In Combatting K–12 Antisemitism, You Can’t Educate Haters Out of Power

One of the major blind spots of those fighting rising antisemitism is the persistent belief that people can be educated out of their enmity. The assumption goes like this: if students have been taught to hate, surely we can teach them not to hate. And in limited cases, education does soften prejudice. The TV ad that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft produced scheduled to air during the Super Bowl portraying a young Jewish kid being bullied, well meaning though it is, falls into the same trap, completely failing to address the nature of the hostility students are actually facing.

But the hostility we’re seeing today in K–12 schools has very little to do with education and everything to do with power. Antisemitism in schools is not rising because students lack knowledge about Jews or the Holocaust. It is rising because many of our school systems have been captured by radical actors who promote ideological frameworks that cast Jews, Israel, and the West as villains within an oppressor/oppressed morality play. You can’t “teach away” an ideology that is built into the operating system of the institution itself.

This is the core argument of “When the Classroom Turns Hostile”, a new white paper from my organization, the  North American Values Institute (NAVI). Its central insight is blunt: the crisis is not one of ignorance—it is one of institutional capture. Over the last decade, activist ideologies rooted in power and identity have permeated colleges of education, teacher unions, state bureaucracies, curriculum providers, and school boards. The result is a self-reinforcing ecosystem that replaces academic instruction with political activism. Once installed, this worldview distorts American history, suppresses dissent, and normalizes hostility toward Jews and toward the civic values that once anchored public education.

Within this ideological frame, Jews are often portrayed as “privileged” or  “colonizers” or stand-ins for oppressive systems. Israel becomes a “settler-colonial” regime. Zionism becomes racism. And Jewish students, often without any knowledge of these narratives, find themselves recast in roles they never auditioned for.

That worldview is now embedded across the K–12 pipeline. Schools of education teach future teachers that their primary job is to raise political consciousness. Accreditation bodies reinforce these expectations. Teacher unions adopt social-justice programs that encourage educators to see themselves first as activists and second as instructors. State bureaucracies codify ideological competencies into licensure. School boards adopt curricula shaped by these ideas or are taken over by factions explicitly seeking to embed them. And through activist networks, crowd-sourced lesson marketplaces, and social media, teachers can bypass district oversight entirely, importing politicized content directly into classrooms. In this environment, adding more “education about antisemitism” will not fix the problem. In fact, it can make it worse. NAVI has documented that identity-based “anti-oppression” pedagogy can actually increase hostility toward Jews, because new information is filtered back through the very ideological lens that produced the prejudice to begin with. In a rigid oppressor/oppressed framework, Jews appear on the wrong side of the ledger. So, more curriculum cannot counteract that logic it can only reinforce it.

This is why the Jewish community’s traditional playbook, such as Holocaust lessons, anti-bias workshops, and cultural programs, is hitting a wall. These tools treat antisemitism as a misunderstanding, but today’s antisemitism is a feature, not a glitch, of an ideological system that sees the West as malevolent and Jews as its beneficiaries.

If the operating system itself is hostile, adding more content cannot overwrite it.

We argue, therefore, that action must be political, institutional, and comprehensive. That means reclaiming influence over the “upstream” structures of education: teacher preparation, licensure, state standards, union dynamics, school board governance, curricula, and professional norms. It means building broad, cross-ethnic, cross-partisan coalitions committed to restoring civic, liberal-democratic values—pluralism, fairness, open inquiry, and academic excellence. And it means acknowledging that many of these values, though increasingly coded as “conservative,” are in fact the core liberal principles that allowed Jews to flourish in America in the first place.

Most importantly, it requires moral clarity. You cannot appease an ideology that insists your existence is oppressive. You cannot negotiate carve-outs that say, in effect, “teach the worldview, but leave the Jews alone.” And you cannot fight a political problem with an educational solution.

The classroom is where citizens are formed. A school system that abandons shared civic values in favor of ideological struggle sessions will produce a generation unprepared for democratic life and deeply susceptible to conspiracy, extremism, and antisemitism. Jews may be the canary in this coal mine, but the collapse will not stop with us.

If we want to reverse the tide, we must abandon the fantasy that we can educate our way out of a problem birthed by political extremists. The task ahead is not to develop better lessons, but to regain influence in the institutions that shape the lessons in the first place.

David Bernstein is the Founder and CEO of the North American Values Institute (NAVI).