Elite Private Schools Are Teaching Antisemitism

By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Thursday, August 22, 2024

 

While most people were busy living, progressives quietly captured the schools. As a result of this decades-long project, young Americans now finish high school fluent in both anti-Americanism and antisemitism. Congress probed antisemitism in public K–12 schools earlier this year. Independent schools, however, deserve their own scrutiny.

 

Only 10 percent of American students attend private, or independent, schools. But these schools punch above their weight. “While only about 1% of the schools in America” affiliate with the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS), “nearly one-third of Biden’s cabinet attended these schools,” Undercover Mother, a Substack that covers independent schools, has noted.

 

“These schools have been leading in DEI for 20 to 30 years,” says Ashley Jacobs, executive director of Parents Unite, a nonprofit that promotes intellectual diversity and free expression in independent schools. There’s now “suffocating empathy everywhere.” DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) “comes out in a more sophisticated way at private schools because they have more money,” observes Kate Hudson, founder of Education Veritas, a nonprofit organization that informs the public about developments in public and private schools and colleges.

 

“Every bit of this stuff is tested in private schools because they’re a black box,” says a mother whose children graduated from a Hill School in New York City. “Trustees sign off on everything. They have unlimited money, and they can do whatever they want.” This is happening nationwide in schools that are “church-affiliated, secular, single-sex, coed, rural, suburban, urban.” In short, it’s pervasive.

 

Displeased parents often keep their children in these schools because “it’s the same everywhere,” explains Rose Bronstein, a Chicago independent-school parent. “Pick your poison, public or private. Parents like me, who use private school, think your child will be protected [and] won’t get this kind of curriculum. They try to cover it up with words. DEI is a cover-up for CRT [critical race theory]. ‘Social emotional learning’ sounds good to a layperson; it’s code for CRT and DEI. They keep changing the words until we catch on.”

 

The challenges that Jewish students face at independent schools are “just a symptom,” says the Hill School mother. “The issue is far bigger. If they’re not attacked for being Jewish, they’ll be attacked for being white or having parents who are wealthy [or] care about education.”

 

DEI holds that the world is binary. Groups of people are either “oppressors” or “oppressed,” and within DEI’s framework, Jews are white “oppressors.” Anything that contradicts that narrative is dismissed or summarily rewritten.

 

One New York City parent, whose children are now in college, recalled a decade-old incident. When her daughter was in sixth grade at a top school in the city, “she got the social-studies teacher that everyone wanted.” At back-to-school night, this teacher was “impressive, bright, engaging, and fun.” But the girl’s parents were struck by the classroom’s world map, where all of Israel was labeled “Palestine.”

 

“It was a topic of conversation in my house for days,” the parent continues. Because this teacher “was not picking on our Jewish kid” and “our child was not confused — she knew that the teacher had it wrong,” the parents didn’t protest. Instead, “we made it a priority to reeducate our kids as needed.” That reeducation became so customary, the children “sometimes would roll their eyes and say, ‘I get it.’ And they do. But what about the non-Jewish kids who are not being told by their parents that it’s wrong to refer to the State of Israel as ‘Palestine’?” This parent reflected: “When I think back, I wish I had not been silent. We need to stand up and call out even the subtle antisemitic tropes. And calling Israel ‘Palestine’ is not subtle.”

 

Jewish families in the Los Angeles area have faced their own challenges. Lori Weisskopf, mother of two Harvard-Westlake School graduates, recalls that in October 2022 her daughter found swastikas and the sentence “Hitler rocks” carved into her desk. In emails Weisskopf shared, the family reported the incident to school administrators, describing themselves as “shocked and disappointed.” A top administrator quickly replied, saying that he and his colleagues were “horrified” and promising to “do everything we can to identify the perpetrator and, more importantly, to educate our community about antisemitism and prevent further experiences like this one.” The administrator added, “Please do not share the pictures of the carvings, and please let us know if there are other students who you know saw the carvings and would benefit from some outreach from us right away.” Weisskopf was taken aback by that final sentence, reading it as redirecting concern from her daughter’s well-being to the school’s reputation.

