(NewsNation) — Lawmakers in the House are set to hear from school districts in New York City, California and Maryland about what they are doing about multiple reports of antisemitism on their campuses, many of them coming in recent months.
“Antisemitic incidents have exploded in K-12 schools following Hamas’ horrific October 7 attack. Jewish teachers, students, and faculty have been denied a safe learning environment and forced to contend with antisemitic agitators due to district leaders’ inaction,” Republican Florida Rep. Andrew Bean, chair of the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education, said in a statement. “This pervasive and extreme antisemitism in K-12 schools is not only alarming—it is absolutely unacceptable.”
Leaders of school districts in New York City; Berkeley, California; and Montgomery County, Maryland, will appear before the GOP-led subcommittee on Wednesday at 10:15 a.m. ET, The Wall Street Journal reported.
While lawmakers say Wednesday’s hearing is needed to protect Jewish students and school employees, others say it is just a chance for “political grandstanding,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. They quoted New York City Public Schools Chancellor David Banks, who said truly solving antisemitism doesn’t mean doing it “through cheap political theater and cheap sound bites.”
The Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education is part of the Committee on Education and The Workforce, which also had meetings over antisemitism at colleges and universities. Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill both resigned after getting much backlash to their testimony, with critics saying they were not doing enough for Jewish students.
Antisemitism, Islamophobia increase after Oct. 7
Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League say there’s been an increase in antisemitic incidents since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 and taking over 250 hostages. Israel declared war, with its military offensive in Gaza killing around 34,500 people, per local health officials, and spreading widespread devastation.
The ADL said in a recent report that 2023 saw an increase of “dozens of percentage points” in the number of antisemitic incidents happening in Western countries when compared to 2022.
In the U.S. alone, there were 7,523 in 2023, almost double the 3,697 recorded in 2022, the ADL said.
At the same time, there has also been a rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian acts, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR received 8,061 complaints nationwide in 2023, the highest number the organization has seen in the three decades since it was created. That makes for 56% over 2022, CAIR said.
NewsNation reached out to Bean’s office to see whether there would be hearings to address Islamophobia at U.S. schools as well.
What happened at the school districts?
Berkeley, California
Two organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights against Berkeley Unified School District, alleging that administrators failed to take action to stop the “nonstop bullying and harassment of Jewish students by peers and teachers.”
Incidents cited by the ADL include calls to “kill the Jews” and “eliminate Israel.” Jewish students in the district, the ADL said, have been asked what “their number is,” referring to Nazi concentration camps, derided for their physical appearance and told that “I don’t like your people” and “Of course it was the Jews.” This complaint was expanded in March to include more occurrences, including one where “Kill Jews” was scrawled in a high school bathroom.
“During an unauthorized teacher-promoted walkout for Palestine, no teachers intervened as students shouted, ‘Kill the Jews,’ ‘KKK,’ ‘Kill Israel,’ and ‘“’From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,'” the ADL said. While the ADL has categorized the last phrase as antisemitic, many Palestinian activists say it’s a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decadeslong, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions, according to the Associated Press.
“The blatant disregard by BUSD of this continuing anti-Semitic harassment, bullying and rhetoric is inexcusable,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Jewish students are hiding their identities and are afraid to go to school – this is outrageous, unacceptable, and should not be happening in 2024.
However, the Los Angeles Times writes that pro-Palestinian parents in the district, including a Jewish group called “Berkeley Unified School District Jewish Parents for Collective Liberation,” said some of the complaints conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
The Berkeley Unified School District Jewish Parents for Collective Liberation wrote in a statement that Jewish children are “safe and thriving” in the city’s schools.
“As Jewish Berkeley parents, we reject the notion that there is rampant antisemitism in our schools; it is simply not true,” the statement to the LA Times said. “A handful of parents have painted a false picture of our city in the national media, fueling the national right-wing attack on education.”
A spokeswoman for Berkeley schools told the newspaper that the district “celebrates our diversity and stands against all forms of hate and othering, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.”
Montgomery County, Maryland
The WSJ wrote that Montgomery County Public Schools currently has an interim superintendent, so the president of the district’s school board is set to speak.
There have been numerous antisemitic acts committed in the county’s schools, according to local magazine MoCo360, such as some students drawing swastikas on desks and school property in December and others being seen giving an antisemitic “salute” last September.
Since Oct. 7, the district has found antisemitic graffiti in a bathroom at multiple schools as well.
A spokeswoman said to the WSJ that the school board president is looking forward to sharing how the district “responds to incidents rooted in antisemitism and promotes a culture of tolerance and respect.”
The district has also come under criticism from CAIR, which filed a complaint against Montgomery County’s Board of Education and BOE officials after three teachers were put on administrative leave over speech supporting Palestine. One of the teachers posted a picture on her personal Instagram account of an Israeli government missile moments away from killing a Palestinian child, per the complaint, with the caption, “Shame on the world.”
Lawyers for CAIR said this was posted as a “critique of the Israeli government’s human rights abuses that it has and continues to carry out against Palestinians in Gaza and other occupied territories in Palestine.”
Another teacher added, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” to her email signature, which lawyers called “a call for everyone to have a right to exist and move freely within the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea” for both Palestinians and Israelis. It was particularly significant, the lawsuit said, as the teacher has loved ones in Palestine and had recently learned her childhood friend was killed as a result of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
“The actions by the Board and by MCPS officials have been thinly veiled attempts to accomplish one mission: removing teachers who express support for the Palestinian people from the classroom,” CAIR attorney Rawda Fawaz said in a statement.
MoCo360 reported in April that the three teachers and a fourth who was suspended but not involved in the litigation were reinstated.
New York City
The city’s Education Department is currently being investigated by the U.S. Department of Education for its response to incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Chalkbeat New York wrote.
In November, at Queen’s Hillcrest High School, students staged a protest after a teacher posted a picture of herself on social media holding a sign saying she stands with Israel. NewsNation partner The Hill wrote that the New York Police Department said school safety agents at Hillcrest “requested the response of the school sergeant in regard to a disorderly group of students inside of the location,” after which they “dispersed.”
Chalkbeat wrote that New York City Public Schools Chancellor Banks condemned the protests, saying several students were disciplined for taking part in it, though he also stressed that many teens at the school had felt anger and grief upon seeing images on social media of “children and young people in Palestine … being blown up.”
In addition, staff members at Origins High School say Jewish teachers and students have been bullied, with one student saying a classmate called her “a dirty Jew” and said he wished Hitler could have “hit more Jews,” including her, The New York Post reported. One teacher who is suing told The Post in March she “lives in fear of going to work every day.” CBS New York wrote there’s also been Islamophobia, with a Muslim teacher being called a “terrorist” by one student.
Talking to CBS New York a day before the hearing, Banks said, “Antisemitism is a vile scourge that cannot stand in our public schools,” but acknowledged that his district still has work to do in combatting it.
“We’ve got to continue to educate, and some of the biggest challenges we really face are the bias that we find in our own adults, some of our teachers, some of our administrators, who are bringing some of their own political opinions into the schools and into the classroom,” Banks said. “You cannot tolerate that. We have to provide a classroom setting that is fair and is balanced.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.