JewsInSchool Amplifies Voices of Jewish Students & Parents in K-12 Hearings

WASHINGTON - May 6, 2024 - PRLog -- JewsInSchool seeks to amplify the voices of Jewish parents, students, teachers and organizations including Berkeley JewsInSchool, NYCParent Alliance and Jews4Change, whose experiences with antisemitism and discrimination initiated Congressional investigations against three of the nation's most embattled school districts. Their testimonies compelled members of Congress to schedule the hearings taking place May 8 as Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL) chairman of the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education's holds their school district's chancellors and administrators accountable during the hearing on "Confronting Pervasive Antisemitism in K-12 Schools."

Many schools who claim that prioritizing activism is at the root of their actions are frequently refusing to be accountable for their outright antisemitism.

Leah Fink Wiseman states, "The NYC Public School Community Board of District 14 has been overstepping boundaries, including posting political statements on social media and promoting a citywide school walkout that included distributing a toolkit that included antisemitic chants to be used at the walkout as well as instructions on what to do if one was to encounter police. In addition, Jewish and Israeli families have deliberately been blocked from social media and blocked and removed from what are legally public meetings."

This kind of targeting and exclusion is not rare, but commonplace in these districts.

"As a freshman last year, two of my teammates from the debate team made a plan to lure all the Jews to a remote cannibal island with challah, a traditional Jewish food, and then burn all the Jews at the stake with mosque music in the background. On top of this, they made a hit list of specific Jews that they would burn first, I was second on the list," says now-sophomore, Rachel Barold.

Sadly, Barold is not alone.

"My daughter said that being a Jewish student in Indonesia (the largest Muslim country or earth) was more comfortable than in Berkeley," said parent Chiara Juster  "She was called a "midget Jew" in the hallway between classes. But worse, after changing classes to avoid bullying, her new homeroom teacher displayed a Palestinian flag and posters calling for a cease-fire and urged students to join the after-school 'watermelon club'."

Despite parent advocacy and activism, the lack of recourse and the system of delay, deny, deflect and gaslight, as well as the toxic "restorative justice" methods were mentioned in numerous accounts of district mismanagement.

Barold recounts, "The restorative justice circle was by far the worst day of my life. MCPS denied affected Jewish students the opportunity to share our experience."
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