A grammar school in Germany a few years ago: A Jewish teenager from Ukraine who has just arrived in Germany is exposed by classmates during his first days at his new school. Someone has stuck a note with the words “Jew” on the 14-year-old’s back. Because he does not notice this and no one else points it out to him, he walks around wearing it the whole school day.
When a social worker from the local Jewish community talks to the headmaster about the incident, he says: “Why do you think it happens to this particular boy? Have you seen the way he dresses and the way he looks? This boy does not come to school well groomed, he stinks. There is something wrong in the family.”
The social worker reported on the case in a study on anti-Semitism in schools, conducted by Julia Bernstein, professor of discrimination and inclusion in the immigration society at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences.
“The exposure worked because no one brought the note to the attention of the person concerned,” says Bernstein. “This means that the person concerned is confronted with a hostile atmosphere at his new school, which is also being supported by the headmaster.” The headmaster fails to recognise the anti-Semitic nature of the exposure, and the person concerned is blamed for it.
The Jewish youth left the school according to the statements of the headmaster. Again and again in recent years, incidents have become known after which those affected left state schools and joined Jewish schools. One reason for this is that the attackers often stayed at the schools and did not receive sufficient punishment.
Trivialisation by teachers and school administrators also occurs again and again. Bernstein criticises a “pedagogical tolerance”. For example, in her study, an educator at a boarding school where a Star of David was scrawled on a Jewish student’s room door said that the problem was that the student was “too obvious about his Jewishness”.
A teacher there said of the swear word “You Jew” often used in schools, “It’s just a word in a vocabulary, which is, however, detached from any meaning.” Another teacher justified the anti-Semitic statement of a pupil with her origin: “It is clear that the pupil who comes from Palestine dislikes Jews for completely different reasons. Of course she doesn’t like Jews, and she makes no secret of it.
For years, there have been repeated reports about hatred of Jews in German schools. So what can be done? This was discussed on Wednesday at a symposium of the Central Council of Jews, the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs and the Federal-Länder Commission of Anti-Semitism Commissioners. The experts repeatedly made it clear that the problem must first be acknowledged and named before any intervention can take place. A “fire brigade pedagogy” that only intervenes in concrete incidents is wrong and hides the fact that such incidents refer to a latent anti-Semitic structure.
Central Council President Josef Schuster wants the confrontation with anti-Semitism in all its forms to be anchored in the curricula. This also applies to the history of Israel. “It is clear to me that some teachers are unsettled and prefer to avoid the subject if there are many students of Arab origin in the class,” said Schuster. “But this is precisely what teachers need to be prepared for.” Israel-related anti-Semitism is a massive problem and “far beyond migrant circles” is also widespread on the political left, in the churches and in the middle of society.
The sociologist Bernstein is of the opinion that “physical violence is mostly perpetrated by Muslim pupils”. The way teachers deal with this ranges from ignoring specifically Muslim anti-Semitism to perceiving hatred of Jews exclusively as a problem of Muslims.
This can be reconstructed from the perspectives of those affected and teachers from her extensive study, for which Bernstein conducted 251 interviews. In other aspects, however, such as the perception of the problem, the perspectives of the two groups clearly diverge.
For example, while many teachers assumed that there were no Jews at the respective school, Jewish pupils who were taught there reported that they did not want to stand out as being different. Many teachers are aware of the historical persecution of Jews, but have little knowledge about the diversity of Jewish life today. Those affected, on the other hand, often feel they have to do educational work and always have to identify themselves as Jewish.
In Berlin, the Association for Democracy and Diversity in Schools and Vocational Training wanted to set up a “Contact and Documentation Point for Confrontational Religious Conflicts” to be able to combat the problem of religion-related conflicts. However, the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs only funded the project for three months in order to conduct a qualitative survey among school headmasters in Berlin-Neukölln.
In it, a headmaster reported: “And then they want to cut Israel out of the atlas and paint over it. That happens every now and then. They don’t even know what Israel is. But that originates from their parents’ home.
To this day in Germany, the very word for Jew “Jude” is an emotionally-charged word. Even during the 3rd Reich, the Nazis didn’t have to resort to slur words, the very word, Jude, when pronounced with the sneering tone, was enough.
I’d say Islam is the new Nazism, but the original Nazism got a lot of ideas from Islam. The idea for the Holocaust itself was given to Adolf Hitler by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muhammad himself was a genocidal tyrant, along with other unflattering things like a zoophile who drank camel urine and a pedophile who married a 6 year old and statytoty raped her at age 9.