How to Use Your Classroom to Confront Antisemitism In Ways That Matter

Seventy-one percent of our Jewish students say they feel there’s a target on their backs, and the fact that most of us don’t know is a disturbing sign of educational failure. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish students from kindergarten through college have reported rising antisemitism (anti-Jewish hate), along with social isolation and fear.

Antisemitism, which means anti-Jewish hate, is the oldest hatred in recorded history. It appears in the Book of Exodus, where Pharaoh surveys a prosperous Jewish population and declares them a threat to be enslaved and destroyed, not for anything they have done, but for what they are. That story, which Jews around the world will retell at Passover seders in just a few weeks, is not merely ancient scripture. It is the first documented template for a pattern that has repeated itself across every civilization that has hosted Jewish communities: the identification of Jews as a problem, followed by the demand that they be eliminated.

No other group hatred has survived that many centuries, that many empires, or that many attempts to extinguish the people it targets.

This is not a both-sides story demanding attention to other groups. Conflating and comparing our students’ experiences with hate obscures what antisemitism is: a specific, ancient hatred with specific contemporary forms that educators must learn to name.

Addressing it requires three things: knowing what antisemitism is, recognizing it when it appears, and having the courage to name it out loud.

The instinct in some communities has been to pull back: avoid the topic, keep school “neutral.” But silence is neither neutral nor protective; it empowers aggressors. And silence also means not knowing what to listen for.

Consider the word “globalist.” To an untrained ear, it sounds like an economic or political descriptor. To a Jewish student, it often lands differently, because “globalist” is a modern wrapper for one of antisemitism’s oldest accusations: that Jews are a rootless, stateless people whose loyalty runs not to the nations where they live but to a hidden international network of Jewish power. The word has traveled through history in different forms: “cosmopolitan,” “internationalist,” “rootless.” But its cargo has never changed. When a student in class warns about “globalist elites” controlling governments, the antisemitic subtext is legible to most Jewish students even when they can’t articulate why it unsettles them. A teacher who doesn’t know this history hears an economic opinion. A teacher who does hears something else entirely. That gap is an antisemitism literacy problem, and it plays out in classrooms every day.

Over the past year, ADL researchers conducted focus groups with Jewish parents across New York, Chicago, California, and Washington D.C., examining how students are experiencing the surge in antisemitism in K-12 schools. A striking theme emerged consistently across all four groups: Jewish identity and antisemitism are being systematically excluded from the very DEI and non-discrimination programming designed to protect students from exactly this kind of hatred. Jewish students are sitting in schools that hold assemblies about bias, post inclusion statements in their hallways, and run social-emotional learning curricula, and none of it mentions them. The message that sends is not subtle. When every form of identity-based harm is named and addressed except yours, students notice. And they draw the reasonable conclusion that their safety is not a priority.

This is the environment educators are working in. Not a neutral one. Not an uninformed one. One that has actively organized itself around inclusion in ways that exclude Jews, and then expressed surprise when antisemitism flourished anyway.

After Oct. 7, antisemitic incidents in U.S. schools didn’t just increase; they exploded. According to the Anti-Defamation League, K-12 antisemitic incidents rose 135% in 2023, reaching 1,162 incidents, part of a nationwide surge of 360% in the three months immediately following the attack, an average of 34 anti-Jewish incidents every day. IAC School Watch, which tracks school-specific incidents, recorded an even starker picture: a 700% spike in K-12 antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents between October 7 and January 2024, averaging 27 cases per week across 25 states. These weren’t abstractions. They included students telling Jewish classmates that Israel “made up” the October 7 attack, teachers distributing anti-Israel classroom materials, and students expressing support for the massacre of Israeli children, to Israeli-American students’ faces. And the trend has not reversed: ADL’s 2024 audit recorded 9,354 total antisemitic incidents nationwide, the highest number in the 46 years ADL has tracked this data, representing an 893% increase over the past decade. Much of what students encountered went unaddressed by teachers who either didn’t recognize it or didn’t feel equipped to respond. Students reported that when teachers stayed silent, they concluded the hatred wasn’t serious enough to name.

It is serious enough. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition is the most widely adopted working definition among governments and institutions worldwide, used by the United States federal government, recommended by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has repeatedly called for its broad adoption, most recently renewing that call in the wake of October 7, and adopted by 47 national governments and more than 1,300 entities globally. Closer to home, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously passed a resolution adopting the IHRA definition, along with 37 U.S. states and nearly 100 American cities and counties. This is not a fringe framework. It is the established, consensus standard. Teachers don’t need to adjudicate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to teach it. They need to know what it says, and recognize Jew-hatred when students encounter it.

There are educators who believe that presenting “both sides” signals intellectual rigor and fairness. On most contested topics, they’re right. But antisemitism is not a contested topic. It is a form of hatred with a 3,300-year documented history, a definition ratified by 47 governments, and a death toll in the tens of millions. Asking students to debate whether Jew-hatred is wrong is not critical thinking. It is the normalization of hatred dressed up as pedagogy.

We do not ask students to debate whether anti-Black racism is a legitimate worldview. We do not structure lessons around “both sides” of misogyny. The moment we treat antisemitism as a proposition requiring rebuttal, we have already conceded something we cannot afford to concede: that Jewish safety and dignity are negotiable positions on a spectrum of reasonable opinion.

They are not. There are not two sides to hate. There is hate, and there is the refusal to tolerate it. Classrooms must be the latter.

Our research points to three specific commitments:

1. Define the terms. Before any discussion of Israel, the conflict, or related history, teach students what antisemitism is, historically, theologically and in its contemporary forms. Use the IHRA definition as a foundation. And teach the vocabulary of modern antisemitism: the tropes, the dog whistles, the coded language that sounds like political speech but functions as something older and uglier.

• Train teachers, not just students. Civil discourse skills matter, but they are insufficient without content knowledge. A teacher who can’t identify a blood libel trope can’t interrupt one. A teacher who doesn’t know what “globalist” signals can’t address it when it surfaces. Professional development must include antisemitism literacy, not just facilitation technique.

• Name the moment when it happens. When antisemitic language appears, online, in the hallway, in a class discussion, it must be addressed specifically, not folded into a generic conversation about “division” or “polarization.” Jewish students are watching to see if adults will say the word.

Confronting antisemitism in schools is not complicated in principle. It requires knowing what antisemitism is, saying so when it appears, and building in students the historical and critical literacy to recognize it themselves. Classrooms can do this. But only if we stop treating Jew-hatred as one side of a debate and start treating it as what it is: a form of bigotry with a name, a history, and a remedy.

That work is difficult. But it is also, as Jewish students across this country have reminded us again and again, overdue.