How British Schools are Teaching Hatred Against Jews

Even Holocaust Memorial Day events are being used to create hatred against Jews

This photo from is of Daniel Kebede who is the General Secretary of the UK’s biggest teaching union the NEU and Louise Regan, who is an executive committee member and heads its international arm. Pictured at an anti-Israel rally a year ago, they demonstrate a growing problem within our education system.

In 2021, Kebede made calls at another anti-Israel demonstration to ‘globalise the intifada’. Regan is chair of the Palestine Solidarity campaign.

When I first wrote about the anti-Israel obsession of the NEU and how it was seeping into classrooms a year ago in a piece for Unherd, although it was shown to Labour ministers, it was ignored.

Then, at the Jewish Labour Movement conference, earlier this month, the Communities Minister Steve Reed tried to explain how he knew antisemitism was bad because his own colleague and friend had been banned from going to a school in his district.

He didn’t realise how shocking it would be to many. Because of my original article, I was asked to write many more deep dives into the scandal of what is happening in our schools.

Fortunately for me as a journalist, less fortunately as a Jewish person being shown the full horror of the propaganda against Israel, it wasn’t hard to find examples.

For the Telegraph, I spoke to two Jewish NEU members - one revealed the NEU rep at her school had simply told her that Israel didn’t exist. The second spoke of the pain of the Israel obsession and how teachers had shown off about their pro-Palestine classroom activities (I’ve put a version of this below).

For the Mail, I looked at the impact of this in the classroom - lies and historical inaccuracies to wipe out the Jewish story. In the Jewish Chronicle, I helped unveil how just a few days after the October 7 massacre, the Bristol branch of the NEU, which had celebrated stopping Jewish MP Damian Egan from going to one of their schools, had shared teaching material which invited pupils to sympathise with Hamas’s actions.

For another piece in the Telegraph (a version also below - but please remember journalism should be paid for), I revealed how even Holocaust Memorial Day is now being used against Jews as the idea of a Gaza genocide is being pushed by both pupils and teachers.

The shadow education minister has now asked for the NEU to be investigated - our Education Minister Bridget Phillipson has says she will look at it, which feels like a tiny win for journalism.

This couldn’t be more important. For years, we have seen hatred against Jews rising in universities, and now this is being replicated in schools.

But this has been going on for a long time and I worry that the political will isn’t there to stop it.

Photograph of the Western Wall in Israel

‘My Colleague Told Me Israel Doesn’t Exist’

This came from two interviews with NEU members who asked to remain anonymous. A version of this first appeared in the Daily Telegraph.

· Louise is a special needs assistant at a school in North London

It was after the NEU representative at my school told me that Israel didn’t exist that I started having doubts about the union I had been a member of for nearly a decade.

I don’t go to branch meetings or anything like that – I knew it was left wing but I never realised just how bad things were.

I had gone in to talk to the rep in her office, we were good friends. It was soon after October 7, and I was quite sad about it, as I have family in Israel. She was sympathetic, but then just told me that Israel didn’t exist. When I challenged her and said, ‘What do you mean it doesn’t exist?’ She told me, ‘I’ve been to a union meeting, and they’ve shown us the maps and it’s Palestine, not Israel.’ This was an intelligent woman.

I was kind of speechless, but over the next few days I sent her some material and videos to show her the history of Israel. I never even heard back. I wish I’d said to her, ‘Well, I go to Israel almost every year, so it must exist.’ But of course I didn’t. I daren’t.

I’ve found this denialism to be a recurring theme. One day, I went for lunch with some of the other assistants, and we had falafel. They started talking about how it was a Palestinian dish and going on about Palestine. In the playground I heard two colleagues talking in front of the kids about the ‘genocide’ in Palestine and I went and talked to our head.

Soon after that, he banned all talk about the conflict on the school grounds. In some ways, that was helpful, but in other ways it totally isn’t. I work in quite a Muslim area and there is only one point of view being perpetuated. It feels like we are not allowed to challenge that.

Both my parents were from Hungary - my father’s family perished in the Holocaust – he was lucky he was already working in the UK. My mother grew up under communism, coming to the UK in 1956, so I have a good understanding both of antisemitism and of impelled speech from communism. I don’t think teachers should be on the side of brainwashing children. I don’t want to have to tiptoe around this subject when it involves me. It feels like we are on dangerous ground.

