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Jewish advocates demand policy changes to combat antisemitism at NYC public high schools

(New York Jewish Week) – About three weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, a parents’ group that advocates for New York City public high school students unanimously passed a resolution condemning the attack and demanding support for students and staff facing antisemitism.

The resolution by the Citywide Council on High Schools came in response to the Hamas attack and subsequent reports of swastikas in schools, but the bigotry it condemned did not seem to abate. Ten days later, a pro-Palestinian student walkout saw young people shouting epithets against Jews and Israel, and chanting in support of an intifada. Then, on Nov. 28, an unruly protest targeting a Jewish teacher at Hillcrest High School in Queens sparked an uproar.

“It clearly showed that that resolution wasn’t strong enough and that those resources were not being provided,” said Rachel Fremmer, the council’s second vice president. She added that the resolution, which passed on Oct. 30, had garnered a lot of pushback in public comments.

So last week, the council tried again: It passed another resolution, by a vote of 7-1, demanding more concrete measures. Those include antisemitism training for school employees; a task force including representatives of Jewish groups that will monitor efforts to fight antisemitism; a hotline to report antisemitic incidents; data collection on in-school hate crimes; and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which includes some criticism of Israel.

The council, which acts as an advisory board of sorts to the city’s public school system, is one of several advocacy groups raising the alarm about antisemitism in high schools as anti-Jewish hate crimes have spiked citywide in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. While public discourse on antisemitism in schools has largely focused on college campuses, a series of activists say that the same trends are manifesting in New York City’s high schools, and that City Hall has been slow to respond.

Hard data on antisemitic incidents at New York City public schools is not available, but concern about the issue is not limited to volunteer groups or parents. On Nov. 30, the federal Department of Education’s civil rights office announced that it would investigate New York City Public Schools over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia — a step it has generally reserved for college campuses.

“We’re hearing from parents and families daily about the hate that their children are facing in schools and they’re scared,” said Tova Plaut, a staff member for Manhattan’s District 2 school district, who helps train teachers and plan curricula. Plaut is a co-founder of the New York City Public School Alliance, a group formed in the wake of the Hillcrest incident to combat antisemitism in the city’s schools.

“They worry about the future,” she added. “Not just the future of their children in the school system but also the children who are graduating from the school system with these ideologies.”

New York City Public Schools Chancellor David Banks has acknowledged that antisemitism is a problem at the schools he oversees and told CBS earlier this month that “we have to take action.”

“Many of the adults in our schools also shy away from these kinds of politically fraught topics because no one wants to be accused of being anti anything, and yet we have a responsibility to our kids that we do this,” Banks, whose department declined New York Jewish Week requests for an interview, told CBS. “People are treading very lightly here but they’ve got to know that you can’t put your head in the sand. We’ve got to have those conversations for everyone.”

Banks said he was considering setting up a hotline for students and teachers and was scheduled to hold a press conference on countering antisemitism earlier this week, but the event was canceled. A spokesperson for the school system said Banks would instead be engaging with stakeholders directly, and did not respond to a request for further information.

That engagement appears to be happening. Banks said he has met with school administrators to discuss antisemitism and the New York Jewish Week has confirmed that Banks or his office have discussed antisemitism with a series of Jewish organizations and public officials. Those include the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the Jewish Education Project, Plaut’s group, acting Israeli consul general Tsach Saar and the New York City Council’s Common Sense Caucus, a group of conservative city lawmakers.

Several of those groups said the chancellor had been supportive of Jewish students and understanding of their concerns. Others are hoping for more from the city’s education department. Plaut said the canceled press conference and the “lack of a proactive response raises serious concerns regarding his commitment to eradicating antisemitism in our school system.”

Her group has demanded that the school system adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, take a zero-tolerance policy toward antisemitism and restructure how schools address diversity and inclusion so that those programs cover antisemitism and Jewish heritage.

The Israeli consulate said it had pushed for a zero-tolerance policy for antisemitic incidents and for education on topics including the Holocaust, antisemitism and the modern history of Israel.

