Montgomery County, Maryland, is among the most affluent and diverse counties in the United States. It rivals only Huntsville, Alabama; California’s Silicon Valley; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and northern Virginia in the sheer number of Ph.Ds. Until recently, at least, its schools were top-notch and a magnet that attracted migration into the county.
Increasingly, though, the county’s public school system has been beset by antisemitic hate. In December 2022, vandals
graffitied
, “Jews not welcome,” on the sign for Walt Whitman High School. While Whitman’s principal
said
he investigated the incident, he did not reveal the results of the investigation, though he spoke about how he seeks to work with Montgomery County Public Schools’ “
restorative justice unit
.”
THE FIGHT AGAINST ANTISEMITISM SHOULDN’T BE PARTISAN
Members of the school’s debate team
allegedly talked
about “luring Jews” with challah and “burning them at the stake” on a remote island.
According
to the Washington Post, “Since January, officials have found swastikas on desks at Tilden Middle School in Bethesda, Magruder High School in Rockville, Silver Creek Middle School in Kensington, Gaithersburg High School, and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.” Within Montgomery County at large, police statistics show the greatest number of hate crimes were directed at Jews.
Enter MCPS Superintendent Monifa McKnight. McKnight has a history of
prioritizing virtue-signaling
over action. In a Friday email to MCPS parents (of which I am one), she wrote: “A concerning number of students have drawn Nazi symbols on desks, verbally assaulted Jewish peers, spoken anti-Jewish tropes, and glorified Naziism via pictures broadcasted on social media. These acts have left me — and so many of you — feeling angry, dismayed, and horrified.” She added, “As we fight these repeated acts of hate, we must challenge one another to learn and understand what antisemitism, hatred, and racism are and the harm they cause.”
The following day, I walked through Westbrook Elementary School. On one classroom door was this poster: “Challenge like Rosa [Parks], Dream like Martin [Luther King, Jr.], Write like Maya [Angelou], Lead like Malcolm [X].” There is nothing wrong with
assigning students
the Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school literature classes studying the
American experience
and its various
perspectives
. High school students should learn to analyze rather than recite and criticize rather than idolize. Authors, historical figures, and politicians are human. The job of a school system should not be to cancel or glorify but to examine and expose.
Malcolm X was an important figure, but was he a leader students should emulate? Does MCPS want to endorse and embrace violence as
Malcolm X did
? While Martin Luther King, Jr. marched with Jews and spoke out repeatedly
against antisemitism
and in
favor of
Zionism
, Malcolm X was a rabid antisemite. Malcolm X disparaged Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. As he
stated
in his autobiography, “I knew that the Jew played these roles for a very careful strategic reason: the more prejudice in America could be focused upon the Negro, then the more the white Gentiles’ prejudice would keep diverted off the Jew.”
He dismissed the accusation that the Nation of Islam was antisemitic. “Jews, who have been guilty of exploiting the black people in this country, economically, civically, and otherwise, hide behind — hide their guilt by accusing the Honorable Elijah Muhammad of teaching — of being antisemitic,” he
said
. When Malcolm X
met
with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan to seek their support for black separatism, he “assured them it was Jews who were behind the integration movement.”
Within MCPS, however, virtue-signaling and racial politics mean elementary school students are taught to believe Malcolm X was to leadership what Maya Angelou was to literature. If McKnight is suddenly worried about antisemitism in Maryland’s largest school district, perhaps she might consider that the problem lies in part in the district’s own propaganda and her own leadership’s prioritization of politics and polemics over academics and critical thinking.
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Michael Rubin (
@mrubin1971
) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
