A middle school principal in Massachusetts reportedly sent an email to seventh-grade students apologizing for an educational session on antisemitism after he said families told the school that the lesson made some students feel “unseen.”
In a letter circulating on social media attributed to Johnny Cole, principal of William Diamond Middle School, a public school in Lexington, Mass., he wrote, “A few weeks ago, your class participated in a session about antisemitism, connecting the learning you had done in social studies class about the Holocaust to the modern world.”
“The goal was an important one: to help you recognize hate, understand where it comes from and encourage you to speak up against it,” he wrote.
“We have learned from speaking to some of your families that the experience did not feel that way to you,” Cole stated. “Some of you felt unseen. Some of you felt like your own history, your identity or your community was left out or erased.”
“We are sorry,” he wrote. “We are sorry because every one of you deserves to walk into this school and feel that who you are matters—Arab students; Jewish students; Lebanese students; Muslim students; Palestinian students—every student. And in this case, we missed the mark and did not achieve what we hoped to.” (JNS sought comment from Cole.)
Deborah Lipstadt, former U.S. antisemitism envoy, stated that the principal’s email is emblematic of “the toxification of Jewish history, life and community, making it untouchable.”
Trisha Posner, founder of AntisemitismWatch, agreed, stating, “This is how they will try to erase Jewish history.”
“First, they denied it,” she wrote. “Now, they try to avoid teaching it because Arab and Muslim students are offended. In this way, they can push the false narrative of genocide in Gaza and ignore the real Nazi genocide of European Jewry.”
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis condemned the principal’s apology and urged Lexington Public Schools to “take concrete action, including establishing a clear and unified process for reporting and responding to hate and bias incidents, strengthening instruction on Jewish history, culture and identity and providing staff with substantive professional development on recognizing and confronting contemporary antisemitism.”
“It should be common sense that Holocaust education is not an affront to any student’s identity, and it is not something for which a school should apologize,” said Kurt Schwartz, CEO of CAMERA.
Schwartz pointed to past incidents at the school, including swastikas drawn in a boys’ bathroom, as well as the principal confronting a Jewish student who was wearing a sweatshirt with an “anti-Nazi message.”
“Leadership should be responding with moral clarity, not suggesting that the act of teaching about the Holocaust has somehow ‘missed the mark,’” Schwartz said.
The Lexington Observer published a letter to the editor from the student, Teagan Murtagh, an eighth-grader at the school, on June 17.
Murtagh claimed that Cole stopped her in the school hallway to ask her not to wear a sweatshirt to school that read, “Save the bees. Plant more trees. Clean the seas. Punch Nazis.”
She said that she wore the sweatshirt to “silently fight back against antisemitism in my school,” and that the principal told her that students had complained about feeling threatened by the words on her sweatshirt.
Murtaugh, who is the great-granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, wrote that “this is a school where students drew neo-Nazi symbols on the bathroom walls in December and the only schoolwide response was a statement on the announcements telling us to be kind.”
