Antisemitism in American education isn’t only a matter of elite universities. The scourge is being tolerated and encouraged at colleges large and small across the country by woke administrators and faculty. But according to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, it’s also happening in K-12 schools—something that is being facilitated by teachers’ unions.
He’s joined in this week’s episode of “Think Twice” by Deborah Project legal director Lori Lowenthal Marcus, whose cases involve suing school districts and institutions of higher learning where Jews are being targeted and suffering discrimination. Marcus recently won a significant victory by forcing Haverford College, where administrators and faculty were tolerating anti-Zionist and antisemitic behavior, to adopt new standards that will, if enforced, require them to fundamentally change their approach to Israel and the treatment of Jewish students on campus.
What made the difference in the Haverford case were investigations by Congress and actions by the federal government, which pressured the academic institution into conceding to the demands of Jewish students. Without it, Marcus says, the school would have stood its ground.
The Deborah Project has also been defending students in Philadelphia whose families were forced to move to enable them to go to school without suffering anti-Jewish targeting. The incident involved a public high school that established a “prayer room” that was a de facto mosque, where Jewish students were falsely accused of assaulting other students.
According to Marcus, part of the problem in fighting back against antisemitism in education is the way the entire profession of teaching at both the K-12 and college levels has been captured by people indoctrinated in toxic theories. They don’t consider antisemitism to be a problem because Jews don’t qualify as victims in the intersectional mindset in which only racial minorities deserve help.
The other problem is that many Jews are either too intimidated to take action in defense of themselves or their children. And many also are partisans and so prejudiced against U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republicans that they oppose their efforts to combat campus bigotry, even when it is to their benefit.
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