A Jewish educators' group has documented at least 250 antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents inside New York City public schools since the October 7, 2023, terror attacks, and says city leadership has done almost nothing to stop them.
United Jewish Teachers, an organization representing Jewish educators in the city's sprawling school system, compiled the incidents into a formal report and sent it to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels. The group's president, Moshe Spern, did not hold back about what the numbers show: the city's Department of Education has failed to protect Jewish students, teachers, and staff from a rising tide of hostility that has persisted across multiple school years.
Sixty-five percent of the incidents the group tracked involved what it called "direct acts", harassment, vandalism, physical assaults, swastika drawings, and verbal threats aimed at Jewish members of school communities. Nearly one in four incidents, 23 percent, involved biased classroom instruction about Israel and the Middle East. Another 10 percent involved student walkouts. The remainder involved staff actions, including social media posts, the New York Post reported.
Brooklyn accounted for the largest share, 37 percent, followed by Queens at 27 percent, Manhattan at 25 percent, the Bronx at 9 percent, and Staten Island at 2 percent.
The report catalogs specific episodes that illustrate the scope of the problem. On January 27, someone carved a swastika into a blackboard at Brooklyn Tech High School. On May 1, a student at Townsend High School in Queens was harassed for planning to join the Israel Defense Forces after graduation. On May 28, a flyer bearing a Nazi symbol and calling Israel an apartheid state turned up in a hallway at Flushing High School in Queens.
In November, a teacher at Manhattan's Heritage High School attended what the report described as a disruptive anti-Israel protest outside Park East Synagogue. The report does not specify what disciplinary consequences, if any, followed that incident, or any of the others.
That pattern of inaction is the report's central charge. Spern said the data point to a system that logs complaints but does not follow through.
Spern laid out the group's conclusion plainly:
"Many incidents documented by United Jewish Teachers show limited or no effective follow-through by school or district leadership, allowing hostile conditions to persist. These patterns have continued across multiple school years, indicating that existing policies and practices have not adequately protected Jewish members of the school community."
Asked whether the findings surprised him, Spern was blunt: "It's what I would expect. They haven't done anything to address antisemitism."
The Department of Education's internal data on student-on-student bullying, harassment, and discrimination based on religion, covering all faiths, not just Judaism, show a sharp increase over the past several years. In the 2018, 2019 school year, before COVID, the system recorded 151 such incidents. By 2022, 2023, the number had jumped to 367. It climbed again to 398 in 2023, 2024, the first full school year after the October 7 attacks. The figure dipped to 319 in 2024, 2025 but remained more than double the pre-COVID baseline.
City schools do not break those numbers down by specific religion, which means there is no DOE figure isolating antisemitic incidents from the broader category. That gap itself is telling. A school system that cannot, or will not, track the problem by faith has limited its own ability to measure whether its interventions work.
Citywide, the picture is no better. The latest NYPD data show a troubling rise in overall hate crimes this year, with more than half of those incidents deemed antisemitic. Jewish New Yorkers, in other words, are bearing the brunt of the city's hate-crime surge both inside schools and out.
Mayor Mamdani, a staunch critic of Israel, has not made the problem easier to address. In January, the mayor who snubbed the annual Israel Day parade scrapped an executive order issued by his predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams, that had adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of antisemitism. That definition is widely used by governments and institutions around the world to identify antisemitic conduct, including rhetoric that singles out the Jewish state using double standards not applied to other nations.
The United Jewish Teachers report does not stop at documenting the problem. It lays out five specific policy recommendations sent directly to Mamdani and Samuels:
Each recommendation targets a specific failure the report identifies. Without the IHRA definition, schools lack a shared standard for recognizing antisemitism. Without mandatory police involvement, hate graffiti gets painted over and forgotten. Without a public reporting portal, parents and taxpayers have no way to track whether incidents are rising or falling. Without training, teachers and administrators default to whatever instincts or biases they already hold. And without a curriculum review, students in nearly a quarter of the documented cases continue to receive instruction the report characterizes as biased.
The mayor's decision to scrap the IHRA executive order makes the first recommendation a direct rebuke of his administration's posture. Mamdani removed the very standard the educators' group now says the city urgently needs. Questions about how Mamdani's circle handles antisemitism are not new, and the UJT report adds institutional weight to concerns that have followed his administration from the start.
A representative for Chancellor Samuels responded to the report with a statement that leaned heavily on existing programs and procedures:
"New York City Public Schools is focused on ensuring that every student and educator is safe and respected in school. We have a zero tolerance for hate or bias, including antisemitism, and investigate and respond to all reported incidents in accordance with our Chancellor's Regulations and applicable laws."
The spokesperson also pointed to the DOE's Respect for All program, which assigns a dedicated staff member at every school to lead anti-bullying and bias prevention efforts. The department listed multiple reporting channels: a school-level Respect for All liaison, an online complaint form, an anti-hate hotline, and a dedicated email address.
On paper, that infrastructure sounds adequate. In practice, the UJT report argues it has not worked. Two hundred fifty documented incidents across nearly three years, with what the group describes as limited or no follow-through in the majority of cases, is not a system functioning as intended. A "zero tolerance" policy that produces 250 incidents and no visible consequences is a policy in name only.
Spern framed the gap between rhetoric and results in stark terms: "The data compiled by United Jewish Teachers demonstrate that antisemitism remains a serious and ongoing problem in New York City Public Schools." The report itself states that "these incidents have created hostile learning and working environments across the system."
Mamdani's broader record on issues touching the Jewish community has drawn sustained criticism. Public frustration with the mayor has surfaced repeatedly, and his administration's willingness to scrap the IHRA definition while antisemitic incidents climbed suggests a leadership that is, at best, indifferent to the problem.
The report's description of what Jewish students and staff actually face day to day is worth lingering on. The majority of verbal harassment cases involved antisemitic tropes, Holocaust references, and what the report calls "eliminationist language" directed against Israeli Jews. Vandalism featured swastikas and other hate symbols. Physical threats and assaults were also documented, though the report does not detail specific injuries or arrests.
Beyond the overt hostility, Jewish religious accommodations and participation in school life were denied or obstructed in multiple cases. Spern noted that Jewish educators and students have been shut out of ordinary school activities, a quieter form of exclusion that rarely makes headlines but corrodes the daily experience of attending or working in a public school.
The biased-curriculum finding, 23 percent of incidents, raises a distinct concern. When nearly a quarter of documented antisemitic episodes involve what teachers are actually teaching, the problem has moved beyond individual bad actors and into the institutional fabric. Mamdani's administration has faced legal and policy setbacks on other fronts, but the curriculum question may carry the deepest long-term consequences for the city's Jewish families.
New York City operates the largest public school system in the country. More than a million students pass through its doors. The idea that 250 antisemitic incidents can accumulate over nearly three years, with the city's own data showing religious discrimination complaints more than doubling since before COVID, without prompting a serious policy response from the mayor or the chancellor is a failure of leadership, not a failure of reporting mechanisms.
The DOE can point to its hotlines and its liaisons. The mayor can point to his spokesperson's statement. But Jewish parents sending their children into city schools are pointing to swastikas on blackboards, Nazi flyers in hallways, and a mayor who revoked the one executive order that gave the system a shared definition of the hatred their kids face every day.
When a city's leaders cannot even agree on what antisemitism is, they have already decided not to fight it.