The NEU WhatsApp groups were full of Palestine and pumping this narrative that Israel isn’t a legitimate country. It is almost like it is a mental illness, this post-truth place where Israel doesn’t exist. I never went to any branch meetings or conference, but I saw that the NEU President called to ‘globalise the intifada’, and I don’t think someone like that should be running a union.

It was seeing, via the internet, that they’d announced at the conference that they were sending hundreds of thousands from our subscriptions to the union to Palestine that made me decide to leave and find another union. They didn’t say what charities they were giving the money to – what sort of checks they’ve done. This was not something that I’d signed up for.

All of this in the union is one of the reasons for me questioning whether I want to stay here in the UK. Before the war, I never even thought about going to Israel but now I have started the paperwork to make a move and I think my daughter, who is 30, will come too.

I believe that education should be about telling the truth, and that means explaining that Israel is a legally set-up country. If teachers are taking the side of terrorists and brainwashing children, we are on extremely dangerous ground not just for Jews but for everyone.

I no longer want to tiptoe around people, hide my Jewishness or the fact that I support Israel. It feels that we are now in a country where only some people are allowed to speak.’

‘I’m staying to fight from the inside’

· Sarah is an English teacher in a secondary school in East London

Two weeks after the October 7 attack, which saw my own relatives killed and taken hostage, my union put out a statement saying that Palestinians had the right ‘to resist Israeli settler colonialism by all available means including armed struggle.’ I was horrified, furious but also wondered what on earth a war 2000 miles away had to do with a British education union.

The union has long been interested in Palestine. I remember when there was a conflict in 2021 between Israel and Hamas that there had been some excitement: lots of motions and demonstrations. But since the October 7 attacks, what was a fringe issue has become mainstream in the union.

When I look at my NEU WhatsApps from the last two years it is all ‘Palestine! Palestine! Palestine!’ The magazine seems to have one constant: Palestine. While there are lots of teachers who don’t take much notice of the union, the problem is that there are plenty who do. The most politically active go to their branch meetings, where all they do is talk about Palestine, and then they take it back to their schools, where it is sometimes fed into lessons.

On my local group, when the union has one of its regular days of action for Palestine, teachers post photographs of themselves holding up Palestine flags in front of their children. They discuss how to get Palestine into their lessons and encourage children to colour in Palestine flags and even say ‘intifada revolution’. I have seen reading material in which teachers are encouraged to tell pupils to watch Al Jazeera – which is paid for by the state which sponsors Hamas.

I am amazed that in many ways the union is encouraging teachers to break educational rules. But also the NEU reps know that they have that bit more protection – it is harder to sack a union rep – and it is often them taking it into schools and radicalising fellow teachers and even students.

Even now the war is over, the union is hosting yet another ‘how to educate about Palestine’ day in July. It is relentless.

This union has helped me in the past and all the teachers at my school are with the NEU so while I feel isolated inside the union, if I were to leave, I would be alone in my school without it.

There are teachers in my school who wear Palestine badges. I think it’s wrong – we shouldn’t be bringing politics into school. Quite a few stopped wearing them when my headteacher challenged them: ‘If you are asked about the badge are you prepared to give a response which puts across both sides?’ It annoys me that anyone is allowed to wear them – and it’s isolating. I just feel totally on my own but I try to not talk politics at all with any of them. I have found the war and everything so hard that I also try and avoid social media other than being on WhatsApp groups. I just go to work and do my job the best I can.

Most Jewish teachers have left the NEU and I don’t blame them. It has become a hostile place for Jews. The fury over just one conflict, the conflict that happens to involve the one Jewish state, feels like antisemitism to me, even if it’s being done by people who feel like they are just caring.

You have this classic antisemitism because we now have teachers coming from cultures which just are just plain old antisemitic, and it’s in this unholy marriage with far left antisemitism. And the union just won’t recognise this problem.

It didn’t surprise me that the union would be partly behind the campaign to ban Damian Egan. If we live in a functioning democracy, how is it possible that an elected representative of a mainstream party isn’t safe to visit a school?

One of the NEU’s other big issues is Prevent – it deems the anti-radicalism programme ‘racist’. But some of these teachers should be referred to Prevent for indoctrinating children.

