According to a recent article in Inside Higher Education, "reports show harassment and attacks on Jewish students [are] at an all-time high.” Looking at the ADL Tracker of Anti-Semitic Incidents, it appears that the Covid-driven reliance of educators on the internet has opened up new opportunities for anti-Semitic harassment of students. The last month alone has seen classes disrupted by hackers crashing online classes with messages such as: "Adolph Hitler," "F*CK JEWS FREE PALESTINE," "Sieg Heil," "Kill the Jews," “Shlomo Rothschild,” “The Holocaust Never Happened,” as well as various swastikas and death threats.
Additionally, religious-based hate crimes on college campuses roughly doubled between 2009 and 2017, mostly targeting Jewish students. This reflects a society-wide spike in anti-Semitism that has been going on for several years.
While the increased attention being paid to Black lives is welcome, the prevalence of anti-Semitic harassment and hate crimes remains a major blind spot. Most people would be surprised to learn that, per capita, there are far more hate crimes committed against Jews than against African Americans or Muslims. And anti-Semitic incidents (not including incidents solely directed at Israel or Israeli policies) are at record levels.
This shows the need for educational institutions to address the issue of anti-Semitism more vigorously. Unfortunately, America’s largest educational system, California, is moving in the opposite direction. Under a bill awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature, all California K-12 students will soon be taking a mandatory ethnic studies class. But even though California has one of the largest populations of Jews in the world, Jews will not be one of the ethnicities covered. The model curriculum set out by the state will “focus on the traditional ethnic-studies first established in higher education which has been characterized by four foundational disciplines: African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American and Indigenous, and Asian American studies.”
Bowing to public pressure, they have now added Pacific Islander Studies to the model curriculum, but when it comes to Jews, California will be teaching students that Jews benefit from white privilege. There will be a unit in which “students will write a paper detailing certain events in American history that have led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege. They will be asked to think critically about why and who is allowing this evolution in white identity and how this shift is affecting the identity of Irish and Jewish Americans.”
There do not seem to be many hate crimes directed against Irish Americans in this country, but teaching students that Jews enjoy “racial privilege” and telling students to question "who is allowing this evolution" at a time of record-setting levels of anti-Semitism is tone-deaf at best.
The question of Jewish ethnicity is extremely complex and could not be timelier given today’s political climate. As Emma Green wrote in The Atlantic: “On the extreme right, Jews are seen as impure—a faux-white race that has tainted America. And on the extreme left, Jews are seen as part of a white-majority establishment that seeks to dominate people of color. Taken together, these attacks raise an interesting question: Are Jews white?” The California educational system should not be ducking this question by simply telling students that Jews enjoy “racial privilege,” while ignoring the record-setting numbers of anti-Semitic hate crimes plaguing the state, the nation, and the world.
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