While antisemitism at colleges and universities gets the most attention, discrimination against young Jewish students is also growing in pernicious ways that often have less to do with nuanced political debates over Israel than outright bullying, including Nazi salutes, jokes about Hamas killing Jews and memes in the online forums where many students socialize.

These incidents have prompted a growing interest in countering K-12 antisemitism — the Anti-Defamation League is ramping up pressure on districts and a new political action committee is seeking “pro-Jewish” school board candidates. But alongside these efforts has been a hunt for a boogeyman supposedly driving the problem.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential neoconservative think tank, along with Republican lawmakers in Congress have sought to lay the blame on Qatar for “fueling anti-Jewish bigotry in K-12 schools” by, among other things, distributing for years a map of the Middle East to some schools that omitted Israel.

Teachers unions have also come under special scrutiny, especially after a contingent of National Education Association members unsuccessfully tried to cut the union’s ties with the ADL over the summer. Eric Fingerhut, chief executive of the Jewish Federations of North America, went on a self-described “rant against the NEA” from the stage of his organization’s annual conference this week in which he described the union as “invidious” and “one of the biggest, most serious problems that we have.”

This framing presents the plight of young Jewish students as an especially daunting front in the ongoing fight over how Israel is treated in American society; most concerns about both the NEA and Qatar are focused on growing hostility toward Israel.

But away from the conference’s main stage, experts working on the issue had a less conspiratorial outlook.

“It’s exciting to believe that if only we get rid of foreign funding we could solve this problem,” Hindy Poupko, a top lobbyist for the UJA-Federation of New York, said during a Tuesday panel on K-12 antisemitism. “It’s not true.”

Poupko added that some Jewish leaders were painting unions with too broad of a brush in describing them as anti-Israel and she credited the positive relationship Jewish organizations in New York City have with local unions, including the teachers union, for their success in blocking a ceasefire resolution at city council.

***

Rather than a sinister plot to seed classrooms with antisemitism or a political agenda about Israel, Poupko and the other experts suggested the problem was much more prosaic: Teachers have limited time and resources to learn about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.

David Bryfman, chief executive of the Jewish Education Project, said that many teachers simply Google to find information to teach about current events and are increasingly turning to ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence chatbot — to build lesson plans plagued by the flimsy sourcing and false information caused by the bot’s “hallucinations.”

One effective solution has been to provide classroom materials that teachers can easily integrate into their lessons. UJA-Federation distributed lesson plans pegged to Jewish American History Month to New York City schools along with posters of “Jewish heroes,” including authors Judy Blume and Emma Lazarus.

They’ve also promoted an interactive theatrical performance, featuring actors portraying Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. who come to classrooms for a show that weaves together the writings of both figures.

The local Jewish federation in Toronto realized that the only lessons about Jews in many schools centered on the Holocaust, so they wrote materials about ancient Israel that could be worked into the block on “ancient civilizations” taught to every fourth grader, and distributed books about Hanukkah to teachers.

And Bryfman is working on a database of educational resources about Jews and Judaism that teachers can both access directly and that will be given to artificial intelligence models with the hope that, when teachers search online in the future, they’ll turn up more accurate information.

***

None of these are groundbreaking solutions, but I appreciated hearing about them because they provide an important reality check. If we imagine antisemitism to be the result of a malignant conspiracy — Qatar turning teachers into sleeper agents for Hamas, or the NEA seeking to indoctrinate kindergarteners against Israel — the challenge of addressing it can seem insurmountable in the absence of a magic bullet.

Certainly, hanging a poster of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a middle school hallway isn’t going to solve antisemitism. But these kinds of practical interventions can help make Jewish students feel included at a time when many are feeling stigmatized and isolated.

Poupko said that, at least anecdotally, Jewish students had reported excitement at seeing their school hold an assembly block on Jewish heritage month for the first time, and data has found that Americans who personally know at least a few Jews are less likely to believe antisemitic stereotypes.

That’s the same logic behind a George Washington University project that offers a summer institute for faculty at schools of education at universities around the country, some of whom come in not knowing what the “Hebrew Bible” refers to, according to Ben Jacobs, the professor who runs the program.

And Be the Narrative, a group that trains Jewish students to present basic information about Judaism to their non-Jewish peers, found that 78% of teachers believed the presentations helped reduce antisemitism in their schools.

One throughline in all of these strategies is that they’re focused on working in good faith with teachers and school administrators. This is much harder when organizations view them as enemies rather than potential partners, as Fingerhut was encouraging.

“We can’t out mob the mob,” Poupko said. “Our special sauce is relationships with the people who are actually in positions of power.”

The post Some blame Qatar and unions for K-12 antisemitism. Experts say that’s the wrong focus appeared first on The Forward.

Despite what you may have heard, Hebrew translation still works on X. But allegations that the platform had disabled translation for Hebrew went viral after Grok, the AI chatbot built into the platform, said Hebrew was disabled because posts in the language were likely to encourage violence. As it turns out, the AI was hallucinating — the real question is why.