 

The school subsequently met with tenth- through twelfth-graders to discuss opposing all hate speech, including antisemitism. Weisskopf was “frustrated and angered” that the administrator “claimed they were focused on finding the perpetrator” but tried to lower expectations by saying it “could have been anyone” — even someone unaffiliated with Harvard-Westlake. That seemed implausible, given the school’s security. Weisskopf also considered the school’s focus misplaced. She felt that Harvard-Westlake treated the incident as an isolated incident rather than as proof that antisemitism was resurgent and that Harvard-Westlake had not sufficiently educated the school community about it. And she was unhappy that neither administrator who promised to check on her daughter ever did.

 

A Harvard-Westlake spokesman was unaware that an administrator had advised a parent not to share photos of antisemitic graffiti. He shared a schoolwide letter that read, “This is an offense to all of us, not just our Jewish students and community members,” and that promised to treat the incident “with the utmost seriousness,” naming some corrective steps the school would take. The spokesman mentioned that Harvard-Westlake hosted speakers from the ADL and added a mandatory “field trip to the Museum of Tolerance.” He did not answer when asked whether the perpetrator was ever identified.

 

Former Brentwood School parent Jerome Eisenberg found the state of things so disturbing, he sued. “Our complaints were about latent antisemitism,” he says. “It was a situation where every group in the school had an affinity group. They created these after George Floyd. When we asked for a Jewish affinity group, it was backpedaled, in our opinion. They required two faculty advisers instead of one. You couldn’t be ‘political.’ People requesting it weren’t allowed to be officers. The school had to pick officers. That was our experience.”

 

Eisenberg’s attorney, civil-injury lawyer David Pivtorak, says the suit has been “resolved on mutually acceptable terms” and adds, “The complaint in the case alleged those [affinity groups] wielded some influence on general policies within the school. It alleged every other group had an affinity group, but Jewish parents were sandbagged, delayed, and essentially denied until it was too late to make any changes.” The Brentwood School did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Another Los Angeles–area independent-school parent relates that, during the 2021–22 school year, “they instituted race-based affinity groups” for elementary-school students “where kids that are not that ethnicity are not allowed to join the group.” She continues, “I wouldn’t want my kid to participate in any affinity groups. It’s like segregation. If you’re a white kid or Jewish, you didn’t have a group you could belong to.”

 

During the 2022–23 school year, the parent continues, “they decided to add the ‘white anti-racist group.’ Now it’s even worse. . . . There’s no Jewish group, so any white, Jewish kids have to join the white anti-racist group. The name says you’re racist; you need to learn how to not be a racist. . . . The first day of the meetings of these groups, . . . eight white and Jewish girls hid in the bathroom so they wouldn’t have to join the anti-racist group.” The parent concludes, “A lot of people think” that banishing DEI “is a right-wing, MAGA thing, but it has nothing to do with politics.”

 

DEI permeates independent schools in several ways. A California independent-school parent pointed to guest speakers including Angela Davis, whom the Amcha Initiative, which tracks campus antisemitism, has called “a well known anti-Zionist who aggressively promotes boycotts of the Jewish state and has condoned terrorism against it.” Davis, the California parent said, has addressed elite schools such as Choate and Andover “for decades.”

 

The California parent points also to the Klingenstein Center Heads of Schools Program at Teachers College, affiliated with Columbia University. That’s where heads of school “are cultivated and programmed in the NAIS agenda.” It “looks like a prestigious fellowship, but that’s one way the ideology seeps into every aspect of a school.” Two search firms specialize in placing fellows at “the most traditional and most elite academic NAIS private schools around the country.” Fellows then “ensure the institutions are captured from within and either lead or allow others within the institution to carry out the agenda,” including curricular changes and increased DEI spending. Teachers College did not respond to a request for comment.

