Westchester County schools are under attack by antisemites and extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Underlying the cause of this rampant upsurge are social media outlets and gaming, resulting in hate crimes at record levels.

“We don’t always hear from young people about their actual experiences,” said Senator Shelley Mayer, the sponsor of the event and chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee. “While there are a lot of older adults on this panel, the real stars of this panel are the high school students who are here to tell their stories and then to use this panel and the expertise here to try to think of creative solutions. … This program today is to try to find solutions, in addition to what we do in schools, both to ensure there is less of this occurring … [and] that there are consequences for those who engage in hateful speech, hateful conduct—and then we create a climate where it is truly discouraged and it is not permissible anymore.”

This past summer Mayer, a Jewish Yonkers Democrat, put together a panel discussion with Jewish students from Port Chester High School, White Plains High School and Yorktown High School who have all experienced antisemitism in some fashion and feel frustrated that school administrators ignored their complaints. Joining the students were four professionals and one elected official from the village of Port Chester.

“Port Chester experiences discrimination from outsiders; prejudice is very much an issue within our own communities,” said Gwen Dominguez, a Port Chester High School student. “As a high schooler there was a controversy where our school board president … was exposed for interacting with racists on Facebook. Knowing that was disheartening and appalling. Not only that someone who had power over making decisions that affected my classmates and everyone I grew up with, but seeing that a large number of people supported him. … I did see all the hate that was a big part of the situation, but I also saw how people were standing up and having their voices heard. I am a white person who is the granddaughter of Cuban immigrants.”

Another student described a disturbing symbol etched into her school desk. “On November 15, 2022, someone carved a swastika on my desk. I was shocked, upset and taken aback. As a Jewish individual I was personally affected,” said Lexi Labis, a student at White Plains High School.

That incident brought a positive response from one of the most prominent professionals on the panel.

“Lexi, you spoke about how upset you were about the swastika but you also noted that the swastika is a symbol that the Nazis used to attack other groups,” said Scott Richman, the ADL regional director for New York and New Jersey. “That’s a lesson that I talk about all the time and I rarely hear universalizing the image of the swastika. [This concept] is so important as a way to counter that issue. We in the Jewish community tend to internalize that and make it our own issue but it’s not just an issue for the Jewish community, it’s an issue for everybody.

“There’s an important group you left out,” Richman continued. “It’s not just the Jews the Nazis put in the concentration camps, it’s also our soldiers. Our American soldiers, more than 400,000 Americans lost their lives in World War II fighting against that symbol. … We need to stand up to the swastika, which unfortunately has become ubiquitous in our schools. I always talk about the fact that everybody in that school needs to be up in arms about that, not just the Jewish community, so kudos to you [Lexi] for universalizing it. ”

Another student claimed that communicating and education are two solutions to combating hate.

“In my school there is a lack of focus on personal stories and learning about how individual people’s lives have been turned upside down as a result of hate,” recalled Talia Pierson, a student at Yorktown High School. “We learn about events such as the Holocaust and slavery. We learn about how this has changed history. We learn from personal stories and we listen to speakers or remembrances. As more students have that opportunity from more organizations it will really help to eliminate hate as a whole. Any individual’s life, no matter how ordinary, can be turned upside down as a result of hate.”

Turning to the professionals, they saw bravery with what the students expressed in their remarks before an audience of approximately 70 people.

“To the youth here, not only do you have courage, you have what we call moral courage,” said Andrea Myer Winograd, executive director of the Holocaust Museum & Center of Tolerance and Education based at Rockland Community College in Suffern. “Moral courage is when you take a risk that you don’t need to take. It’s the courage you all had to stand up. … Not just for yourself but to pave the way for the next and the next and the next [generation]. ”

Winograd found an ally with Virginia Norfleet, CEO and founder of the Rockland County-based Haverstraw African American Connection.

“Together we have formed Better Together,” Winograd said. “We realized that the African American community and the Jewish community in the ’60s walked together, stuck together in solidarity, and today we are farther apart than ever. There was a bond, there was a break, and now we want to build a bridge. We try to build relationships through storytelling. Professional development can run around three hours sometimes and the teachers ask that it never ends.”

Norfleet had her own take on building bridges in a community where her family roots extend back 120 years.

“I left New York and then came back. I started to hear about ‘those people,’ referring to Hasidic Jewish people buying up property. That became a problem for me because in the ’60s. I was ‘those people,’ ‘you people,’ and people were running from our neighborhoods. It’s not just between Blacks and Jews but with everybody. New York was the second-largest slave-holding state in the country, only behind South Carolina. We don’t even teach our history. That’s an issue. What it does is make other people feel inferior while other people feel superior. New York was as brutal as the south. In Haverstraw the first Africans arrived in 1616. We don’t even deal with our own history.”

