In eighth grade, I was walking to recess, and one of my friends laughingly said to me, “I feel bad for all the Jews who died in the Holocaust, but I wish you were one of them.”
Insulting jokes like this happen every day in school hallways like mine, and increasingly, they have become more of a problem.
Many of us heard about the massacre at Bondi Beach in Australia, where Jews were celebrating Hanukkah in their community. Similarly, on October 7th, the Hamas militants attacked the Nova Music Festival, which followed an increase in antisemitic attacks across recent years in the world.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)’s 2025 research, “78% of Jewish students hide their religious identity on campus.” Because of the rise of antisemitism, schools should respond to any form of antisemitic attack in the same serious way as any hate speech is addressed.
In my recent interview with Ethan Roberts from JCRC of Minnesota and the Dakotas, he said, “gay people define what homophobia looks like. We let Muslims define what Islamophobia looks like. But … we presume to tell Jews what antisemitism is.”
To address this issue, schools must talk with their Jewish families and students to learn what antisemitism means and what their experience with it has been. Unfortunately, this was not the case at Nysmith School in Virginia, where three siblings were shockingly expelled after one of them received antisemitic bullying and their parents asked the school to address it. Eventually, the school paid the family $150,000 in damages; however, the kids’ trauma remains.
This example may be extreme, but this kind of bullying happens to students too often and every day. Schools need to educate students on how to become an ally for their Jewish classmates and take accusations of antisemitism seriously.