 

Additionally, there are conferences and well-compensated DEI consultants. One such consultant, “a Nation of Islam person” whom the Hill School mother calls “absolutely poisonous,” addressed NAIS’s People of Color Conference for independent-school educators last fall. According to the California parent, the event featured speakers who favored “freeing Palestine,” and children’s books were available “about genocide in Gaza, . . . straight indoctrination picture books.”

 

A Virginia independent-school parent recounted her teenager’s experience last fall at NAIS’s Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC), which ran concurrently with the People of Color Conference. The Student Diversity Leadership Conference began as “a great learning experience.” But that changed when students began delivering minute-long extemporaneous speeches.

 

Videos taken by other attendees show a teenager spending nearly five minutes on “the genocide” that is “going on in Palestine.” He said, “Many people are like blaming Hamas,” but Israel “put these people . . . under like terrible, horrible conditions over like so many years. . . . What did you expect from these people?” The crowd roared approvingly. He continued: “Hamas has only like done like the event for only one day, and the whole world, the whole media is blaming for that one day.” He criticized social-media companies for favoring Israel and said that there is no “real freedom of expression” in the U.S. or Europe. His example of people being punished for opposing Israel was a student sent to the principal for scrawling “Free Palestine” in a school bathroom. He said that the school’s reaction was “confusing between like antisemitism and like anti-Israel, which is like different things.” The audience applauded enthusiastically.

 

In that room of 2,000 students, approximately 20 to 40 were Jewish. The daughter of the Virginia parent “was sitting with one other Jewish girl” from the event’s Jewish affinity group. “Behind her, she heard, ‘F*** the Jews! F*** Israel!’ ” Both Jewish girls “were very shaken” and gathered with other Jewish attendees. One of the “three adult facilitators for the Jewish affinity group” cried. “One child cried so much she was vomiting.” While Jewish students “sequestered themselves in this room, they heard somebody in the hallway saying, ‘Heil Hitler!’ ” One sobbing student was approached by “an NAIS employee . . . to find out why she was upset, and basically [the employee] told her that [the employee] didn’t think anything was wrong with what had been said, and that it didn’t resonate that way with her.” Many Jewish students wanted to leave at that point and called to ask whether their chaperones could arrive earlier than planned — but to no avail, as it turned out, for most of those students.

 

“My daughter came back to the hotel room and was crying hysterically all night,” the Virginia parent says. “I was on the phone with her. . . . We had two weeks where I had to sleep in her room with her. She was really traumatized. She’d never been exposed to anything like that before. She felt hated and in fear for her safety.”

 

The speaker who denounced Israel is “just a kid,” the parent acknowledges. “Who I really blame are the moderators and organization, who failed to set appropriate guidelines, which resulted in many children feeling afraid and unsafe at a conference designed to celebrate diversity and inclusion, and who then failed to offer any resolution or apology.”

 

An NAIS spokesperson says that the SDLC conference “aims to help students navigate complex and often challenging conversations respectfully. Students are invited to share their perspectives in various settings. . . . The remarks in question came from a student commenter. Some students were deeply offended by the comments. These students reached out to SDLC faculty members, who worked to support them and to facilitate discussions. As an organization, NAIS condemns antisemitism in all forms, and our work — at SDLC and more broadly — strives to embrace diversity and champion inclusivity.”

 

Some parents, however, would counter that last year’s SDLC is one more example of the frequent failing by independent schools to truly include or protect Jewish students. Jewish parents and their allies in combating antisemitism are, indeed, in a morass, but there are two possible ways out. The first is to seed new classical schools. The second is to reform existing institutions.

 

Reflecting on DEI and its antisemitism, chilling of speech, and unpopularity in opinion polls, Ashley Jacobs, the Parents Unite director, observes, “This goes away if people have the courage to speak up.” The California parent estimates that this would require “20 percent of people.” So will parents speak up? And if not now, when?