Republican New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, an outspoken critic of anti-Israel activism and a member of the Common Sense Caucus, said City Council members had also demanded repercussions for teachers and students engaging in antisemitism. She added that they want to see educational programming to address the issue, including lessons on the Holocaust, citing polls showing widespread ignorance about the Holocaust among young people in the United States.

Vernikov said antisemitism in schools was something she had “been hearing about for a long time,” and added, “Jewish students are getting bullied.”

For years, Holocaust education has been the centerpiece of the education department’s effort to combat antisemitism among New York City youth. In 2020, the public school system piloted a program that brought groups of eighth and 10th graders on tours of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a Holocaust museum in Lower Manhattan.

That program is ongoing, with approximately 5,000 students visiting the museum every month, the museum told the New York Jewish Week. Educators from the museum also visit classes in 20 schools and accompany them on their visits, the museum said.

Richard Carranza, who headed the city’s public schools from 2018 to 2021, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2020 that the student tours of the Museum of Jewish Heritage were about “understanding that symbols have meanings.” Referring to swastikas, he said, “Don’t use these kinds of symbols if you don’t know what they mean.”

The museum told JTA that since Oct. 7, some teachers had reached out ahead of visits to tell the museum that students had been making antisemitic comments. In response, the museum is creating a glossary of antisemitic tropes and terms with historical context. It will also give future groups of visiting students anti-bias and de-escalation training.

“We know we cannot teach them everything they need to know in a single visit, but the hope is we spark something in them to continue to learn,” the museum said in a statement.

Now, some Jewish educational professionals say schools should address antisemitic incidents by discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more directly. Sharon Jacker, the director of the New York Education Initiative at the Jewish Education Project, said the massive scale of New York’s school system — with 1 million students in over 1,800 schools — makes system-wide changes difficult.

She encouraged individual schools and teachers to tackle the subject, though New York State education standards do not include guidelines on the modern geopolitics of the Middle East. Jacker said she’s found that teachers are reluctant to engage such a fraught topic, and two public high school students told the New York Jewish Week that none of their classes discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Instead, said the students, who asked to remain anonymous, their peers formed their opinions based on social media and conversations at home.

“Teachers are smart and they see around them that this is a can of worms, it’s fraught,” Jacker said. “And if you don’t have to open a can of worms and get a parent upset or a student upset or an administrator upset, it’s just much easier not to.”

Jacker, who has met with Banks since Oct. 7, said teachers should discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in class and use primary sources that explore the conflict from “a really balanced, nuanced point of view.” She recommended materials from the Institute for Curriculum Services, an affiliate of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council that provides educational resources on Jewish history.

Teachers may already be addressing the conflict in their classrooms. A Jewish teacher who has taught at city public schools for two decades, and declined to give her name for fear of professional repercussions, said that since Oct. 7 her colleagues have worn keffiyehs, or traditional Palestinian headscarves, to work; put up pro-Palestinian messaging in school and worked the narrative into classes such as literature and social studies.

“I can tell you they won’t look at me anymore. My colleagues won’t talk to me anymore. Not all of them, but some of them,” she said, adding that she has not expressed support for Israel while at school. “I don’t wear any pin of Israel, I don’t have a flag. The only thing is I’m Jewish.”

School policy bans teachers from engaging in political activity in school, but the rule wasn’t being enforced, she said.

“They’re getting very skewed information,” she said of the students. “I don’t know if other people are not aware of it, I don’t know if they’re looking the other way.”

Rabbi Rena Rifkin, who works with about 250 middle and high school students as the director of youth education at the Reform Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan, said that Oct. 7 had “opened the floodgates,” and made students more aware of persistent antisemitism, but that school hasn’t given them tools to cope with it.

“I’m concerned that our students don’t have a safe haven to process what they’re seeing and hearing, and what that means for them to feel so targeted,” Rifkin said.

To find that space, some students are turning to extracurricular Jewish groups at their schools and beyond, some of which have themselves had to contend with antisemitism. The Orthodox Union’s Jewish Student Union, which has chapters in 30 public high schools in the New York City area, said two of its clubs in Brooklyn had been harassed with anti-Israel rhetoric. The group sent JTA a photo of a swastika drawn on a stairwell of one of the schools. A member of another club was bombarded with hate messages on social media.

