From left to right: The American Jewish Committee’s Laura Shaw Frank, Executive Director of Hillel of Broward & Palm Beach Adam Kolett, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Maya Gordon, and University of Florida Graduate Maia Kofman discuss rising antisemitism during a symposium held at the David Posnack JCC on May 20 [Courtesy American Jewish Committee].
A Jewish student leader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last Monday detailed multiple instances of hostility toward Jews at the school and criticized administrators for not doing enough to combat anti-Jewish prejudice.
Stoneman Douglas senior Maya Gordon described the antisemitism impacting one of Broward’s top schools during a community symposium, “Standing Together: A Community Response to Antisemitism,” at the David Posnack JCC in Davie.
Gordon’s experiences included seeing a swastika and the phrase “From the river to the sea” scrawled on school bathroom walls, a swastika etched into dirt on a student’s car, and an effort by some students to have their Jewish peers excluded from a multicultural food fair.
“It’s disturbing and appalling to go there and then see all these things,” said Gordon, president of Stoneman Douglas’ Jewish Student Union and School Board Chair Lori Alhadeff’s appointee to Broward County Public Schools’ Human Relations Committee.
During a symposium panel titled “Combating Antisemitism in Education Spaces,” Gordon described an act of overt antisemitism surrounding the school’s biannual food fair.
Student groups representing a diverse array of backgrounds bring foods representative of their cultures to the event. The Jewish Student Union typically shares food such as bagels with cream cheese schmears, rugelach, hamantaschen, and falafel balls with small Israeli flags.
Gordon said she was “really proud of the amount of co-existing that we had going on there, showing that we are one school, one community as a whole.”
But amid fair preparations, Gordon was told by a student “that they didn’t want the Jews there.”
“I was just shocked to hear that,” given the school’s sizeable Jewish population, said Gordon, who will attend Florida State University. “Then they told me again, and I heard from multiple other people that this was the case.”
“I had no idea what to do. That obviously was not something that was OK.”
Gordon said she reported the antisemitism to Stoneman Douglas Principal Michelle Kefford, and the Jewish group wound up being allowed to participate.
“They did end up including us, which was good, but still not the point,” said Gordon.
“The point was they didn’t acknowledge that there was blatant antisemitism there, saying that they didn’t want the Jews there.”
Gordon, who has interned for U.S. Representative Jared Moskowitz and Florida House of Representatives member Christine Hunschofsky, said antisemitic graffiti has repeatedly been spotted at the school since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists led an attack on Israel and massacred some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
An additional 253 people in Israel were kidnapped and taken into Gaza, where many remain. Israel responded to the Hamas rampage by launching a military campaign to destroy the terrorist group and free the hostages. According to the Hamas-run health ministry, about 35,000 Gazans – including Hamas fighters – have been killed in the war.
Amid the conflict, Jews have faced attacks, exclusion, and intimidation; part of a wave of global antisemitism unparalleled since World War II, experts say. Even before the Gaza war, antisemitism had been rising in recent years.
For Jewish students like Gordon, the hostility has, at times, been palpable.
“Since October 7, I’ve seen so many things written in the school, written on walls and bathrooms,” including a swastika and “From the river to the sea,” said Gordon, adding that she has a good relationship with school administrators.
“From the river to the sea” is an antisemitic slogan commonly featured in anti-Israel campaigns and chanted at demonstrations like the ones that recently brought unrest to U.S. college campuses, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
The rallying cry is used by Hamas and is fundamentally a call for a Palestinian state extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, territory that includes the State of Israel, which would mean the dismantling of the Jewish state, the ADL says.
Gordon said Kefford took the unusual step of making the end-of-day announcement to students to address the graffiti but did not offer specifics.
“She said there’s vandalism, and we do not condone vandalism,” said Gordon. “They didn’t even mention that it had anything to do with [being] anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish people. They need to say something about what it actually is.”
The American Jewish Committee’s Laura Shaw Frank, who moderated the panel on which Gordon sat, said she “talks to hundreds of schools [and] I’ve heard that story dozens and dozens and dozens of times, ‘It was just vandalism.'”
“It’s incredibly important that we call out specifically antisemitism when it happens,” Frank said.
In a written statement sent to Parkland Talk on Monday, Broward County Public Schools said that Stoneman Douglas is “committed to offering an inclusive and supportive educational environment” and “at no time are displays or acts of bigotry and hate tolerated.”
The school’s leadership and staff work throughout the year to raise cultural awareness and promote understanding and inclusiveness, which includes supporting a variety of clubs and activities, the district said.
“If made aware of an issue, the school’s administration takes prompt action to resolve it. Students involved in any incidents receive appropriate disciplinary consequences.”
Regarding the graffiti described by Gordon, BCPS said in its statement that a graffiti incident in a Stoneman Douglas bathroom was reported earlier this year. The graffiti was immediately removed by school staff, officials said.
“The school’s leadership says this was an isolated situation and the school has not seen an increase in incidents,” BCPS said.
Kefford has reached out to Gordon “to learn more about the experiences she shared during the presentation,” the school district’s statement said.
Antisemites have previously targeted survivors of the 2018 mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas that killed 17 students and faculty members, five of who were Jewish.
A month after the killings, police in Washington, D.C., arrested a man caught hanging antisemitic fliers at American University that included a survivor’s photo. Several students who took up gun control advocacy after the shooting were also targeted with antisemitic slurs and imagery on social media.
Last Monday’s antisemitism symposium drew hundreds of community leaders and elected officials from across South Florida. Speakers offered disturbing accounts of the rise of antisemitism in public life, including the prevalence of antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-Jewish prejudice masquerading as social justice activism.
“We will never go back to business as usual,” said Ted Deutch, CEO of the AJC and a former member of Congress representing parts of Broward and Palm Beach Counties. “We will be in this fight for decades to come.”
Frank said Gordon’s experiences at the student food fair highlight a trend of Jews being singled out for exclusion on school campuses and beyond.
“A lot of what Maya was just talking about is that disinclusion piece of antisemitism,” said Frank, who directs AJC’s William Petschek Contemporary Jewish Life Department and oversees AJC’s Jewish educational initiatives. “That disinclusion piece is really, unfortunately, unbelievably prevalent today.”
While other minority groups and their allies frequently speak of listening to students’ “lived experiences,” Jews’ personal narratives are often disregarded in those same spaces, according to Frank.
“We find that a lot of peoples’ lived experiences are important, but somehow Jewish students’ lived experiences are not as important,” Frank said.
She urged students to report acts of antisemitism, lamenting the fact that as many as 80 percent of anti-Jewish incidents go unreported in the U.S.
BCPS said any student with concerns is encouraged to report them to school administration.
Gordon said she has worked to educate her peers about antisemitism and will continue her advocacy.
“There’s more that we could do to educate people,” she said.
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