted a photo of herself holding an “I Stand With Israel” sign. The teacher hid in an office, fearful. Banks replied that students were disciplined and the principal was removed.
“I don’t know how to make it much clearer,” Banks said. “What happened at Hillcrest was a complete act of antisemitism.”
(c) Washington Post