Brooklyn, New York. My hometown (until I was five, when we moved to Queens). Where just about everyone on both sides of my family lived. A “no problem area to be Jewish.
Not any more.
From Susan Edelman’s article in the New York Post:
A Brooklyn high school has become a haven for Hitler-loving hooligans who terrorize Jewish teachers and classmates, The Post has learned.
On Oct. 26, just three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis, 40 to 50 teens marched through Origins HS in Sheepshead Bay waving a Palestinian flag and chanting “Death to Israel!” and “Kill the Jews!” staffers said.
The hateful procession was shocking even for Origins, a school rife with bias and bullying, insiders told The Post.
“I live in fear of going to work every day,” said global history teacher Danielle Kaminsky.
According to interviews with multiple staffers, and a Jewish student’s safety transfer request, recent hate incidents include:
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- A student painted a mustache on his face to look like Hitler, and banged on classroom doors. When someone opened, he clicked his heels and raised his arm in the Nazi gesture, security footage shows.
- Three swastikas in one week were drawn on teachers’ walls and other objects, a manager found.
- A 10th-grader told Kaminsky, 33, who is Jewish, “I wish you were killed.”
- Another student called her “a dirty Jew” and said he wished Hitler could have “hit more Jews,” including her.
- Students pasted drawings of the Palestinian flag and notes saying “Free Palestine” on Kaminsky’s classroom door. One scribbled note that said simply, “Die.”
The teen tormentors have so far faced no serious discipline under interim acting principal Dara Kammerman, who has done little beyond contacting parents in an effort to practice “restorative justice,” staffers said.
Kaminsky, who joined Origins in 2017 after working four years in Long Island, has experienced antisemitism only at the DOE school, she said.
It’s widely known among students that Kaminsky is Jewish, though she doesn’t make a point of it, she said.
Her students routinely draw swastikas next to their names on classwork, engrave the Nazi symbol on their desks, and scribble them on bulletin boards, she said.
An Israeli flag – one of nearly 200 from countries around the world that Kaminsky hangs in her classroom – was ripped down in the spring of 2021.
A group of girls told her it was taken across the street and burned.
“I’ve been yelled at, followed, taunted,” Kaminsky said. “I report everything to the principal. I’ve been to a school safety committee. I’ve told my union, the UFT. I’ve told my superintendent,” Brooklyn South high schools chief Michael Prayor.
They’ve offered little help.
“Nothing has made me feel safe going to school,” she said.
Welcome to the new Brooklyn.
Welcome to the current education climate in Brooklyn (and, from everything I’ve read. the other boroughs as well).
This is what Brooklyn/the city of New York is raising as its next generation. How do you like it?
And when do you suppose most of our mainstream media (with precious few exceptions, the New York Post being one of them) are going to tell people about it? Maybe demand that something be done about it? Maybe demand that “students” who behave this way are made to answer for their actions?
Ever?