Most clubs have around 30 students attending on a weekly basis, said the group director, Rabbi Yossi Schwartz, who added that they saw an uptick in attendance after Oct. 7. Schwartz said he prefers to focus on the way participants are expressing their Judaism positively — by lighting Shabbat or Hanukkah candles, for example.

“We mourned, we not understood, but processed, what happened, and now we need to move on to the next thing,” Schwartz said. “Yes, it’s a scary world out there, there’s no question about it for a Jewish person, but we don’t fight back by hiding.”

Rabbi Tracy Kaplowitz runs programs at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue that teach teens about Israel, criticism of it and philanthropy. While a range of voices are calling on schools to more proactively address antisemitism, Kaplowitz cautioned that Jews should not depend on the education system to provide care for students’ Jewish identity.

“If we rely on the media, public schools, private schools to deliver what should be a part of our kids’ Jewish education, they’re going to do a terrible job at it,” she said. “And they’re going to leave our kids lost.”


The post Jewish advocates demand policy changes to combat antisemitism at NYC public high schools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire

Explosions send smoke into the air in Gaza, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, July 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

The spokesperson for Hamas’s armed wing said on Friday that while the Palestinian terrorist group favors reaching an interim truce in the Gaza war, if such an agreement is not reached in current negotiations it could revert to insisting on a full package deal to end the conflict.

Hamas has previously offered to release all the hostages held in Gaza and conclude a permanent ceasefire agreement, and Israel has refused, Abu Ubaida added in a televised speech.

Arab mediators Qatar and Egypt, backed by the United States, have hosted more than 10 days of talks on a US-backed proposal for a 60-day truce in the war.

Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement on a call he had with Pope Leo on Friday that Israel‘s efforts to secure a hostage release deal and 60-day ceasefire “have so far not been reciprocated by Hamas.”

As part of the potential deal, 10 hostages held in Gaza would be returned along with the bodies of 18 others, spread out over 60 days. In exchange, Israel would release a number of detained Palestinians.

“If the enemy remains obstinate and evades this round as it has done every time before, we cannot guarantee a return to partial deals or the proposal of the 10 captives,” said Abu Ubaida.

Disputes remain over maps of Israeli army withdrawals, aid delivery mechanisms into Gaza, and guarantees that any eventual truce would lead to ending the war, said two Hamas officials who spoke to Reuters on Friday.

The officials said the talks have not reached a breakthrough on the issues under discussion.

Hamas says any agreement must lead to ending the war, while Netanyahu says the war will only end once Hamas is disarmed and its leaders expelled from Gaza.

Almost 1,650 Israelis and foreign nationals have been killed as a result of the conflict, including 1,200 killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, according to Israeli tallies. Over 250 hostages were kidnapped during Hamas’s Oct. 7 onslaught.

Israel responded with an ongoing military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.

The post Hamas Says No Interim Hostage Deal Possible Without Work Toward Permanent Ceasefire first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel

People hold images of the victims of the 1994 bombing attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center, marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Irina Dambrauskas

Iran on Friday marked the 31st anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires by slamming Argentina for what it called “baseless” accusations over Tehran’s alleged role in the terrorist attack and accusing Israel of politicizing the atrocity to influence the investigation and judicial process.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on the anniversary of Argentina’s deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.

“While completely rejecting the accusations against Iranian citizens, the Islamic Republic of Iran condemns attempts by certain Argentine factions to pressure the judiciary into issuing baseless charges and politically motivated rulings,” the statement read.

“Reaffirming that the charges against its citizens are unfounded, the Islamic Republic of Iran insists on restoring their reputation and calls for an end to this staged legal proceeding,” it continued.

Last month, a federal judge in Argentina ordered the trial in absentia of 10 Iranian and Lebanese nationals suspected of orchestrating the attack in Buenos Aires.

The ten suspects set to stand trial include former Iranian and Lebanese ministers and diplomats, all of whom are subject to international arrest warrants issued by Argentina for their alleged roles in the terrorist attack.

