Anti-Semitism in Schools and Society

Anti-Semitism is hostility toward Jews that can manifest on an individual, institutional, or societal level. As defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, anti-Semitism is hostility toward Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group. The latter definition highlights a dilemma regarding Jews: Is Judaism a religion, an ethnic group, or a distinct racial group? This ambiguity is a major reason why Jews have been largely excluded from diversity education.

One of the biggest challenges in defining anti-Semitism is that Jews confound established notions of ethnic, racial, and religious identity. Therefore, anti-Semitism is more than simple religious bias. Most people see Judaism simply as a religion. Others see Jews as White; this latter designation is particularly problematic for Jews of color. These categorizations are overly simplistic and do not fully describe the diversity of Jews. For example, there are Jewish ethnic differences (i.e., Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim), and different Jewish movements (i.e., Orthodox, Hasidic, Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist).

Anti-Semitism has been documented for more than 4,000 years and comes in many forms, including oppression, discrimination, segregation, pogroms, and genocide. Lisa Tessman and Bat Ami Bar-On (2001) outlined seven categories of anti-Semitism:

• 1.
  religious (e.g., Jews' “refusal” to embrace Jesus),
• 2.
  social (e.g., limiting Jews' occupational choices),
• 3.
  political (e.g., blaming Jews for communism),
• 4.
  economic (e.g., the myths that (a) all Jews are rich penny-pinchers, and (b) Jews control the banks, media, and the U.S. economy),
• 5.
  psychological (e.g., “the dominant culture's desire to assimilate the Jew is projected onto the Jew as ‘the Jewish plot to take over'” [Tessman & Bar On, 2001, p. xviii]),
• 6.
  sexual (e.g., Jewish men and women being seen as having certain negative sexual traits), and
• 7.
  racial (e.g., Jews seen as biologically inferior).

Other examples of anti-Semitism include questioning the Jewish identity of nonreligious Jews, violence against Jews/Jewish communities, and denying the occurrence of the Holocaust. Most importantly for the purposes of this encyclopedia is the minimization and invisibility of discussions of anti-Semitism in diversity education due to the confusion around how to classify Jews.