I don’t go to any branch meetings or conferences – I don’t want to see the full extent of how awful it is. But remaining in the union means I get to keep a Jewish voice there – however small it is. I know that when Daniel Kebede has been tackled about the Palestine obsession, his response is that it is ‘democracy’. But I’d be afraid to tell my colleagues I have family in Israel – that’s how intimidating all of this is. And it isn’t a democracy if Jews feel they have no choice but to leave.’

Railway tracks at Auschwitz, where 1.1million Jews were killed

How The Holocaust is Now Being Used Against Jews

(This is an extended version of an article I wrote for The Telegraph)

Leah* is already battling with both her fellow pupils and teachers over the wording for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day assembly.

At her Manchester private school, sixth formers from the Jewish Society are meant to write the assembly with the Humanitarian Society. Last year, fellow pupils tried to insert the ‘Gaza genocide’ into the document while a teacher suggested a paragraph about the war in Gaza, stirring up ‘anti-Muslim hatred’.

She and a fellow Jewish student pushed back against both wanting Holocaust Memorial Day to focus on the Holocaust. This year, the struggles have started again. ‘A pupil wanted to put in a paragraph about ‘the recognised genocides in the Middle East and Sudan in the last 12 months’,’ she says. ‘It kind of sums up what has been happening in my school – where I’ve overheard people say about a younger pupil, ‘I wouldn’t be friends with her because she supports Israel’ and lots of other instances that I complain about. It feels like nothing is ever done, but now the other Jewish pupil and I will have to fight to get this paragraph removed before the assembly.’

But at least her school is still commemorating it. At the weekend, it was revealed that since the October 7 Hamas massacre in 2023, the number of schools commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) has more than halved.

The figures have been put out by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT), which collates all the figures for events on or around the day, showed that while 2000 secondary schools commemorated the HMD – which is timed to represent the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 – in 2023, that number dropped to 1200 in 2024 and 854 last year.

‘There are people who have cancelled for what we would still see as a good faith agenda and others with a bad faith agenda,’ says HMDT chief executive officer Olivia Marks-Woldman. ‘Some teachers will say to us, I am not confident about leading this because I don’t know what to say if people try to bring in unrelated conflicts. We try to provide them with guidance: that this day only commemorates the Holocaust, some of the other communities who were persecuted by the Nazis and the recognised genocides which followed the Holocaust in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. But then there are people with their own agenda who want to use HMD to attack the memory of the Holocaust.

‘We have had people write to us saying they will only commemorate HMD on certain conditions, for example, if we put out a letter condemning Netanyahu. I find this shocking – learning about and commemorating the Holocaust should not be conditional on anything. We know there are teachers who are facing pushback from parents who might be withdrawing their children from HMD events. Some of our sister organisations say that although they haven’t had a drop in numbers from schools engaging, they have seen a smaller number students attend.’

Last year the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a pro-Iran charity that helps organise the annual anti-Israel Quds Day march in London, sent a letter to 460 local councils and universities urging them to snub HMD events, saying it was ‘morally unacceptable’ that Gaza was not included on the list of genocides being marked on the day.

‘They are a fringe group, but their call for a boycott was falling in this broader context of lack of confidence from teachers, which may have led to disengagement,’ says Marks-Woldman.

Mala Tribich, a survivor of Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, has noticed less interest from schools. ‘I can’t explain why,’ says Mala who was appointed an MBE for services to education in 2012. ‘I have been going into schools less, but instead, I have been going into offices to talk. You would be surprised how many people in offices know absolutely nothing about the Holocaust. It is not just children who need to be educated.’

Hannah*, the Jewish parent of a child in a school in a multi-faith South London secondary, says that in her child’s school, they have taken the easy option of ignoring the day since the October 7 attacks. ‘It was hard to know what to say to them as you tend to only find out after the event and I am not someone who wants to draw attention to myself or the fact that my child is Jewish,’ she says. ‘This year, a very sweet parent, who isn’t Jewish and whose husband is half Muslim, actually wrote to the school just before Christmas and asked them to do an assembly for HMD after what happened in Manchester, but they said they were busy with Black History Month for the whole month. I was touched that she’d made the effort even though it seems it was easier for them to just say no.’

The Holocaust is part of the national curriculum for year 9s, but commemorating HMD is up to individual schools. Even for those schools still marking it, there has been tension, however.

