Students arranging themselves to form a swastika at a San Jose, Calif., high school was “uniquely awful,” but elected officials told JNS that they have been encouraged by the response from the school and local community.
Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.) told JNS that when he heard about the incident, his first thought was, “How could this possibly happen, that young people could be so infected with this horrible disease of antisemitism in such a way that they would be engaged in organizing such a hateful act?”
“My thoughts turn to the adults,” said Liccardo, who is not Jewish. “What were the adults saying? Because it had to have been facilitated and encouraged somehow, and it undermines your confidence in so many ways, because you have a certain perception of your own community.”
“I always imagine that these are things that happen somewhere else,” he told JNS. “It is confidence shaking.”
Liccardo, a previous mayor of San Jose whose district now includes the city, was one of the speakers at an event titled “Silicon Valley united against antisemitism,” which drew about 130 people and which was held on Saturday at Congregation Shir Hadash, a Reform synagogue in Los Gatos.
The event, which the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area organized, drew elected officials, Jewish leaders, school administrators and leaders of various faith traditions.
Liccardo told JNS that he was aware of students scrawling swastikas on desks in other areas, but he hadn’t heard previously of young people arranging themselves to form a swastika, which he called highly visible and “so organized, orchestrated and premeditated.”
“This is not some stupid kid,” he said. “It’s something more.”
Earlier in the month, eight students at Branham High School formed the swastika and reportedly referenced a Hitler quote in a since-deleted social media post.
Robert Bravo, superintendent of the Campbell Union High School District, which includes Branham, told JNS that students at the school organized a short walkout during class and formed the peace sign in the quad in response to the swastika incident.
Liccardo told JNS that he was “encouraged” by the school’s response.
“Action was taken immediately, Holocaust instruction and remembrance is being coordinated and the educators are recognizing that this is a teachable moment for the entire school community,” the congressman said.
“We need to understand the Holocaust and learn about and understand what antisemitism is,” he told JNS. “As I understand it, the students are being dealt with appropriately, severely.”
‘Like something on social media’
Josh Becker, a Democratic state senator and vice chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, also addressed attendees. He told JNS that the swastika was an “unfathomable incident” and that he “could not believe that this happened in our community.”
He has seen studies stating that 4% of Americans over 50 have a negative image of Jews, and that 25% of Americans under 25 have such a view. “Feels like something on social media is part of what is happening here,” he told JNS.
“Events like tonight and what’s happening with these students, the education and the coming together of community are hopeful,” he said. “But I don’t want to sugarcoat how serious this is.”
Becker helped lead a standing ovation for Beth Silbergeld, the Branham principal, said that the school handled the incident “very well.” He added that the pending state law that addresses Jew-hatred in schools and that would create a state coordinator on antisemitism would make a difference in incidents like this one.
Matt Mahan, the Democratic mayor of San Jose, told JNS that he felt disappointed, angry and “frankly embarrassed” when he learned of the swastika. “I’m the mayor of the city, and so anything that happens in the city, I feel like we’re all one,” he said.
Amid global rises in Jew-hatred since Oct. 7, San Jose had only experienced “very small things here and there” prior to the swastika incident, according to the mayor.
“School leaders quickly condemned the students’ actions and began to take steps toward engaging the student body in a conversation about antisemitism, the horrors of the Holocaust and doubling down on the importance of education,” he said.
“It’s just, to me, a reminder, as a parent and a former public school teacher, that we have to just keep engaging, we can’t get complacent and think that kids are getting the moral education that they need somewhere else,” he told JNS. “They’re not getting it on social media obviously. In fact they’re getting a lot of bad ideas on the internet.”
When young people don’t learn such things at home, “what’s left are our public institutions, where we can hopefully challenge them to really question their values and the kind of world we want to live in,” he said.
“Our young people are spending more and more time on their phones, on TikTok, getting exposed to bad ideas, being made more ignorant, not less with the information they’re consuming,” he said. “In some ways, becoming radicalized by groups that they’re falling into online.”
Many of the principles of a liberal democracy “come out of a Judeo-Christian historical heritage—individual liberty, religious freedom, mutual respect, love of thy neighbor,” he told JNS. “These are in fact very core American values that we ought to engage people in discussing without crossing the line of actually trying to promote one particular religious view in our schools.”
It’s important, he added, to talk to all of the school leaders in the city “about antisemitism and teaching our history and getting our students to face it and really challenge them on what their responsibility is and who would have they been in 1930s Nazi Germany.”
In his public speech, Bravo, the district superintendent, said that “antisemitism, clearly, is not a relic of the past.”
“It is a present danger,” he said.
‘Great darkness’
Bravo told attendees that the district intends to run “significant” staff development through the California Teacher’s Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education network and that the district has committed $13,000 toward those efforts.
He told JNS that he cannot comment on the eight students involved in the incident or to say if they have felt remorse. He said that the principal would know more about that. The principal declined to respond to questions from JNS.
“This is a moment of great darkness to be sure,” Liccardo told JNS. “But as we celebrate Chanukah, we should, in addition to condemning that darkness, we must celebrate the light and the light takes different forms.”
“It takes the form of adults, teachers, administrators, who recognize the imperative of educating the student body about the Holocaust,” he said. “It means students, who organize a walkout of their own to form a human peace sign afterward to demonstrate that at least some of them get it.”
“It’s important for all of us to know that we’re not alone,” he added. “Community coming together at a time like this, when people are feeling under assault, feeling alone in the darkness, this is a time for all of us to support one another and demonstrate that we’re in this together.”
