Educate, don’t erase

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).

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”?