ERASIVE ANTISEMITISM

‘The myths and madness of hate’: Antisemitism in the classroom

The uptick in hostility, even in the K-12 academic space, has not happened in a vacuum. 

 

By Alyza D. Lewin 

 

JNS

Sep 10, 2025

 

 

 

Alyza D. Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, testified before the Religious Liberty Commission on Sept. 8. She was asked to speak about antisemitism in grades K-12.

U.S. President Donald Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission in May. Lewin was appointed to the commission’s legal advisory board.

The hearing was held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Below are the remarks she delivered.

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Chairman Patrick and commissioners, thank you for inviting me to appear here today.

My name is Alyza Lewin. I am president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization headquartered here in Washington, D.C., whose mission is to advance the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and to promote justice for all.

In addition, I have a law practice together with my father, Nathan Lewin, where we have handled numerous religious liberty matters, and where I had the privilege to argue the case of Zivotofsky v. Kerry before the U.S. Supreme Court. That case, which involved the right of an American citizen born in Jerusalem to list ISRAEL as the place of birth on his U.S. passport, paved the way for President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

And I am honored to have been appointed by President Trump to the Legal Advisory Board for this Commission.

I’ve joined this panel to share with you how K-12 public schools are not immune from the severe spike in antisemitism afflicting this country.

At the Brandeis Center, we hear almost daily from students and parents who have been targeted on the basis of their actual or perceived Jewish ancestry.

In Massachusetts, Jewish students were subjected to repeated bullying and harassment, including by students who gave Nazi salutes in the hallways, divided themselves into teams called “Team Auschwitz” and “Team Hamas” during athletic games, drew swastikas in notebooks and on school property, and used antisemitic slurs including “kike,” “dirty Jew,” and “go to the gas chamber.”

At a public school in North Carolina, a middle-school student who was not Jewish wore an Israeli baseball team jersey to school and was, thereafter, perceived to be Jewish. For the next two years, classmates persistently taunted and degraded the student referring to him as “dirty Jew” and “filthy Jew”; they invoked classic antisemitic stereotypes about Jews and money by calling the student a “penny picker-upper”; and they invoked the Holocaust by telling the student to “Get in a gas chamber,” “Go back to your concentration camp,” “Go to your oven Jew,” “The oven is that way” and “Go die, Jew.”

In California, a Jewish Israeli high school student was reprimanded for singing a song in Hebrew during a talent show. An administrator told her that she was “in big trouble” and that “there will be consequences” because it allegedly “made students feel unsafe and uncomfortable.” Yet other students sang songs in foreign languages at the show, including songs in Spanish and Korean; they were not reprimanded or threatened with punitive consequences. Only the student who sang in her native tongue of Hebrew—the Jewish people’s ancestral language, the language of the Bible—was rebuked.

And also in California, a 6-year-old first-grader at a public elementary school overheard older children on the school playground say “Jews are stupid” and then went home, visibly distressed, and told his parents that he wished that he wasn’t Jewish because people don’t like Jews.

These are just a few of the many stories that the Brandeis Center has heard and included in complaints that we have filed on behalf of K-12 parents and students.

This increased hostility towards Jews has not happened in a vacuum. It is facilitated by a deliberate, systematic effort to erase and deny the Jewish people’s religious, cultural, ethnic and ancestral history in the land of Israel. In a growing number of K-12 classes today, Jews and Israelis are portrayed as “colonizers” and “oppressors,” guilty of a litany of evils. But it’s not possible to colonize a place where your ancestors are from. You cannot call Jews colonizers without first erasing the Bible and centuries of Jewish history.

There is a term for this. “Erasive Antisemitism.” This antisemitism ignores evidence of the Jewish people’s ancient and continuous presence in the land of Israel, including evidence exhibited here in the Museum of the Bible. Erasive antisemitism erases and denies who Jews really are and creates a false evil narrative in its place, indoctrinating students and the school community to hate Jews.

So how should we address this?

First, we must develop zero tolerance for erasive antisemitism. Push back against those who rewrite history and deny the Jewish people’s ancestral connection to their biblical homeland.

Second, hold the bullies accountable. Far too often, schools seek to address the situation by removing Jewish students from the hostile environment rather than by ending the harassment the Jewish students have endured. For example, schools have offered to take a Jewish student out of a particular class, arrange private tutoring or even permit a Jewish student to study from home. These, however, are not solutions because they isolate and ostracize the Jewish students while failing to address the underlying Jew hatred.

Third, institute effective training to educate the school community to recognize contemporary manifestations of antisemitism. Teach students, faculty and staff that it is never OK to demand that Jews disavow their history and heritage in order to be accepted.

We have seen the wave of antisemitism sweeping across college and university campuses, particularly in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. If we want to turn that tide, we must ensure that our elementary, middle, and high schools are not teaching our children to hate. We need to empower our students to recognize the myths and seek the truth.

Let me close my remarks with a quote from the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, which includes the United Kingdom. Rabbi Sacks once noted, when commenting on antisemitism, that irrational hate does not die. He then added, “but neither does the Jewish people. Attacked so many times over the centuries, it still lives, giving testimony to the victory of the God of love over the myths and madness of hate.”

Rabbi Sack’s words sum up the task of this commission: to help ensure the victory of the God of love over the myths and madness of hate.

Thank you.