Antisemitism is a prejudice against the Jewish people or hatred towards them. As humans, we often blame groups of people for tragedies or shifts we can’t control and this often divides our society into “in” and “out” groups.
This hatred reaches generation to generation in new contexts, sometimes showing up in schools as bullying or even memes promoted by politicians, celebrities, and social media influencers.
The way antisemitism is represented may change over time, but the attitudes, stereotypes, and the harm they cause remain almost the same.
While many people relate antisemitism with the Holocaust, this hatred and the acts charged by it did not begin in the 1930s, nor did they end in 1945 when the Nazis were defeated. Jews have been stereotyped, exiled, and violently assaulted based on a wide range of false accusations and assumptions for thousands of years.
Anti-Jewish ideology has been there for so long that, at times, it gets difficult to even recognize. Antisemitic attitudes extend to the political dynamics, and even in communities without a visible Jewish population, anti-Jewish stereotypes and behavior can exist. People can pass on negative stereotypes about Jewish people or Judaism without realizing it, even when they don’t feel hatred toward Jews.
School students are specifically at risk of coming across antisemitic content in unmonitored digital spaces.
Like any other form of intolerance, hatred, or discrimination, antisemitism is damaging to an entire community because it encourages suppression or even the extinction of difference, rather than bridge-building, cultural literacy, empathy, and conflict resolution.