Swastikas and graffiti praising Hitler painted on a high school building. A Jewish student taunted and hit — the attack videoed and shared over social media with other kids in the same school. It keeps happening — and it happened in my own backyard. Antisemitic graffiti appeared on the playground of Setauket Elementary School in the Three Village Central School District on Long Island in New York (Brodsky, 2021).
Tracking and responding to antisemitism
How common is this? Tracking is difficult; the U.S. Department of Education does not include religious bias in its Civil Rights Data Collection, focusing instead on race and LGBTQ+ issues (Kunz, 2022). While Jewish people make up only 2% of the U.S. population, they were the targets of 55% of religious hate crimes in 2020. FBI Director Christopher Wray has noted the violence and threats against the Jewish community, and Diane Kunz (2022) at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has found “skyrocketing anti-Semitism in K-12 schools.”
Meanwhile, in Setauket, the police were contacted, the graffiti was quickly scrubbed off, and parents were informed that the school district “does not condone the use or promotion of hateful messages or references.” Is that enough? Would you be satisfied to learn, after a local shooting, that the police department “does not condone murder”?
Schools are not only a target of hate crimes, but also a source.
Schools, it so happens, are not only a target of hate crimes, but also a source. According to the FBI, 15% of hate crime offenders are age 17 and younger (Masucci & Langton, 2017). In fact, it appears that students may have been responsible for the antisemitic graffiti at Setauket. The police must do the policing, but schools must do more educating. Otherwise, we are just addressing the crime in hate crimes — not the hate.
Many school administrators would likely rather have a root canal than draw attention to such incidents at their own school. But that’s exactly what they need to do. “Yes, folks, it happened here. It might even have been one of us or one of our children.” Perhaps with thoughtful planning and an uncommon willingness to go deep, an antisemitic crime like the one at Setauket could become a valuable teachable moment.
Waking up the community
What if the graffiti clean-up had not been relegated to the maintenance staff, but rather carried out by Three Village residents and students? It’s likely that very few students ever saw the graffiti and therefore had little sense that it really happened, never mind how hateful it was. Protecting them from seeing the hate prevented them from understanding its power and, more important, from experiencing their own power to respond. This, after all, was an attack on their community and their values.
These incidents can be a wake-up call. But alarms only work if you hear them.
Acts like this typically don’t come out of nowhere. Anyone who writes “Gas the Jews” on the walls of a public high school, as was done in Orange County, California, heard that hateful sentiment from someone else. Quite possibly it was someone in their own family or peer group. These incidents can be a wake-up call. But alarms only work if you hear them. Too many school leaders hit the snooze button and hope the alarm never goes off again.
Valuable resources are available to education leaders, including best practice frameworks and models. For example, see Responding to Hate and Bias at School from Learning for Justice, Preventing Youth Hate Crime: A Manual for Schools and Communities from the U.S. Department of Justice, and School Hate Crime Resource Guide from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. But these resources tend to focus more on eradicating the negative, rather than on creating more positive alternatives.
Responses that empower
There is another way. In Cayuga County, New York, students and adults came to together to plant a sapling from “the Anne Frank tree” — the very tree that Frank could see from the attic in which she and her family hid during the Holocaust and which she saw as a profound symbol of hope (Robiou, 2019). For the students and teachers in Cayuga County, the tree became a source of pride and enlightenment. Here is a response that leads toward something valuable, not just away from the ugliness.
Community responses to hate must be developmentally appropriate to avoid traumatizing kids, especially those whose communities have been targeted. Students should be invited but not required to take part. For younger students, consider an upbeat event, inspired by a specific hate act but not focused on it. For older students, encourage them to channel their feeling toward acts of leadership and service in their community. Helping students feel empowered can promote well-being and counteract traumatic stress and feelings of helplessness (Hardy, 2013).
I am reminded of an incident in Michigan when the owners of a restaurant — a community hangout with many gay patrons — learned that their business was going to be the target of aggressive anti-gay demonstrations. Rather than organizing a counterdemonstration, the owners initiated a quick email campaign, inviting people from across the community — of all sexual orientations — to pledge any amount they wished for each minute the demonstration lasted (Pittinsky, 2012). The longer the haters hated, the more money was raised for a local community center. This was leadership toward something valuable and not just away from something awful.
When we clean up hate crimes too quickly — erasing them to protect the children — whom are we protecting? Not the kids who have to live in this world and who need to know their own individual and collective powers to counteract the hate that’s in it.
References
Brodsky, R. (2021, April 10). Cops probe anti-Semitic graffiti on Setauket Elementary School playground. Newsday.
Hardy, K.V. (2013). Healing the hidden wounds of racial trauma. Reclaiming Children and Youth, 22 (1), 24–28.
Kunz, D.B. (2022, February 25). Fighting anti-Semitism where it starts. The Hill.
Masucci, M. & Langton, L. (2017, June). Hate crime victimization, 2004-2015. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Pittinsky, T.L. (2012). Us plus them: Tapping the positive power of difference. Harvard Business Press.
Robiou, M. (April 30, 2019). With anti-semitic incident in schools on the rise, teachers grapple with Holocaust education. Frontline.
This article appears in the October 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 2, pp. 66-67.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Todd L. Pittinsky
Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor at Stony Brook University and a senior distinguished fellow of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center on Long Island in New York. He is the author, with Barbara Kellerman, of Leaders Who Lust.
