A Fever Called Antisemitism Hatched In Schools

The human body always has a temperature but no one talks about it unless it spikes. At a perfect 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, no one even uses the word “temperature.” Jump a few degrees, and suddenly it’s sirens and sick days.

Antisemitism works the same way.

Jews have long been the most targeted religious group per capita in the United States. Attacks, slurs, defacements, discrimination were normalized and ignored. Society treated Jew hatred like a low-grade temp: just part of the day-to-day hum of our civic immune system.

Then came October 7, 2023.

The massacre of Israeli civilians by Gazan terrorists ignited something far beyond protests thousands of miles away — it was an outbreak of unmasked hatred. Jewish students were chased off college campuses. Synagogues were vandalized. Civilians were gunned down in Washington, D.C. Jews were burned alive in Boulder, Colorado.

*Vandalism at Washington synagogue, November 2023*

The low-grade temperature turned into a public health emergency.

The presidents of leading universities were like first year medical school students, offering cooling words while feeding the fever. They were mum as professors glorified the slaughter of Jewish children. They discussed free speech while student groups blamed the victims. The campuses didn’t just incubate antisemitism — they made it a fashionable teaching moment of civic engagement.

The pandemic of antisemitism chased Jews indoors and to their homes while the fever set up camp in quads. President Biden fumbled the vaccine, creating task forces that dealt with antisemitism – and Islamophobia. Biden couldn’t figure out whether to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism or not, while it invited the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) – which glorified the October 7 slaughter – onto the task force meant to address Jew hatred. (To no one’s surprise, no Jewish groups were placed on the Islamophobia task force.)

Enter President Trump with an ice bath.

His administration is moving to dismantle the academic machinery that has enabled the plague, including revoking visas for foreign students at institutions like Harvard. Those students tend to come from the Global South where antisemitism is endemic. It’s not a gentle response. It’s designed to be a fever-breaker.

And it’s not just the universities which are infected.

California’s public schools – the Santa Ana Unified School District in particular – have become the Wuhan lab of American antisemitism — unleashing a virus of hate that targets the young and vulnerable. Unlike COVID-19, this disease travels faster through idealism than droplets, and to the young more than seniors. It spreads through TikTok videos and campus chants. It thrives in “social justice” syllabi soaked in Hamas talking points.

At SAUSD, Jews were not just excluded from ethnic studies; they were labeled “oppressors” and “racists.” Those who dared to push back opposing the antisemitism were accused of suffering a “colonized Jewish mind.”

The school board intentionally set a fire in the California desert: it condemned Jews as heretics in absentia, to be burned at the stake. While a lawsuit shut down the SAUSD ethnic studies and social justice courses, the virus had already spread.

Antisemitism is highly contagious when the populous is reeducated with lies and slander. Schools and woke media spread a narrative that Jews are “powerful” who stole their wealth and land in a capitalist and racist fashion from noble people of color. The blood libel – always there at the comfortable 98.6 degrees – became elevated after pro-Palestinian activists attached their cause to Black Lives Matter, and politicians fanned the flames during the pandemic. Marc Lamont Hill’s 2015 “from Ferguson to Palestine” and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s 2021 “from Gaza to Detroit” and 2024 “from Detroit to Cleveland to Gaza” were an incubation continuum, turning global Jewry into a virus to be vanquished. October 7, 2023 was the breakout moment.

We have been led to believe that antisemitism is a sickness that infects non-Jews which can be healed via education. The consequential thought is that reeducating people that Jews are neither powerful nor racist will somehow break the fever. Teaching people about the Holocaust and the frequency of antisemitic attacks are marketed as cures for the ailments.

But those approaches inherently keep Jews distinct; it leaves them as foreign entities in the body which will sooner or later be attacked by white blood cells. It is best to get blood cells to view Jews as normal, healthy cells like others, not unnatural tumors.

There are abundant opportunities to do so. A significant percentage of people from Latin America are descendants of conversos, Jews who were forced to convert by the Church during the Inquisition. Does the Hispanic community know they share common ancestry with Jews? The United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values. Are schools teaching the humble faith of America’s founding fathers which looked to build a “government for the people by the people”?

Yes, Jews are distinct, but a healthy and functioning part of the body like a heart or lung. The antisemitic and anti-Israel movements which characterize Jews as a dangerous alien mass – strangers to be attacked by both White supremacists and the majority-minorities pushing DEI – places global Jewry perpetually in the crosshairs.

Jews should not hide in the manner President Biden’s Jewish Engagement Director Aaron Keyak posted on X in May 2021 that “It pains me to say this, but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david (Jewish star),” in response to growing antisemitic attacks. Quite the opposite. Schools must showcase Jews as an integral part of a healthy and functioning society.

It is for the safety of American Jewry and betterment of America.