The rumor seems to have started because a Hebrew post advertising a pop group’s new single, “I, Butterfly,” was not working with the translation tools on the site. An account with the name “Red Pill Media” — though the bio for the account only says “America First,” and does not link to any media site — took a screenshot of an error message pop-up saying that Hebrew was not supported “for this translation.” They then shared the photo with a caption alleging that Hebrew translation was gone because “Jews were calling for genocide on this app without getting suspended.”

In the comments of this post, someone tagged Grok to ask why Hebrew wasn’t available. “Translation from Hebrew was disabled because it often amplified inflammatory or policy-violating content, like calls for violence, to a global audience via inaccurate or literal renditions,” the bot replied. “It’s about platform integrity amid documented spikes in Hebrew hate speech.”

Many people took this as an official confirmation from X that Hebrew translation had been turned off.

But while engineers, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, often tinker with the AI’s responses — for example, Musk made Grok more right-wing, and programmed it to flatter him — it largely consumes responses on X itself as its training material, which means that it is easy to mislead it. This is particularly the case on new, viral topics that its programmers have not had time to put up safeguards around.

In the comments on the original post, users speculated as to why the translation wasn’t working, quickly coming up with nefarious explanations. One user posited, or joked, that there was a Mein Kampf excerpt in the caption. Others guessed that it was an effort to “protect hate speech” in Hebrew so that English speakers can’t condemn it or use it to criticize Israel.

The original post that Grok could not translate contained no hate speech at all. It simply lists the song’s composers and the members of the band. (The translation issue may have stemmed from the fact that the song’s title was in English, and mixing characters from different alphabets confused the translation software.) But that didn’t stop false ideas about what it said from circulating. This is likely how Grok came to its conclusion — by consuming and regurgitating the conspiracy theories that users had themselves generated.

Chatbots and AIs are prone to hallucinations like this because of the way that they are trained; they tend to use human-generated input as their main source of information, which means that they are easily influenced by people’s own thoughts, incorrect beliefs and conspiracy theories. (This is also why they are prone to spouting neo-Nazi talking points without safeguards; there’s a lot of those floating around on the internet that the programs learned from.)

In fact, the error message in the screenshot saying that Hebrew was not available for that translation was not actually part of X; it was a pop-up from Apple Translation, the iPhone’s built-in translation tool, which was probably also confused by the mixed alphabets. And Grok has elsewhere confirmed that Hebrew can be translated on X, and that mixed alphabets cause a glitch. Still, theories continue to swirl that Grok may be refusing to translate Hebrew posts that include hate speech as part of an effort to reduce outcry against Israel.

But whether or not it’s good for the Jews, it’s still perfectly possible to translate plenty of racist statements in Hebrew, and any other language.

The post Grok said Hebrew translation was disabled on X — but it’s not appeared first on The Forward.

France, Paris, 20/06/2024. Gathering at place de la Bastille after the anti Semitic rape of a 12 year old girl in Courbevoie. Photography by Myriam Tirler / Hans Lucas.

More than a year after the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, a French court has dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted in the attack, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”

On Tuesday, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure, the French news outlet Le Parisien reported. 

“The court took into account the entire case as provided for by law: the facts, their seriousness, but also the personality of the minor and the need to prepare for future reintegration,” the boy’s lawyer Melody Blanc said in a statement. 

The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.

The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice.

Because the girl’s ex-boyfriend was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility. 

The lawyers of the victim, Muriel Ouaknine-Melki and Oudy Bloch, praised “the courage of [their] client” for confronting her attackers and ensuring that two of them were imprisoned.

According to police reports from the time, the two French boys cornered the girl on June 15, 2024, inside an empty building in Courbevoie, a northwestern suburb of Paris, questioned her about her Jewish identity, and then physically assaulted and raped her.

The assailants who were Muslim also allegedly called the victim a “dirty Jew” and uttered other antisemitic remarks during the brutal gang-rape.

Under threat of death, she was forced to perform penetrative and oral sex on two of the boys, while her ex-boyfriend threatened to burn her cheek with a lighter and attempted to make her sit on her handbag, which he had set ablaze.

Local reports indicate that part of the assault was recorded, and at least one assailant allegedly demanded 200 euros from the girl to withhold the footage, which was eventually circulated.

The ex-boyfriend sent footage of the assault to a boy the girl had gone out with that afternoon, with the message “Look at your chick,” according to law enforcement. After receiving such a message, the boy informed the girl’s family, who found her an hour after the attack.

“Before letting her leave, they made her swear on Allah not to say anything and that she should not tell anyone, neither her parents nor the police,” the girl’s mother told Le Parisien at the time.

The three-day trial, held behind closed doors, took place in a regional juvenile court in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris.

During the proceedings, the judge explained that the severity of the sentence came “in view of their concerning personality traits and the immense social disturbance.”

“There is no doubt that [the victim] would not have been assaulted or raped if she had not been Jewish,” the judge said at the time.

The brutal crime sparked outrage throughout France and among the Jewish community, unfolding against the backdrop of a disturbing surge in antisemitism that has gripped the country since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.