Our students are our answer to antisemitism

Last week, a year 7 student from Masada College was walking home from the bus stop. He was not wearing a kippah, his uniform bearing only a small logo, when a car slowed beside him in a leafy Sydney north shore suburb.

A man leaned out and screamed: “Jews are c***s! We love Hitler and we are coming back to get you!”

I can comfort his family. I can refer them to CSG, to the police, to the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. But how do I answer the question, why does everybody hate us? This is the heartbreak of educating Jewish children in the Diaspora. Abuse does not wait for adulthood. It can come in childhood, on a walk home.

That is why the battles begin not at university, not even in high school, but in primary school. The loss of innocence does not wait. What books do we give our students, knowing some storytellers hated people like us? What do we say when children learn their hero, Roald Dahl, declared himself “antisemitic” and claimed “Even a stinker like Hitler did not pick on them for no reason”?

And it is not just Dahl. What about Greta Thunberg? What do we say when idealistic young Jews discover that some of the loudest voices for justice have also spoken against Jews or the Jewish state? This forces us to grapple with the question of art versus artist; can we separate the work from its creator, and should we? It makes the choice of literature we study in school harder, but also creates some of the richest, most necessary conversations.