A Massachusetts middle school principal reportedly apologized to seventh-grade students after an antisemitism lesson prompted concerns from some families that the presentation left certain students feeling “unseen.”
The message, circulating on social media and attributed to Johnny Cole, principal of William Diamond Middle School in Lexington, Mass., referred to a recent classroom session that connected students’ social studies lessons on the Holocaust with present-day antisemitism.
Cole said the purpose of the program was to help students identify hatred, understand its roots and feel empowered to speak out against it.
But after conversations with some families, Cole wrote that school officials understood the session had not landed as intended. Some students, he said, felt that their identities, histories or communities had been overlooked or excluded.
In the email, Cole apologized and said every student should feel valued at school, specifically naming Arab, Jewish, Lebanese, Muslim and Palestinian students, among others. He added that, in this instance, the school “missed the mark” and fell short of its goals. JNS reported that it sought comment from Cole.
Deborah Lipstadt, the former U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, criticized the email, saying it reflected what she described as the “toxification” of Jewish history, life and community, rendering the subject increasingly difficult to address.
Trisha Posner, founder of AntisemitismWatch, also condemned the message, arguing that it showed an effort to diminish or remove Jewish history from classroom discussion.
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Posner wrote that after Holocaust denial, critics are now seeking to avoid teaching the subject by claiming it offends Arab and Muslim students. She said such an approach allows people to promote what she called a false narrative about genocide in Gaza while ignoring the Nazi genocide of European Jews.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis condemned the principal’s apology and urged Lexington Public Schools to “take concrete action, including establishing a clear and unified process for reporting and responding to hate and bias incidents, strengthening instruction on Jewish history, culture and identity and providing staff with substantive professional development on recognizing and confronting contemporary antisemitism.”
“It should be common sense that Holocaust education is not an affront to any student’s identity, and it is not something for which a school should apologize,” said Kurt Schwartz, CEO of CAMERA.
Schwartz pointed to past incidents at the school, including swastikas drawn in a boys’ bathroom, as well as the principal confronting a Jewish student who was wearing a sweatshirt with an “anti-Nazi message.”
“Leadership should be responding with moral clarity, not suggesting that the act of teaching about the Holocaust has somehow ‘missed the mark,’” Schwartz said.
The Lexington Observer published a letter to the editor from the student, Teagan Murtagh, an eighth-grader at the school, on June 17.
Murtagh claimed that Cole stopped her in the school hallway to ask her not to wear a sweatshirt to school that read, “Save the bees. Plant more trees. Clean the seas. Punch Nazis.”
She said that she wore the sweatshirt to “silently fight back against antisemitism in my school,” and that the principal told her that students had complained about feeling threatened by the words on her sweatshirt.
Murtaugh, who is the great-granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, wrote that “this is a school where students drew neo-Nazi symbols on the bathroom walls in December and the only schoolwide response was a statement on the announcements telling us to be kind.”