Another professional said education is lacking to combat hate and antisemitism.

“It is our belief, as an organization, that education is one of the responses that we need to actually uniformly put forward in order to respond to hate,” said Lisa Zeiderman, president of the White Plains-based Justice Brandeis Law Society, Ninth Judicial District, an organization that raises awareness about racism of all kinds and organizes cultural events for attorneys and judges. “It’s about education and educating people as to why hate is so wrong and why we can’t be desensitized to hate.”

Richman, who has been in his position for less than three years, spoke about a six-point awareness plan that includes polarization, hate crimes, social media, gaming, extremism and antisemitism. As we have seen in Congress recently, polarization of ideas can bring the government to a screeching halt due to a polarization of ideas.

“We live in a particularly divided moment where society is getting increasingly more divided,” Richman said. “That’s a big problem. When people take sides like that, what they do is say, ‘Everything on my side is right,” whether it is right or wrong, and ‘Everything on the other side is wrong,’ whether it’s right or wrong. People on the left need to control hate on the left. People on the right need to control hate on the right. There is a rise of hate speech on social media due to polarization and that is emboldening extremists.”

Combating hate crimes is a particularly devious problem because it balances free speech against hurtful speech.

“The latest FBI data is that hate crimes are at their highest levels in 20 years,” Richman said. “More than 11,000 hate crimes. It’s not easy for something to be declared a hate crime. … You need to show that the person had some sort of animus, some sort of motivation that they were attacking someone because of their identity. It’s a very high bar because of our laws. By the way, it has to be a crime. The incidents that the people spoke about here are terrible and they’re painful, but they’re not crimes.”

The spectrum of hate is not as clear-cut as it was a decade ago before social media took hold and gained a free-thinking audience.

“Hate is typically controlled by civil society,” Richman claimed. “Social media throws it out of whack because we don’t have to ask permission. If you want to get your ideas out, you simply have to put it out there. Even more than that you can find others who share your hateful views. That was very hard in the past. You can also radicalize others who may not share your hateful views but are susceptible to it.

“Social media is completely self-regulated; there is no regulation by the government,” he continued. “The gaming industry has not put in place content moderation policies that have been done by Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok. In gaming we have now seen that harassment has become normalized. In the gaming industry more than 83% of adults and 50% of youth report being harassed on social media. Ten percent of that involves white supremacy.”

Richman said all this leads to public displays of hate and antisemitism. “We had the example in Port Chester of the Goyim Defense League. A vehemently antisemitic, white supremacist group that left flyers on people’s lawns. By the way, this is completely allowed because of free speech. They left flyers on people’s lawns with horrific statements about people in the Jewish community. Stickers that were left in New Rochelle about a year and a half ago with a message about white power. Starting in 2017, ADL began keeping track of it. We counted 20 incidents of such white supremacist propaganda in 2017. In the latest count that has gone up more than 10 times, well over 200 incidents in New York. It is mirrored across the country.”

Richman then zeroed in on antisemitism.

“We are a Jewish organization but we are also allies when it comes to fighting all forms of hate. I do want to single out antisemitism because we are in a moment where antisemitism has gone up tremendously. Antisemitic incidents have gone up tremendously. ADL tracks these. ADL responds to antisemitic incidents, Literally, every day of the week we respond to antisemitic incidents. Having multiple incidents every day to which they need to respond is tremendously difficult.

“Perhaps the most heinous example of this are assaults. We counted the largest number of assaults, 111 incidents of people who were physically attacked where you could prove that this was because they were Jewish, not just because a Jewish person was harmed but where you could prove the person was doing it because that person was Jewish, in 2022. … It’s very serious.”

Richman said he is hopeful that students helping students deal with hate will be effective.

“ADL has peer-to-peer training in high school. It’s a very important part of what we do. … Teaching students to be able to talk to fellow students about this has such an impact. We work in about 80 schools in Westchester, not to mention approximately 400 schools in New York and New Jersey. It’s a very important part of our work. Peer-to-peer training is critical.”

Aside from all the conversations coming from this panel it is possible that new laws could result from these experiences. The state Bar Association has empaneled a task force of highly respected attorneys to discuss anti-Asian hate and antisemitism in an effort to develop recommendations for the legislators to refine into proposed laws. Mayer is a member of the task force. John Harris is the task force member representing the ADL on the panel of experts.