BAD EDUCATION
Students are embracing their feelings about the war in Gaza — and turning anti-Israel in the process
AS campus antisemitism mounted over the past decade, we tragically misdiagnosed the problem — and therefore massively misaligned the treatment. Government, civil society, and Jewish groups have interpreted antisemitism as a problem of improper emotion: too much hate. And so policies and programs have focused on promoting empathy for Jews’ past and current injuries — most especially the Holocaust — while providing a dose of John Lennonstyle universal love.
But despite growing investment in this approach, campus harassment and deadly synagogue attacks grew and grew. And since Hamas’ assault on Israel on Oct. 7, antisemitism has skyrocketed — particularly in academic settings and in the violent demonstrations they spew forth.
This is because emotion wasn’t the problem. Antisemitism has grown to record-breaking proportions in the US because, as a society and in our educational systems, we treat emotion as actionable fact.
This trend is not exclusively a problem for Jews. It is feeding a generation of young people who cannot reason from data, taught that to do so is racist and lacks empathy. As documented in Abigail Shrier’s recent book, “Bad Therapy,” and “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, this crisis is creating a generation who are psychological wrecks, unable to put their feelings aside and just engage life’s tensions.
But for Jews, this trend holds particular danger, by constraining students to understand world events through the frame of emotions rather than critical thinking. The mechanisms of this were perfectly encapsulated in a recent forum, led predominately by New York City Department of Education middleschool teachers, on how to teach students to properly despise Zionism —without being sanctioned by school administrators or parents for doing it.
The “Curriculum Share for Palestine” opened with commitments by all to a shared emotional setting. A kickoff “land acknowledgment” ensured all feel bad about the dispossessed Native American tribes, and feel loathing toward American settlers and the nation they created. These feelings then get officially extended toward Palestinians: “As educators committed to doing our part in the fight for Palestinian liberation…let’s remember struggles are interconnected.”
Then, participants received a list of acceptable emotions for engaging in the discussion. You can only ask questions that “come from” the right place and you must “understand that anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism.”
As it unfolded, the meeting’s brainstorming was not actually about curricula in the traditional sense; rather, participating teachers strategized on how to connect children’s feelings to ordained feelings about Zionism.
For instance, in Eva Ackerman’s social-studies class at MS 594 in the South Bronx: “we’ve been talking a lot about settler-colonialism in what is now the United States and that is what [Zionism’s] connected to.”
She pondered how to use “Zionist text” with her predominantly Dominican, Puerto Rican and West African students, “to connect it to their lived realities in some way.”
Session leader and longtime New York City social-studies teacher Arax Tramblian LeFevre shared a curriculum she developed with the Progressive Classroom Project titled “What Is Zionism?” With no embarrassment, she described her goal as aligning students around the proper feelings about Israel. She views this two-part “job” as, first: “to help the 12-year-old boy who's an amazing kid, whose parents identify as strongly Zionist, to understand why the ideology is both harmful and offensive to others.”
Second, she wants, “my students who were raised in households that value and teach Palestinian liberation… to understand why some of their classmates . . . have love for what they believe the state of Israel stands for." And yes, LeFevre noted, she teaches this curriculum after her unit on “Holocaust studies.”
The notion that in their brief modules about Zionism, Israel, and Palestinians, teachers will provide a full understanding of the conflict proves that substance is not the goal here; teaching students how to feel about the conflict is what they’re really after. In fact, as many participating teachers shared anecdotally, you can accomplish exactly that in just a few chat sessions during “social justice through music” class or “socialemotional learning” time.
It is urgently important that educators shift support away from counterproductive “anti-hate” programs administered in this toxic framework. Instead, we should invest in policies that prevent coaching pupils in emotion rather than in substance.
Students don’t need to know or agree on each other’s feelings to study or debate a topic. And as long as teachers keep forcing them to, the easiest emotion to rally consensus on will continue to be hatred for Jews.