Education Week - March 15, 2023 - 20

16
Substitute Teachers
Shouldn't Be
Punching Bags
17
What Principals
Can Do About
School Bias
Fighting the Rise in Antisemitism:
Advice for Teachers
How schools can
combat hate crimes
By Miriam R. Plotinsky
A
few years ago, I sat my children
down for The Talk. No, not that one
about " the birds and the bees. " This
conversation was about something
quite different: antisemitism. We
needed to discuss why, sight unseen,
so many people would hate them for
their entire lives, and why that hatred could easily lead to
oppression, violence, or even death.
My grandparents on both sides fled the countries of their
births to survive systematic extermination. My paternal
grandfather left Ukraine in the face of the immediate threat of
pogroms. His future wife, my grandmother, stole out of Russia
with her siblings on a sled in the middle of the night because all
the Jewish boys in her village were being rounded up and shot.
My maternal grandparents narrowly escaped the horrors of the
Holocaust in Germany, though their families were murdered
in the camps. They fled east and got as far as Shanghai, where
Japanese occupation created ghettos for the Jews, once again
resulting in oppression and death.
When I was a little girl, I often heard stories about my family
history. " Never get too attached to any place, " my elders would
tell me. " Always have your passport updated. "
Once they arrived in the United States, my grandparents
were what we now call " cautiously optimistic " about living
in America. Still, they had seen democracies crumble, Jews
scapegoated, time and time again. The lessons of history were
never fully in the past.
And, now, the past once again becomes the present. With
incidents of antisemitism gaining more traction every day in
the United States and in our schools, educators must ask
ourselves what to do to counter it in the classroom.
I live in one of the purportedly more enlightened corners of
America, in a county where fully 10 percent of the inhabitants
are Jewish. The Montgomery County, Md., school district
provides days off for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. One
would think this is perhaps among the safest of places for
Jewish people to live, and yet, (as recent incidents of antisemitic
graffiti at schools in the county demonstrate) that is far from
true. Whether the increasing number of acts of hatred are
motivated by truly antisemitic feelings or simply a wish for the
thrill of negative attention is immaterial. The question is, how
do we turn this tide of hatred?
so readily available within the pages of books. As incidents
of hatred continue to grow, schools attempt to manage
them. But however well-intentioned, education leaders
often look at correlation, not causation. In other words, the
profound why of oppression goes ignored.
As an illustration, experts widely recommend that
schools increase their levels of student awareness about
antisemitism in the form of Holocaust education. Schools
may opt to bring in survivors (whose numbers are diminishing
every day) for talks, teach well-known texts (many of them
recently questioned or banned, such as Maus or The Diary of
Anne Frank), and provide more detail about what happened in
Germany during the height of Hitler's reign. The problem is
learning about what occurred in the late 1930s and early 1940s
examines a result not a cause.
who consider themselves educated believe, either overtly or
without even realizing it. Antisemitism is so ingrained in our
culture that one of the top films on Netflix right now, " You
People " (2023), peddles highly damaging lies and stereotypes
about Jews under the guise of controversy without so much as
the slightest real attempt to debunk any misinformation.
The best way to combat antisemitism is not to teach
about only one isolated event, even one as significant as the
Holocaust. Instead, educating students about the true story
of the Jewish people is key.
It is also imperative to share, expose, and prove untrue
common tropes, as uncomfortable as it may be. A few years
ago, when I heard students in the hallway talking about " stingy
Jews " and stopped to challenge them, the students' surprise at
my vehemence came from not ever pausing to consider why
that label might be wrong. It was accepted " truth " along with
many other beliefs that they had absorbed in the course of their
young lives.
The Anti-Defamation League warns us that " while
Antisemitism has a long
and complex history dating
back thousands of years.
antisemitism has sometimes escalated to violent or genocidal
levels, it more often appears in subtler ways, such as insensitive
remarks that are brushed off, or negative stereotypes that
go unchallenged. " For the students we educate, it is not
enough to show them the horrors of the Holocaust. We need
to go further and teach them that in times of instability, Jews
become the target of blame, hatred, and oppression. We need
to increase their awareness of the lies that people tell and of
the tropes that have no basis in truth. Otherwise, schools are
not doing their jobs.
It might be uncomfortable to address topics like fictitious
Antisemitism has a long and complex history dating back
My professional role is centered on curriculum
development and instruction for English/language arts and
literacy, so I have already seen signs of trouble in districts
nationwide with the escalation of censorship-both in relation
to books and instruction itself. In every democracy that
crumbles, one of the first things to go is access to education-
thousands of years. For those who follow the Jewish calendar,
this is the year 5783, and hatred goes back a long way in the
existence of lies (think blood libel, which perpetuates the
disgusting lie that Jews used the blood of Christians, especially
children, for religious rituals) and in damaging and untrue
tropes that I won't name but that a large percentage of people
20 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 15, 2023 | www.edweek.org/opinion
Jewish space lasers, threatening tweets, and graffiti on school
walls telling Jewish students to " go home. " But if educators
continue to ignore these warning signs and look only to the
past, they are consigning their Jewish students to hatred-now
and in the future.
PLOTINSKY is an author and instructional specialist for
secondary English/language arts and literacy with the
Montgomery County public schools in Maryland. She can be
reached via Twitter at @MirPloMCPS.
Dmitry Kovalchuk/Getty
http://www.edweek.org/opinion
Education Week - March 15, 2023

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