EDITORIAL: Hatred taught in our schools

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Antisemitism doesn’t come out of nowhere, it has to be taught, and a disturbing federal study suggests one of the places it’s being taught is in our schools.

That’s in Ontario, although there’s no reason to think the phenomenon is confined to one province.

The recent study — Antisemitism in Ontario’s K-12 Schools — by University of Toronto sociology professor Robert Brym, who has published more than 200 academic papers, was commissioned by Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on combatting antisemitism, before she resigned last month.

Brym surveyed 599 Jewish parents who reported 781 antisemitic incidents in Ontario’s kindergarten to Grade 12 education system, occurring between October 2023 (Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel occurred on Oct. 7, 2023) and January, after seeking input through 257 Jewish organizations.

Among his findings, a six-year-old girl was told by her teacher she was only half-human because one of her parents is Jewish.

Another teacher told a different six-year-old girl, who was wearing a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a map of Israel, that it was a map of Palestine, and that the Hebrew school teachers who gave it to her were “lying.”

Overall, Brym reported nearly one in six antisemitic incidents cited in his research were “initiated or approved by a teacher or involved a school-sanctioned activity.”

As disturbing, in six of 10 reported cases of antisemitism, the schools involved either didn’t investigate, denied it was antisemitism, or punished the victims by recommending they take remote classes or switch schools, rather than the perpetrators.

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Brym noted Toronto’s public school board, which recorded the highest number of antisemitic incidents, uses a narrow definition of Jewish identity and thus doesn’t count many attacks on Jewish students as antisemitic, “even if they are clearly motivated by antisemitism.”

He suspects the number of antisemitic incidents is higher than officially reported given that many parents and children told him they were reluctant to complain for fear of reprisals if their names became public.

Given that Statistics Canada reports that while Jews make up 1% of Canada’s population, 70% of all religiously motivated hate crimes today are aimed at them, what are Ontario schools, and the provincial government, doing to address this?

The same question should be asked in every province.