The United Nations International School, a private school for the children of employees of the global body, canceled an end-of-year school dance after students wrote antisemitic and homophobic messages in each other’s yearbooks.
The incident occurred during yearbook distribution to M4 students, the school’s eighth-grade class, last week.
Administrators at the school were alerted by the early afternoon that hate speech, including swastikas and antisemitic and homophobic remarks, had been written in the autograph sections of multiple yearbooks, according to emails sent to parents and staff, which JNS viewed.
The school immediately confiscated as many yearbooks as it could and launched an investigation. Subsequent updates to families stated that more than 30 yearbooks contained hate speech and that nearly 20 students had been identified as potentially involved.
In response, administrators canceled the M4 Social.
“We have made a collective decision to cancel the M4 Social scheduled for tomorrow,” the email to parents stated.
“While we acknowledge that not all students were involved, the gravity of the situation and its widespread impact on our school community make this not the right time for a celebration,” the email stated.
“This decision is not intended as a punishment but rather reflects our profound sadness and disappointment regarding recent events,” a follow-up email stated.
The school also convened assemblies to discuss the impact of hate speech. All collected yearbooks are slated to be destroyed and replaced with new copies, according to the school.
Lupe Todd-Medina, a spokeswoman for the school, told JNS that previous reports that the offensive content had been printed in the yearbook are inaccurate. The swastikas and hateful messages were written by students while signing one another’s yearbooks, she said.
The school has not “sugar-coated” what happened, according to Todd-Medina. “They’re being very honest and up front,” she told JNS. “It’s not the easiest thing to say.”
Todd-Medina said the New York school, which serves 1,500 students from K-12, the children of anyone who works for the United Nations, is “a tight-knit community.”
“There’s people from so many different backgrounds and affiliations that they quickly get on top of it,” she told JNS. “A student who is Jewish hangs out with her friend who is Muslim. It’s very common.”
Todd-Medina told JNS that children are “overly stimulated with information” that they get from social media and that the school is “consistently engaging with the student body and talking about these kinds of incidents with them, even one-on-one.”
“There’s a constant need to educate around this issue,” she said.
Ofir Akunis, Israeli consul general in New York, stated that “swastikas and hate speech against Jews in schools are antisemitic and must never be tolerated.”
Akunis pointed to rising Jew-hatred “across New York and around the world.”
“We cannot afford to dismiss or normalize acts like these,” he wrote. “Educators, community leaders and elected officials must condemn them clearly and ensure that hatred has no place in our world.”
