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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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Switzerland Moves to Close Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s Geneva Office Over Legal Irregularities

Palestinians carry aid supplies received from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the central Gaza Strip, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed/File Photo

Switzerland has moved to shut down the Geneva office of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US- and Israeli-backed aid group, citing legal irregularities in its establishment.

The GHF began distributing food packages in Gaza in late May, implementing a new aid delivery model aimed at preventing the diversion of supplies by Hamas, as Israel continues its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group.

The initiative has drawn criticism from the UN and international organizations, some of which have claimed that Jerusalem is causing starvation in the war-torn enclave.

Israel has vehemently denied such accusations, noting that, until its recently imposed blockade, it had provided significant humanitarian aid in the enclave throughout the war.

Israeli officials have also said much of the aid that flows into Gaza is stolen by Hamas, which uses it for terrorist operations and sells the rest at high prices to Gazan civilians.

With a subsidiary registered in Geneva, the GHF — headquartered in Delaware — reports having delivered over 56 million meals to Palestinians in just one month.

According to a regulatory announcement published Wednesday in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce, the Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations (ESA) may order the dissolution of the GHF if no creditors come forward within the legal 30-day period.

The Trump administration did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the Swiss decision to shut down its Geneva office.

“The GHF confirmed to the ESA that it had never carried out activities in Switzerland … and that it intends to dissolve the Geneva-registered branch,” the ESA said in a statement.

Last week, Geneva authorities gave the GHF a 30-day deadline to address legal shortcomings or risk facing enforcement measures.

Under local laws and regulations, the foundation failed to meet several requirements: it did not appoint a board member authorized to sign documents domiciled in Switzerland, did not have the minimum three board members, lacked a Swiss bank account and valid address, and operated without an auditing body.

The GHF operates independently from UN-backed mechanisms, which Hamas has sought to reinstate, arguing that these vehicles are more neutral.

Israeli and American officials have rejected those calls, saying Hamas previously exploited UN-run systems to siphon aid for its war effort.

The UN has denied those allegations while expressing concerns that the GHF’s approach forces civilians to risk their safety by traveling long distances across active conflict zones to reach food distribution points.

The post Switzerland Moves to Close Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s Geneva Office Over Legal Irregularities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Key US Lawmaker Warns Ireland of Potential Economic Consequences for ‘Antisemitic Path’ Against Israel

US Sen. James Risch (R-ID) speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Washington, DC, May 21, 2024. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch (R-ID) issued a sharp warning Tuesday, accusing Ireland of embracing antisemitism and threatening potential economic consequences if the Irish government proceeds with new legislation targeting Israeli trade.

“Ireland, while often a valuable U.S. partner, is on a hateful, antisemitic path that will only lead to self-inflicted economic suffering,” Risch wrote in a post on X. “If this legislation is implemented, America will have to seriously reconsider its deep and ongoing economic ties. We will always stand up to blatant antisemitism.”

Marking a striking escalation in rhetoric from a senior US lawmaker, Risch’s comments came amid growing tensions between Ireland and Israel, which have intensified dramatically since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Those attacks, in which roughly 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, prompted a months-long Israeli military campaign in Gaza that has drawn widespread international scrutiny. Ireland has positioned itself as one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s response, accusing the Israeli government of disproportionate use of force and calling for immediate humanitarian relief and accountability for the elevated number of Palestinian civilian casualties.

Dublin’s stance has included tangible policy shifts. In May 2024, Ireland formally recognized a Palestinian state, becoming one of the first European Union members to do so following the outbreak of the war in Gaza. The move was condemned by Israeli officials, who recalled their ambassador to Ireland and accused the Irish government of legitimizing terrorism. Since then, Irish lawmakers have proposed further measures, including legislation aimed at restricting imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, policies viewed in Israel and among many American lawmakers as aligning with the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

While Irish leaders have defended their approach as grounded in international law and human rights, critics in Washington, including Risch, have portrayed it as part of a broader pattern of hostility toward Israel. Some US lawmakers have begun raising the possibility of reevaluating trade and diplomatic ties with Ireland in response.

