A clinical psychologist says that Israeli expat children are suffering psychological distress at schools in Massachusetts amid a documented effort by anti-Israel elements of the Massachusetts Teachers Association to inject the public school curriculum with biased content.
Miri Bar-Halpern, director of intensive outpatient treatment services at the Boston Child Study Center and director of trauma training and services at Parents for Peace, told JNS that she has been noticing an increase in mental health issues with her Jewish Israeli patients at the kindergarten through 12th-grade levels.
“There is an uptick of anxiety. There is depression. A lot of school avoidance. There is this fear of bullying, both from peers and from teachers,” said Bar-Halpern, who lectures at Harvard Medical School and holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. “They’re just afraid of going to school.”
“I have some patients who started self-harming,” she said. “I have patients that are saying that they don’t want to be Jewish anymore because everybody hates them.”
Sara Colb, deputy director for the Anti-Defamation League’s New England office, told JNS that there has been a significant amount of anti-Israel activity in the union since Oct. 7, which she thinks has spilled over into “more overt antisemitism.”
“The Jewish teachers in the MTA, many of whom have connected with us and who have been keeping us apprised of the developments, have reported feeling a significant amount of hostility being targeted when they speak up against some of this anti-Israel activity within the union, and when they attempt to provide another perspective,” Colb told JNS.
The union’s influence on classroom experiences is having enough of a profound impact that more than half a dozen Israeli-born licensed therapists, who practice in the state, have shared with Bar-Halpern that they have had similar experiences with their patients.
Bar-Halpern testified last month at a Massachusetts legislature hearing by the Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism. She cited examples, including an Israeli immigrant child whose classmates told the kid that friends murdered during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 “deserved it.” The classmates also told the child to “stop playing the victim.”
In another school, a map of the Middle East didn’t include Israel, and Jerusalem was labeled as part of “Palestine.” Bar-Halpern testified that in that same school, swastikas were painted on the lockers of Jewish students.
Such actions—for which Bar-Halpern blames the Massachusetts Teachers Association—have led to a phenomenon called “traumatic invalidation,” she said.
“It’s when someone who’s been traumatized is being gaslit or told that their feelings or thoughts are not important, or they’re not true,” she told JNS. “It can lead to changes of cognition and change how someone perceives themselves and others, all the way to PTSD symptoms.” (PTSD refers to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.)
Every Jewish person, including those who are not Israeli, who Bar-Halpern has seen recently has met the criteria for traumatic invalidation, she said.
“When it comes from school, which is where they spend most of their day, they really don’t feel like they have anywhere to go,” she said. “They don’t feel protected.”
‘They're constantly hyper-vigilant’
The union passed a resolution in December 2023 that opened the door for its training and professional learning division to create “resources on Israel and occupied Palestine.”
That’s what the MTA calls a framework “for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.”
The union didn’t appear to create a similar resource for any other global conflict.
The framework includes one poster of a dollar bill folded up into a Jewish Star, and another with an image of George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization, above a silhouette of a terrorist armed with an assault rifle. There are also posters criticizing Zionism and calling for Israel to be erased.
The effects of such materials find their way into classrooms, according to Bar-Halpern.
“When someone is under a state of fear or trauma, their part of the brain that is supposed to be thinking and solving problems and executing functioning skills shuts down,” she said. “So from a physiological perspective, Jewish students cannot function academically like their peers right now because they’re constantly hyper-vigilant.”
Those perpetuating the hate will also feel the impact, according to Arno Michaelis, a rehabilitated former neo-Nazi and current exit interventionist at Parents For Peace.
“The MTA is just a symptom of a much larger problem,” Michaelis told JNS. “There are, unfortunately, teachers unions throughout the country that hold a similar position as the MTA, which is rabid anti-Zionism.”
Those unions “swear up and down” that they aren’t peddling Jew-hatred, but Michaelis said his challenge to them is, “if it’s anti-Zionism and isn’t antisemitism, then why do anti-Zionists espouse, word for word, the same antisemitic tropes as white nationalists?”
A white nationalist for seven years, which he said were “far and away the most miserable seven years of my life,” Michaelis told JNS that the hate fomented by the MTA, which filters in the classroom, is causing long-term damage in the students the teachers are there to serve.
“It’s a miserable way to live, to see enemies everywhere you look, every waking moment of the day,” he said. “So whether the violent extremism flavor is violent Islamism or white nationalism or Antifa, all of these violent extremist ideologies bring the same miserable experience, and all of them are rampantly antisemitic.”
The union head, who is Jewish, did not acknowledge at last month’s statehouse hearing that resource materials are antisemitic, though the MTA announced that it would remove the problematic resources.
Still, the union has yet to publish a list of revised resources, and a document, which was shared with the Anti-Defamation League, “continues to be extraordinarily biased, one-sided and includes overtly harmful materials and some materials that were just plainly factually inaccurate,” Colb told JNS.
Bar-Halpern is doing more research on traumatic invalidation among Massachusetts students.
“The research behind it is so profound on other minority groups, but it was never actually investigated on Jews,” she told JNS. “In terms of long-term effects, there are going to be chronic mental health issues, long-term struggles with anxiety, depression.”
“They might have low self-worth in adulthood,” she said. “They’re going to have trust issues, not trusting their peers or authority figures because their institutions are failing to protect them.”
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