In its statement on Friday, Iran also accused Israel of influencing the investigation to advance a political campaign against the Islamist regime in Tehran, claiming the case has been used to serve Israeli interests and hinder efforts to uncover the truth.

“From the outset, elements and entities linked to the Zionist regime [Israel] exploited this suspicious explosion, pushing the investigation down a false and misleading path, among whose consequences was to disrupt the long‑standing relations between the people of Iran and Argentina,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said.

“Clear, undeniable evidence now shows the Zionist regime and its affiliates exerting influence on the Argentine judiciary to frame Iranian nationals,” the statement continued.

In April, lead prosecutor Sebastián Basso — who took over the case after the 2015 murder of his predecessor, Alberto Nisman — requested that federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issue national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over his alleged involvement in the attack.

Since 2006, Argentine authorities have sought the arrest of eight Iranians — including former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died in 2017 — yet more than three decades after the deadly bombing, all suspects remain still at large.

In a post on X, the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA), the country’s Jewish umbrella organization, released a statement commemorating the 31st anniversary of the bombing.

“It was a brutal attack on Argentina, its democracy, and its rule of law,” the group said. “At DAIA, we continue to demand truth and justice — because impunity is painful, and memory is a commitment to both the present and the future.”

Despite Argentina’s longstanding belief that Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group carried out the devastating attack at Iran’s request, the 1994 bombing has never been claimed or officially solved.

Meanwhile, Tehran has consistently denied any involvement and refused to arrest or extradite any suspects.

To this day, the decades-long investigation into the terrorist attack has been plagued by allegations of witness tampering, evidence manipulation, cover-ups, and annulled trials.

In 2006, former prosecutor Nisman formally charged Iran for orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah for carrying it out.

Nine years later, he accused former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — currently under house arrest on corruption charges — of attempting to cover up the crime and block efforts to extradite the suspects behind the AMIA atrocity in return for Iranian oil.

Nisman was killed later that year, and to this day, both his case and murder remain unresolved and under ongoing investigation.

The alleged cover-up was reportedly formalized through the memorandum of understanding signed in 2013 between Kirchner’s government and Iranian authorities, with the stated goal of cooperating to investigate the AMIA bombing.

The post Iran Marks 31st Anniversary of AMIA Bombing by Slamming Argentina’s ‘Baseless’ Accusations, Blaming Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns

Murad Adailah, the head of Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, attends an interview with Reuters in Amman, Jordan, Sept. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jehad Shelbak

The Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements, has been implicated in a wide-ranging network of illegal financial activities in Jordan and abroad, according to a new investigative report.

Investigations conducted by Jordanian authorities — along with evidence gathered from seized materials — revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood raised tens of millions of Jordanian dinars through various illegal activities, the Jordan news agency (Petra) reported this week.

With operations intensifying over the past eight years, the report showed that the group’s complex financial network was funded through various sources, including illegal donations, profits from investments in Jordan and abroad, and monthly fees paid by members inside and outside the country.

The report also indicated that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken advantage of the war in Gaza to raise donations illegally.

Out of all donations meant for Gaza, the group provided no information on where the funds came from, how much was collected, or how they were distributed, and failed to work with any international or relief organizations to manage the transfers properly.

Rather, the investigations revealed that the Islamist network used illicit financial mechanisms to transfer funds abroad.

According to Jordanian authorities, the group gathered more than JD 30 million (around $42 million) over recent years.

With funds transferred to several Arab, regional, and foreign countries, part of the money was allegedly used to finance domestic political campaigns in 2024, as well as illegal activities and cells.

In April, Jordan outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most vocal opposition group, and confiscated its assets after members of the Islamist movement were found to be linked to a sabotage plot.

The movement’s political arm in Jordan, the Islamic Action Front, became the largest political grouping in parliament after elections last September, although most seats are still held by supporters of the government.

Opponents of the group, which is banned in most Arab countries, label it a terrorist organization. However, the movement claims it renounced violence decades ago and now promotes its Islamist agenda through peaceful means.

The post Jordan Reveals Muslim Brotherhood Operating Vast Illegal Funding Network Tied to Gaza Donations, Political Campaigns first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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