The Atlantic By Franklin Foer
Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americansâand demolish the liberal order they helped establish.
Stacey Zolt hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: âIâm scared,â she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned âwalkoutâ to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didnât want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.
Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her classroom. She was trying to project calm. A public-relations executive, Zolt Hara had moved her family from Chicago to Berkeley six years earlier, hoping to find a community that shared her progressive values. Her family had developed a deep sense of belonging there.
But a moral fervor was sweeping over Berkeley High that morning. Around 10:30, the walkout began. Jewish parents traded panicked reports from their children. Zolt Hara heard that kids were chanting, âFrom the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,â a slogan that suggests the elimination of Israel. Rumors spread about other, less coy phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence. Jewish students were said to be in tears. Parents were texting one another ideas about where in the school their children could hide. Zolt Hara placed a call to the dean of students. By her own admission, she was hysterical. She says the dean hung up on her.
By the early afternoon the walkout was over, but Zolt Hara and other Jewish parents worried that it was a prelude to something worse. They joined Google Groups and WhatsApp chains so they could share information. Zolt Hara organized a petition, pleading with the school district to take anti-Semitism more seriously. It quickly received more than 1,300 signatures.
Most worrying was what parents kept hearing about teachers, both in Berkeley and in the surrounding school districts. They seemed to be using their classrooms to mold students into advocates for a maximalist vision of Palestine. A group of activists within the Oakland Education Association, that cityâs teachersâ union, sponsored a âteach-in.â A video trumpeting the event urged: âApply your labor power to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.â An estimated 70 teachers set aside their normal curriculum to fix studentsâ attention on Gaza.
Even classes with no discernible connection to international affairs joined the teach-in. Its centerpiece was a webinar titled âFrom Gaza to Oakland: How Does the Issue Connect to Us?,â in which local activists implored the kids to join them on the streets. They told the studentsâin a predominantly Black and Latino school districtâthat the Israeli military works hand in glove with American police forces, sharing tips and tactics. âRepression there ends up cycling back to repression here,â an activist named Anton explained. Elementary-school teachers, whose students were too young for the webinar, were given a list of books to use in their classes. One of them, Handalaâs Return, described how a âgroup of bullies called Zionists wanted our land, so they stole it by force and hurt many people.â
The same zeal was gripping schools in Berkeley. Zolt Hara learned from another parent about an ethnic-studies class in which the teacher had described the slaughter of some Israelis on October 7 as the result of friendly fire. She saw a disturbing image that another teacher had presented in an art class, of a fist breaking through a Star of David. (Officials at Berkeley High School did not respond to requests for comment.) In her sonâs middle school, there were signs on classroom walls that read teach Palestine.
Zolt Hara didnât need to imagine how kids might respond to these lessons. After October 7, her son, who is 13, began coming home with stories about anti-Semitic jibes hurled in his direction. On his way to math class, a kid walked up to him playing what he called a âNazi salute songâ on his phone. Another said something in German and told him, âI donât like your people.â A Manichaean view of the conflict even filtered down to the lowest grades in Berkeley. According to one parent complaint to the principal of Washington Elementary School, a second grader suggested that students divide into Israeli and Palestinian âteams,â and another announced that Palestinians couldnât be friends with Jews.
On November 17, the middle school that Zolt Haraâs son attends staged its own walkout. Zolt Hara was relieved that her son was traveling for a family event that day. But she heard about video of the protest, recorded on a parentâs phone. I tracked down the footage and watched it myself. âAre you Jewish?â one mop-haired tween asks another, seemingly unaware of any adult presence. âNo way,â the second kid replies. âI fucking hate them.â Another blurts, âKill Israel.â A student laughingly attempts to start a chant of âKKK.â
On a damp morning this winter, I joined about 40 kids assembled in a classroom at a public high school in the East Bay for a meeting of the Jewish Student Union. I promised that I wouldnât identify their school in the hopes that they might speak freely, without fear of retribution from teachers or peers. The first boy to raise his hand proudly announced that he supported a cease-fire. But as the conversation progressed, students began to recall how painful their schoolâs walkout had felt. Their classmates had left them alone with teachers, who they suspected would think less of them for having stayed put. At every stop in their education in this progressive community, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressedâand now they felt that they were being accused of being the bad guys, despite having nothing to do with events on the other side of the world, and despite the fact that Hamas had initiated the current war by invading Israeli communities and murdering an estimated 1,200 people.
At the end of the session a student in a kippah, puffer jacket, and T-shirt pulled me aside. He said he wanted to speak privately, because he didnât want to risk crying in front of his peers. After October 7, he said, his school life, as a visibly identifiable Jew, had become unbearable. Walking down the halls, kids would shout âFree Palestineâ at him. They would make the sound of explosions, as if he were personally responsible for the bombardment of Gaza. They would tell him to pick up pennies. As he was walking into the gym to use one of its courts, a kid told him, âThere goes the Jew, taking everyoneâs land.â I asked if heâd ever told any of this to an administrator. âNothing would change,â he said. Based on how other local authorities had responded to anti-Semitism, I didnât doubt him.
Like many American Jews, I once considered anti-Semitism a threat largely emanating from the right. It was Donald Trump who attracted the allegiance of white supremacists and freely borrowed their tropes. A closing ad of his 2016 presidential campaign flashed images of prominent JewsâLloyd Blankfein, Janet Yellen, and George Sorosâas it decried global special interests bleeding the people dry.
Trumpâs victory inspired anti-Semitic hate groups, long consigned to the shadows, to strut with impunity. Less than two weeks after Trumpâs election, the white nationalist Richard Spencer came to Washington, D.C., and proclaimed, âHail Trump! Hail our people!â as supporters responded with Nazi salutes. In August 2017, angry men carried tiki torches through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, âJews will not replace us.â In 2018, the consequences of violent anti-Semitic rhetoric became tangible: At the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 people were fatally shot. The following year, on the last day of Passover, at a synagogue in a San Diego suburb, a gunman killed one and wounded three others, including a rabbi.
After each incident, my anxiety about the safety of my own family and synagogue would spike, but I consoled myself with the thought that once Trump disappeared from the scene, the explosion of Jew hatred would recede. America would revert to its essential self: the most comfortable homeland in the Jewish diaspora…
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