When Halloween Turns to Hate, Parents Must Wake Up

In the past few weeks, three disturbing school incidents have exposed a cultural sickness spreading among American teenagers. In Holmdel, New Jersey, students reportedly planned to dress as Adolf Hitler and Holocaust victims for Halloween. In Fairfax County, Virginia, a student group posted videos staging Hamas-style kidnappings — hooded classmates shoved into the trunks of cars as part of a supposed “club skit.” And in Hanover, Pennsylvania, a Catholic school parade float recreated the gate of Auschwitz, complete with the infamous words “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

Each episode has been met with shock, outrage, and apologies from school administrators. But the deeper question remains: How did we get here? What kind of home environment produces a young person who can look at the horrors of the Holocaust or modern-day terrorism and think, “That would make a great costume”?

We can blame social media, and rightly so. Platforms that reward provocation and shock have eroded empathy and blurred the line between humor and cruelty. Yet that explanation is incomplete. The more uncomfortable truth is that many parents have gone missing in action when it comes to shaping their children’s moral and historical awareness.

Students don’t wake up one morning and decide to mock the murder of 6 million Jews or reenact a terrorist abduction without first having absorbed the message that nothing is sacred. The question is: Where did they learn that? If schools are responsible for teaching facts, parents are responsible for teaching decency. But too many families seem to have outsourced moral education entirely — expecting teachers, or worse, TikTok, to do the job.

When a teenager uploads a video trivializing hostage-taking, when another dresses as Hitler, that’s not merely a disciplinary issue. It’s a reflection of the vacuum left when adults stop talking to their children about history, faith and moral responsibility. It’s a failure of parenting as much as of pedagogy.

It’s tempting to write these stories off as isolated acts of youthful stupidity. But each required adult acquiescence. The Hanover float was designed, built and approved before it ever appeared in a parade. The Fairfax videos were filmed, edited and shared online. The New Jersey plans circulated among students for days. Dozens of adults saw or heard about these acts before they went public, and none stopped them. The silence is telling.

This is not the first time moral collapse has followed cultural complacency. Every generation worries that its youth are losing their compass. But today’s moral confusion feels different — more performative, more public and amplified by social media’s promise of instant attention. The pursuit of clicks has replaced the pursuit of conscience.

Schools certainly must act. Administrators should make clear that mocking genocide or mimicking terrorism constitutes hate speech, not “humor,” and should carry real consequences. Holocaust education must move beyond a single annual assembly and become part of a broader civic-values curriculum. Teachers should partner with local Holocaust centers, interfaith organizations and survivors’ groups to expose students to living history. But none of this will matter if it isn’t reinforced at home.

Parents must reclaim their central role as moral educators. That means asking questions — What are you watching? What are you posting? — and having the difficult conversations about antisemitism, extremism and empathy that many households have avoided. It means telling children not just what is wrong, but why it is wrong. It also means modeling restraint and respect in an age when adults themselves often engage in online ridicule and partisanship.

America’s schools can set boundaries, but they cannot replace the values that are — or aren’t — taught at home. If parents don’t draw those lines, teenagers will continue to learn their ethics from the comment sections and video feeds that reward outrage over understanding.

I write about this not as a social theorist but as a father who knows the real cost of hate. My daughter, Alisa, was murdered in 1995 in a terrorist attack sponsored by Iran. I’ve spent three decades fighting for justice for victims of terror and educating others about its roots. When I see American students turning horror into entertainment, I’m reminded that hatred doesn’t begin with violence. It begins with mockery, with indifference, with treating evil as a game.

The lesson of these Halloween scandals isn’t just that some kids behaved badly. It’s that the adults around them weren’t paying attention. If we shrug this off as harmless youthful ignorance, we’ll be teaching the next generation that nothing matters — that the suffering of others is just another costume to try on.

The antidote isn’t another assembly or hashtag. It’s parenting — intentional, present and morally grounded. Parents must reclaim their children’s hearts and minds before the culture does. Because if we don’t teach them what should never be mocked, someone else will teach them that nothing is off-limits.

Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror” and is the president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi. He divides his time between New Jersey and Jerusalem.