On March 2, Principal Ralph Crame received reports of vandalism against the Jewish community at Carlmont. He responded with an email to parents regarding the incident. There was a star of David drawn with anti-Semitic words in chalk by the Scots gym and a swastika, a symbol most commonly related to German national pride during the 1900s, near the football field.
Crame wrote, “This behavior is very disappointing especially after our recent events like the Heritage Fair and the Chinese New Year’s festival to celebrate the diversity we have on campus and to show we are a school of acceptance and tolerance.” Crame assured the Carlmont community that the students who committed the acts will be identified as soon as possible.
On Monday, Jewish Club had a meeting in F12 regarding these actions and their thoughts on the subject. Its members were in agreement that something more had to be done to bring more awareness to the situation, other than an email notifying families of what had happened.
Some members of Jewish Club felt threatened and feared that this may be the start of a bigger issue.
Miles Bernstein, a junior, said, “We have to push love and push [people into] caring about each other, and that we’re all just people and we might have different beliefs, but I feel like we have to push that more than ever.”
Sophomore and club member Oria Farkash explained how she was new to this type of behavior, coming from an all-Jewish community.
“When I saw this saying, I thought that we should all do something as a Jewish community and we should stop keeping it quiet,” said Farkash.
Eli Melmon, a junior and club member, mentioned a method that involves “bridging the gap” between different clubs involving different religions, such as the Muslim Fellowship Club and Christian Club, and “make it so it’s not these three separate religions, but it’s this one cohesive unit of people who respect each other.”
There have been some ideas of selling challah and other various foods every Friday in the quad, where no one can miss it.
Although special events like the Heritage Fair promote tolerance and the celebration of diverse religions and ethnicities, many Jewish Club members feel that the message of acceptance in the Carlmont community needs to be extended furthermore.
Alyssa Jenkins • Mar 8, 2017 at 7:42 am
I found this entire article disturbing. First, the response from the school is, to use the principal’s word, “disappointing.” Hate speech isn’t “disappointing” — it’s disturbing. Someone has issued a threat to a group of people through graffiti on campus. This not a time to be “disappointed”; it’s a time to be assertive that there is no place for this hate on campus or in the world. Diversity fairs sometimes do more to fetishize than to educate.
Second, this is an opportunity for education, not a food fair. While I love a good challah, you don’t answer hate with food. You answer hate with education. What about a teach-in about Holocaust history? Or about the history of hate speech? Or propaganda? What about going classroom to classroom to talk to students about why an assault on one of us is an assault on all of us? Or even an email from the school and the local police department about the criminal punishment for a hate crime?
What about encouraging students to attend the Day of Learning at Galileo High School on March 19, a free half-day experience through which students learn about genocide, but also hear about it from those who survived?
The antidote to hate is education, not humus.