School librarian Jo* does an HMD exhibition every year at her large comprehensive in North London and noticed an immediate difference after October 7. ‘In accordance with the charity that does HMD, I include material on the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia and Darfur, but the bulk of it was about the Holocaust,’ she says. ‘For the first time, some colleagues responded saying we should include Gaze, and then others chimed in with other historical events that have not been classified as genocide.

‘It felt like an attempt to totally undermine the Jewish centrality to HMD and explicitly to turn Jewish victimhood into Jewish guilt re Gaza. I responded with a strongly worded email openly accusing those concerned of antisemitism. On the positive side, I got numerous private messages of support but the whole thing left a very nasty taste in my mouth. I am dreading it this year.’

There are signs of light – of a kind. The pressure is off a little with the shaky ceasefire in Gaza still holding. Since the Manchester Synagogue terrorist attack in October, at least some Holocaust education charities are seeing an uptick in bookings, which may mean that the figures will go up again this year.

Hannah Goldstone, who works in the senior management team at the Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield and is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, says she has seen increased interest since the antisemitic attack.

‘I think what happened in Manchester really affected the wider community, not just the Jewish community,’ she says. ‘I think people want to show solidarity, show support and they want to learn. We find that when schoolchildren come in with their parents and grandparents, we are teaching all of them things they didn’t know. This year’s HMD theme is ‘Bridging the generations’ and that is about Holocaust survivors passing the baton to their children and grandchildren but also for the children we are teaching to explain it to their parents and grandparents.’

While there was a tension after Oct 7 in Holocaust survivors and their descendants being asked to talk about Gaza, that seems to have quietened down there too. ‘You would walk into a few places and know that the Gaza question was going to come up,’ she says. ‘Sometimes, if you said you just wanted to talk about the Holocaust, you would get an eye roll. But I think because of what happened in Manchester on Yom Kippur and the ceasefire, things have changed slightly.’

All this still leads to a bigger question of how, with at least some Holocaust education mandatory, antisemitism remains frighteningly high.

Some of it is down to how the Holocaust is taught. Is it done by professionals or someone who cares about the subject? Or is it a box-ticking exercise? For 21-year-old student Jael Cohen-Rothschild, who grew up in Kent as the only Jewish child in her class, her education in the Holocaust in school was watching the film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas in class. The story, based on a book by John Boyne, is deemed controversial by Holocaust educators because readers are meant to feel sorry for the son of a Nazi who goes into a concentration camp for fun and ends up being rounded up rather than the Jewish boy in the story.

‘I think it is a really damaging book because its message is we should feel sorry for the Nazi side,’ says Jael, who posted about her experience on Instagram. ‘There was no actual education coupled with the film which explained what the Holocaust was or how it killed 6million Jews. When I posted about this on Instagram, I had quite a few people messaging me to say they’d had no Holocaust education at school, so I don’t really know what is going on.’

Last year, both television stations and local councils omitted to mention who the genocide had happened to, and for decades, there have been attempts to water it down into an all-genocide day. The pressure to include the war in Gaza is the almost inevitable next step – but that becomes a form of Holocaust inversion and an excuse to attack Jews says historian Simon Sebag Montifiore.

Delivering the keynote speech for the Holocaust Education Trust in Westminster on Monday night, he described how Holocaust is increasingly being used as a weapon against Jews.

Describing how Soviets, in an attempt to attack American ally Israel, started calling the country’s war against Arabs ‘a genocide’ all the way back in 1969. Now the Holocaust, instead of being used to explain the perils of antisemitism, is instead being used to stir it up. ‘The brazen killing of October 7, itself an event of genocidal intent, unleashed the latent Holocaust inversion trope against Israel and, more globally, Jews,’ he said. ‘The dark mirror of the Holocaust was laced with a much older vitriol, particularly the medieval blood libel – the idea that Jews deliberately killed children.

‘With slogans like ‘globalise the intifada’, Holocaust inversion is so damning that it justifies and encourages murder. The moral power of the Holocaust, a sacred pillar of the West’s rules-based order that made the accusation of genocide the polite world’s very definition of evil, so poisonous and diabolical, now commandeers the 6million to justify boycotts and the ultimate murder of Israelis and Jews.’

*(denotes not their real names)