The shocking story of the expulsion of Jewish students in one of the nation’s top K-8 schools has so many outrageous elements that two of the most important aspects have gone mostly ignored.
To review, the Free Beacon reported yesterday on a new civil-rights complaint against the prestigious Nysmith School in Virginia, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center with the state attorney general. The complaint alleges an increase in anti-Semitic harassment in the school after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. When the family of one 11-year-old student brought this to the school’s attention, they were told their child needed to “toughen up.” A particularly skin-crawling detail concerns a social studies project depicting Adolf Hitler as a strong leader, and the creepy admiration this seems to have instilled in the student body. Meanwhile, the school administration took action—by expelling the girl and her siblings.
The details of the case are alarming for reasons beyond the obvious. According to the complaint, the girl’s parents found out “that one of their daughters had been the target both of severe and pervasive anti-Semitic harassment and of bullying by other children in her class. But she had been too ashamed to tell them.”
Now how many times do you think that scenario has been replicated across the country? We know for a fact that anti-Semitic harassment is far too common in elementary schools post-Oct. 7. And yet the ones we know about probably amount to a fraction of the incidents. Even in the Nysmith case, the girl tried to avoid reporting it at first.
And you can see why. Nysmith’s response appears to have been to… cancel the school Holocaust speaker.
Of course, there’s a certain logic to this: If Nysmith is celebrating Hitler in social studies class, it would be very confusing to talk about the Holocaust, which I think we can all agree was not one of Adolf Hitler’s best moments. Better, the administration seems to have decided, not to burden the children with complexities.
What happened next was just as important. The day after the cancellation of the Holocaust program, the school apparently raised the Palestinian flag among the other national flags already raised in the gym. The juxtaposition of the two events had a rancid effect on the students: “The Palestinian flag provoked more aggressive bullying and harassment. Classmates cited it as evidence that ‘everyone hates Jews,’ taunting her that ‘we won’ and that the flag was proof that ‘nobody likes you.’”
Teachers unions and other state-backed education institutions have been relentlessly pushing anti-Zionist propaganda on their students all over the country, and they do so by making a particular argument: Bringing the Israel-Hamas war into the classroom is good for the kids, because school officials know how to guide the conversation in healthy ways that educate but don’t inflame.
What is actually happening when you bring the conflict into elementary schools like Nysmith? The students call their Jewish classmates “baby killers” and tell them they “deserve to die.”
Now, this is either because school officials can’t be trusted to convey the nuances of the conflict in a way that educates without inflaming, or else it’s the result of school officials doing their absolute best to guide the children through the weeds and sand traps of this difficult issue.
Either way, the argument in favor of turning elementary schools into debating grounds for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict disintegrates upon first contact. This isn’t about education—at Nysmith or elsewhere. It’s about the weaponization of the pro-Hamas narrative to make Jewish children suffer. And it is very obviously happening all over America.
