I am a teacher and I believe in the power of education, but I also understand its limitations. In 1996, the New York State Assembly and Senate passed legislature, signed into law by Governor Pataki, mandating a human rights curriculum where students learn about the Great Irish Famine and the right of people to food, the European Holocaust and the right of people to life, and slavery and the Underground Railroad and the right of people to freedom. I was a member of Hofstra University teams that helped write award winning Irish famine and slavery lesson packages. But despite the new human rights curriculum, there is still hunger in the world, there have been additional genocides, and racism and human bondage continue.
New York City and State initiatives supported by Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo are demanding a new school curriculum to combat hate and anti-Semitism. They are in response to a series of anti-Semitic attacks in the New York metropolitan area, including a deadly attack in Jersey City.
I anticipate an anti-hate curriculum, scheduled to be introduced in New York City during the 2020-2021 school year, will be just as ineffective as similar curriculum initiatives were in the past because it will fail, once again, to address the actual experience of students who continue to live in racially, ethnically, and economically segregated communities and, in many cases, are subject to debilitating poverty, gang violence, homelessness, and discrimination that have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
In a recent essay, Congressional representative Nita Lowey from Westchester and David Harris, chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, blamed a “resurgence of anti-Semitism,” including the armed attack on a Jewish group celebrating Hanukkah at the home of a local religious leader in Monsey, N.Y., on the “vanishing legacy of the Holocaust.” They cited recent surveys that “reveal abysmal levels of knowledge among young people about what happened to the Jewish people in the Second World War.” But more lessons in school on historic events that happened to other people in other places at other times will not stem anti-Semitic prejudices any more than lessons about slavery have ended racism in the United States.
Even more implausible to me is that the essay never mentioned the climate of hate engendered in the United States by President Donald Trump, with his incendiary tweets and speeches attacking immigrants and Muslims, and his tacit approval of white supremacist demonstrations. How will teachers and lesson plans, no matter how inventive, counter Presidential rhetoric spewed on television news and the Internet?
Another problem with the curriculum initiative is that while hate crimes increased nationwide and rose by 20% in New York City during 2019, the FBI reports that the group most victimized in the United States are Latinos. In New York City about half of hate crimes targeted Jews, but the other half were aimed at members of other groups. Calls for a curriculum to counter anti-Jewish bias may bolster politicians, but they do not address what is happening in New York City, New York State, or in Trump’s America.
Almost two-thirds of the anti-Semitic attacks in New York City are committed by teenagers in communities where expanding ultra-Orthodox Jewish congregations bring them into conflict with largely black, poorer, neighbors who feel themselves being displaced. While this is disturbing, these tensions are not addressed by mandated school lessons. The city’s Department of Education is rushing to launch hate crime awareness programs in February for public middle and high school students in areas of Brooklyn. But the ultra-Orthodox Jewish students attend private religious schools, so there will be no interaction across differences. If anything, differences may be amplified.
A new school curriculum is also not going to prevent attacks, like the one in Monsey, New York, by people who are mentally ill or the ones in Pittsburgh and Poway, California by white nationalists.
Putting an end to anti-Semitism, to racism, to anti-immigrant nativism, to gay-bashing, and to gender bias in the United States requires much more social and cultural change and government action than a new anti-Semitism/Holocaust curriculum. I suspect a curriculum initiative will provide an excuse not to address broader, underlying, social tensions.
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