Locker room. Photo courtesy of Pixabay.
By DANIEL S. MARIASCHIN
JNS
In a New Year only days old, one story resonated loudly with me: an item about a swastika discovered etched on the wall of the boys’ locker room at the U.N. International School in New York. As reported by JNS, the school’s director sent a letter to parents and supporters of the school in which he rightly termed the matter anti-Semitic and unacceptable, and which causes “real harm, particularly to our Jewish students, families, faculty and staff … .”
In the past couple of years, if you Google “swastika” and “classrooms,” the number of such incidents is spiking, like so many other variants of Jew-hatred across the globe.
My Story
In 1959, I was a fifth-grader, the only Jewish student in a middle school in New Hampshire. I was very much aware of my Jewishness but had little interest in standing out. We began each day with the Lord’s Prayer, and I knew that this was not something Jews did, but I went along with the crowd, even though I felt uncomfortable. Ditto for Christmas caroling during the holiday season; I sang along, lip-syncing in the appropriate places.
By the time I was 10, I already had a pretty good schooling in anti-Semitism from my parents, both immigrants to America from Eastern Europe. It was a subject we frequently discussed in our house at the dinner table, in the kitchen and the living room.
So you can just picture how stunned I was when my teacher, Florence Kellom, called me out of the classroom one day.
Reassuring Teacher
I had no idea what I had done but had no choice but to follow her out of the room. Right there in the hallway, Mrs. Kellom told me that the school janitor had found a swastika scratched into a wall in the boys’ bathroom, and she wanted me to know that he had immediately washed it off. I was both relieved and incredulous that this veteran schoolteacher even thought about reassuring me that the matter had been taken care of.
This was only 14 years after World War II and the Holocaust, so there was no question what the swastika symbolized. I very much doubt Mrs. Kellom had any serious contact with Jews before I appeared in her class. Her husband, a veteran of World War I, was a banker in a small town near where I was raised. The janitor deserves credit for taking care of the matter, but Mrs. Kellom remains, nearly 70 years later, the real hero of this story.
I have recounted all of this before. But the global proliferation of these types of incidents, like that at the United Nations International School, not only reminds me of that personal encounter but of how deeply troubling it is that it persists all these years later. In the 1950s and 1960s, many of my classmates had fathers who served in World War II. They fought the Nazis in the European theater and had no stomach for this kind of scratched-in-the-wall bigotry.
81 Years After Shoah
Details of the Holocaust were becoming better known, and with that, a greater understanding of Jewish sensitivity. Indeed, the movie version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” was released in 1959, opening the door to more serious conversations about the Holocaust and its 6 million Jewish victims.
That this happens today—81 years after the war and the Holocaust—is a result of a perfect storm of historical revisionism and hatred of Israel, Zionism, and all who believe in and support both. Holocaust denial and the minimalizing of this singular event in contemporary history are catching on not only in the dark shadows of our political extremes; they are making their way into more social-media traffic. Combined with the blood libels and big lies of Israel carrying out genocide in the Gaza Strip, and the passage of time, it should come as no surprise that, in a twisted perversion of history, the Israelis are being compared to Nazis. The swastika remains a handy, threatening sign of hatred toward Jews.
Back in Mrs. Kellom’s class, I was taught the essentials of elementary education. We were introduced to social studies, American history, democracy and the nation’s founding fathers.
Teaching Of The Slanders
That was then, and this is now: Today, the Palestinian narrative has wormed its way into many K-12 classrooms, glorifying and excusing terrorists, and accusing the State of Israel of robbing and colonizing land to which it has no connection. Pro-Hamas organizations are leading this indoctrination, aided and abetted by fellow traveler teachers. This could indeed be a problem coming to a school near you; the newly elected mayor of New York himself is a proponent of such thinking. The million students in New York’s public school system must be an inviting target for the pro-Palestinian crowd.
Seeking Sensitivity
In 1959, anti-Semitism was still very much embedded in hiring, college admissions, accommodations and even among literary elites, so those outside of our community who stood against it were not only principled but courageous. What makes the current crisis so worrisome is that the demonization of the Zionist idea—and of Israel and its supporters—has the approbation of political figures and mainstream media types, not to mention academics whose negative influence on their students will be perpetuated for decades to come.
As I recall, there was no investigation into who took a pencil and drew that swastika in my school’s bathroom, though it would have been good to know. What was more important was that Mrs. Kellom saw in that graffiti a symbol of hatred, and she didn’t want her one Jewish student to be hurt in any way. That kind of sensitivity never grows old. Indeed, it is needed more than ever today.
Daniel S. Mariaschin is the CEO of B’nai B’rith International.