Risch’s warning is one of the clearest indications yet that Ireland’s policies toward Israel could carry economic consequences. The United States is one of Ireland’s largest trading partners, and American companies such as Apple, Google, Meta and Pfizer maintain substantial operations in the country, drawn by Ireland’s favorable tax regime and access to the EU market.

Though the Trump administration has not echoed Risch’s warning, the remarks reflect growing unease in Washington about the trajectory of Ireland’s foreign policy. The State Department has maintained a careful balancing act, expressing strong support for Israel’s security while calling for increased humanitarian access in Gaza. Officials have stopped short of condemning Ireland’s actions directly but have expressed concern about efforts they see as isolating Israel on the international stage.

Ireland’s stance is emblematic of a growing international divide over the war. While the US continues to provide military and diplomatic backing to Israel, many European countries have called for an immediate ceasefire and investigations into alleged war crimes.

Irish public opinion has long leaned pro-Palestinian, and Irish lawmakers have repeatedly voiced concern over the scale of destruction in Gaza and the dire humanitarian situation.

Irish officials have not yet responded to The Algemeiner’s request for comment.

The post Key US Lawmaker Warns Ireland of Potential Economic Consequences for ‘Antisemitic Path’ Against Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Israel Condemns Iran’s Suspension of IAEA Cooperation, Urges Europe to Reinstate UN Sanctions

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar at a press conference in Berlin, Germany, June 5, 2025. REUTERS/Christian Mang/File Photo

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar on Wednesday condemned Iran’s decision to halt cooperation with the UN’s nuclear watchdog and called on the international community to reinstate sanctions to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

“Iran has just issued a scandalous announcement about suspending its cooperation with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency),” Saar wrote in a post on X. “This is a complete renunciation of all its international nuclear obligations and commitments.”

Last week, the Iranian parliament voted to suspend cooperation with the IAEA “until the safety and security of [the country’s] nuclear activities can be guaranteed.”

“The IAEA and its Director-General are fully responsible for this sordid state of affairs,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X.

The top Iranian diplomat said this latest decision was “a direct result of [IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi’s] regrettable role in obfuscating the fact that the Agency — a full decade ago — already closed all past issues.

“Through this malign action,” Araghchi continued, “he directly facilitated the adoption of a politically-motivated resolution against Iran by the IAEA [Board of Governors] as well as the unlawful Israeli and US bombings of Iranian nuclear sites.”

On Wednesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian approved a bill banning UN nuclear inspectors from entering the country until the Supreme National Security Council decides that there is no longer a threat to the safety of its nuclear sites.

In response, Saar urged European countries that were part of the now-defunct 2015 nuclear deal to activate its “snapback” clause and reinstate all UN sanctions lifted under the agreement.

Officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), this accord between Iran and several world powers imposed temporary restrictions on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

During his first term, US President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal and reinstated unilateral sanctions on Iran.

“The time to activate the Snapback mechanism is now! I call upon the E3 countries — Germany, France and the UK to reinstate all sanctions against Iran!” Saar wrote in a post on X.

“The international community must act decisively now and utilize all means at its disposal to stop Iranian nuclear ambitions,” he continued.

Saar’s latest remarks come after Araghchi met last week in Geneva with his counterparts from Britain, France, Germany and the European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas — their first meeting since the Iran-Israel war began.

Europe is actively urging Iran to reengage in talks with the White House to prevent further escalation of tensions, but has yet to address the issue of reinstating sanctions.

Speaking during an official visit to Latvia on Tuesday, Saar said that “Operation Rising Lion” — Israel’s sweeping military campaign aimed at dismantling Iran’s nuclear capabilities — has “revealed the full extent of the Iranian regime’s threat to Israel, Europe, and the global order.”

“Iran deliberately targeted civilian population centers with its ballistic missiles,” Saar said at a press conference. “The same missile threat can reach Europe, including Latvia and the Baltic states.”

“Israel’s actions against the head of the snake in Iran contributed directly to the safety of Europe,” the Israeli top diplomat continued, adding that Israeli strikes have set back the Iranian nuclear program by many years.

The post Israel Condemns Iran’s Suspension of IAEA Cooperation, Urges Europe to Reinstate UN Sanctions first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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