Opinion Interview with Guila Franklin Siegel | A Sledgehammer Is Not Always the Answer
There are Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs) in more than 100 American cities, and the JCRC of Greater Washington, like most of them, focuses on the hyperlocal. It gets down in the trenches with local groups and elected officials, pushing for synagogues to get security funding, advocating for Jewish community needs, building coalitions with interfaith and neighborhood groups. Now, with antisemitism on the rise, JCRCs often get the call when a synagogue is vandalized with a swastika or a Jewish student is the victim of antisemitic bullying.
Guila Franklin Siegel, JCRC of Greater Washington’s chief operating officer, caught some public flak recently for suggesting, in an interview with The Washington Post, that a local school system under investigation for antisemitism had actually made improvements during the four years JCRC had been working with it. That got me thinking about the practical and strategic differences between declaring war on antisemitism in general and grappling with it in individual cases. Siegel agreed to explore the subject with me. —Amy E. Schwartz
What’s it like fighting antisemitism in schools today?
Working with the individual parents and kids is labor-intensive and painstaking. Our director of education is a social worker by training, which is helpful, because we encounter parents at a moment of vulnerability and distress. They don’t just need somebody issuing a statement; they need somebody to listen, to understand how stressful it is when your child has been targeted.
The same is true of working with teachers. Some teachers have an agenda and are not living up to their professional responsibilities, but many more simply do not have the specific skills or the cultural competency needed to navigate situations where antisemitism is involved. We’ve met teachers who had no idea they were doing something wrong, and they were in tears. They felt terrible.
What does progress look like?
I had some of the worst conversations of my professional career right after October 7, with local school officials who issued inadequate or hurtful responses to what had happened, and who just did not listen when I told them it was the wrong approach. But we’ve rebuilt those relationships, and it makes a difference. Take the Fairfax County, VA, school system. It’s the ninth-largest public school system in the country, with large numbers of both Muslim and Jewish students. It’s been criticized and even investigated for alleged antisemitic incidents—bullying, harassment, graffiti—as well as student conflicts over Gaza. In November, the Muslim Students Association at one school made a club recruitment video in which students acted out a kidnapping, with some wearing keffiyehs and others pretending to be dead, and one wearing a shirt with a map of Israel covered by a Palestinian flag.
In spite of this incident—to which, by the way, the school responded promptly with suspensions—it would be factually wrong to say that things have not improved in that school system. I was quoted saying so in The Washington Post, and that caused anger among some Jews in our community. Did I mean that your child definitely could not have been bullied yesterday at her school? No. Antisemitism is the oldest hatred. It’s not going anywhere.
But if schools respond properly, then the incidence of antisemitism will go down. The expectations will be clear, the faculty and administrators will be well-trained to respond, and there will be proactive, pro-social programs and curricula in place. And that’s what we have worked on. We have built up a relationship of trust and integrity, to the point where the school system has asked us to train 600 of its social studies teachers. And that’s important, because a lot of the problems with antisemitism in the curriculum surface in social studies classes.
When people get angry, they sometimes set artificial litmus tests.
On the Sunday night when that mock-kidnapping video was going around like wildfire on social media, I got an immediate response. The school’s reaction was the same as mine; not one person on the management team thought it was OK. They acted quickly and unequivocally, with suspensions and a clear statement. It was outside groups such as CAIR that then pushed back, saying the video had just been a joke. But four years ago, I would have had to fight for days to get even an acknowledgment. Now I can call the highest-level school administrators in Fairfax County or of Montgomery County schools at any time, and they will take my call, and they will want to know what they can do to help. It doesn’t mean antisemitism is solved, but at least we now have people who are attuned to our issues, who have a deeper understanding of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And that takes hard work.
Do people have trouble seeing that progress?
Some do. A classic example happened recently with the Fairfax County Public Schools’ (FCPS) Happy Hanukkah message on Facebook. It was lovely. It described the holiday, it focused on the rededication of the temple and the miracle of the oil lasting for eight days. A bunch of Jewish county residents posted appreciative responses, because in past years you might not have seen that from FCPS. But a whole slew of other people were furious and posted that the message was insulting to Jews because it didn’t mention the Maccabees and should have included a menorah or a Star of David. And I saw that and thought, ‘Wow, no good deed goes unpunished.’
It’s a difficult balance, because I also do truly believe that people who downplay the depth of the antisemitism crisis are doing real harm. There is tremendous hatred of Israel and of Jews. How we respond to that fact requires a ton of thought, and inner fortitude, and sometimes grace toward people who are trying to help. Jews might need to pivot a little bit when they hear people saying “yes” to their concerns and maybe utilize a muscle that hasn’t been used very much. If we ignore the efforts of people in power when they’re sincerely trying, and having some impact, then I worry that those people will just go back to saying no.
Why is all this so hard?
Jewish Americans are suffering right now. The fear and the trauma are very real. There is a cumulative cost to having to go through metal detectors every time you go to shul on Shabbos. And this has been a horrible two years for Jews. So sometimes there’s a raw lashing out, the feeling that no one is sticking up for us, and that we have no allies.
It’s not true that we have no allies. But when people get angry they sometimes set artificial litmus tests. They have one notion of what’s good for the Jews. And if you are utilizing strategies that don’t conform to that perception, then you’re perceived as not serving the needs of the Jewish community.
A lot of new groups, especially on social media, have popped up since October 7 that are determined to fight antisemitism. They will hear about a problem at a school and flood the principal’s inbox with hundreds of emails from people in their network. Now, if you are a principal of a school in rural Montgomery County, who has never had to deal with antisemitism before, knows very little about Jewish culture and has next to no Jewish students, and suddenly your inbox is jammed with hundreds of angry emails from people across the country who aren’t even parents in your school—it’s not productive. It creates resentment. Things like this have happened over and over again.
The sledgehammer is not always the right approach. Sometimes it’s necessary, and we know how to use it too. The sledgehammer allows you to get rid of a lot of energy, and really pound, and that can be very cathartic when you’re going through the kind of profound pain that our community is going through. But in the end, a scalpel will probably get better, long-lasting results.