Schools must teach children about Jewish life, not just Jew-hatred

At twelve years old, Jonathan Frisher found himself having to explain antisemitism to his classmates. The only Jewish pupil at his school, he faced Nazi salutes, references to gas chambers and swastikas. Somehow the responsibility for explaining why this was wrong fell to him.

His testimony, shared as Sir David Bell’s review into antisemitism in schools was about to be published, is appalling.

How did we reach a point where a twelve-year-old was left to explain something the adults around him should have understood?

Bell’s review exposes serious failures in how schools recognise and respond to antisemitism. Its recommendations are important, and we welcome them. Alongside the urgent question of how schools deal with hatred, there is another we need to ask.

What are we teaching children about Jews in the first place?

For many British children, the answer is remarkably little. They encounter Jews in lessons about the Holocaust, perhaps again when studying Israel and Palestine, and occasionally when antisemitism makes the news. We appear as victims of history, participants in conflict or targets of hatred.

We rarely get to be ordinary people.

If the only thing you know about Jews is that people have spent centuries trying to kill us, you don’t actually know very much about Jews.

The consequence of ignorance is that Jewish children are having to make calculations about when and where they can be Jewish.

What can they say? Which conversations should they avoid? Do they tell their friends where they go on Friday evenings, or explain why they are absent for a festival? Do they challenge the casual antisemitism they hear, or pretend they haven’t noticed?

Sometimes antisemitism is directed at a child everyone knows is Jewish. Sometimes it is spoken freely because nobody realises there is a Jew in the room.

The danger is that Jewish children learn to make themselves smaller. They leave parts of themselves at the school gates, hoping that being less visibly Jewish will make life easier.

The safety of Jewish pupils cannot mean that Jews gradually disappear from ordinary British life, retreating into places where they know they will be understood. Jewish schools, synagogues and communal institutions are precious. We have spent generations building them. Yet we must be careful not to confuse the importance of those spaces with accepting that everywhere else has become somewhere we cannot belong.

This is not only a Jewish problem. When minorities feel compelled to withdraw into their own communities to escape prejudice, society becomes more divided. People grow up alongside one another without ever really knowing one another. We end up protecting diversity by keeping it apart.

That is a strange vision of a diverse Britain.

We lead Progressive Judaism, the largest Jewish religious movement in Britain by number of communities. Our 77 communities include some of the largest congregations in the country, but also small communities where a family might be the only Jews in their village. Both matter enormously. Both belong to the story of British Jewish life. Both challenge the assumption that there is one recognisable Jewish experience.

For some children, being Jewish means growing up surrounded by other Jews. For others, it means being the only Jewish child in their class, perhaps the only Jewish person anyone in their school has ever met. Some wear their identity openly and others are constantly deciding whether to mention it at all.

We cannot expect Jewish children to feel they belong if we fail to recognise just how many different ways there are to be Jewish.

This is why encounter matters. We want children to meet Jews who live down the road, who argue, laugh, celebrate festivals, disagree about religion and have lives that cannot be reduced to either persecution or politics. A visit to a synagogue is not a cure for prejudice but meeting Jewish people as people challenges the assumptions on which prejudice so often depends.

We want children to learn about Jewish persecution. We also want them to know about Jewish creativity, music, literature, humour and the extraordinary pleasure of belonging to a tradition in which asking questions is practically a religious obligation.

We want them to see Jewish communities thriving around the country, contributing to the places in which they live.

We want to empower a generation of confident, proud Jews in every part of society. In schools, universities, workplaces, politics, culture and public life.

Bell’s review gives us a chance to think seriously about what schools teach, what they fail to teach and what sort of society we are creating for the next generation.

Jonathan Frisher should never have been responsible for teaching his classmates about antisemitism.

The measure of our success must be that Jewish pupils can walk into school without having to decide how much of their Jewishness to leave outside.

Rabbi Charley Baginsky and Rabbi Josh Levy are co-CEOs of Progressive Judaism