A conversation during a recent night out filled me with a sense of frustration. A friend, whose child attends a local public high school, shared some disturbing information. She said that one of her son’s teachers was spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric and that her attempt at solving the problem had been unsuccessful. A conference with the principal of the school had proven to be an exercise in futility. The caustic atmosphere in the classroom continued. Nothing was done and nothing changed.
The boy’s mother seemed to accept that the problem had no solution. There were powerful teachers’ unions. There was tenure and politics. There was the inertia of bureaucracy.
I suggested that action was called for. I encouraged her to contact the media, stage a protest, be tenacious. My friend is a strong and capable Jewish woman, but she acted with a passivity that seemed out of character.
I went home feeling very disturbed.
Shortly after the incident I flipped on the local news and learned that a similar situation had occurred at another South Florida high school. It was treated in an entirely different way by the parent of the child involved and the results reflected a very different outcome.
This incident involved a young teen in a Broward County School. According to the child’s father, Youssef Wardani, the French teacher at his son’s school referred to the 14-year-old boy as a “raghead Taliban” several times during the school year. Mr. Wardani took a zero tolerance approach to what he perceived to be a slur directed at his Muslim child.
After an unsatisfactory meeting with the teacher, Mr. Wardani contacted the school board. He organized a protest outside their building. He spoke to the media. He put the situation in the spotlight.
On Tuesday, March 18, the school board heard the case and unanimously voted to suspend the teacher for five days without pay and have her undergo diversity training. Wardani, however, was not pleased with the punishment. He wanted the teacher to be fired or suspended for a year.
When racism and hate speech are accepted as “just the way things are,” they become acceptable. Why do many Jews choose to remain quiet in these circumstances? Is it because of a mentality that promotes keeping one’s head and voice down in an attempt to be safe? We know from collective experience of the Jewish people that this technique is never effective. It only whets the appetite of the haters, who then assume they have an easy target.
The Jewish community needs to take a lesson from Mr. Wardani and adopt a zero tolerance policy when it comes to overt anti-Semitic speech and actions.