Across the nation, radical teachers are “educating’ students that Jews are colonial interlopers in the Middle East and that Hamas’s genocidal ambitions are completely justified. Some are glorifying Hitler. Opinion.
It sounds like a modern retelling of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. An elite American school teaches children that Adolf Hitler was a good leader and refuses to teach them about the Holocaust. The students turn on their Jewish classmates, subjecting them to antisemitic harassment and bullying. When the Jewish children turn to the adults for help, they are expelled as punishment for not suffering in silence.
That would make for a horrifyingly realistic chapter in a novel about the descent of the United States into Fascism. Only it is no book. It is happening for real in the US in 2025.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon this week, the Nysmith School in Northern Virginia recently expelled three Jewish students after those students complained about the extreme antisemitism they were subjected to as the direct result of the school’s pro-Fascist and anti-Jewish curriculum.
Nysmith is supposedly one of the top ten K-12 schools in the entire country, and yet its classes would be more at home in Gaza where students are taught to worship Hitler instead of receiving an education.
In October 2024, a social studies teacher gave an assignment in which students depicted Hitler as a “strong historical leader.” A photograph shows multiple students holding up a large drawing of Hitler dressed in bright colors and wielding a sword. This project was then shared among the entire school community.
While the school was teaching children to admire Hitler, it refused to teach them about the crimes he committed, nor how many American soldiers his Nazi troops killed. The school cancelled a speaker who was supposed to address students about the Holocaust.
In such an environment, it is hardly a surprise that the children turned on their Jewish classmates, who were told everyone hated them for being Jews, told they were “baby-killers” and deserved to die, and taunted mercilessly about the October 7 massacre.
When the parents of one 11-year-old girl complained to the headmaster and the school administration, they were told that she needed to “toughen up.” As the harassment continued, the school’s response was to stop the bullying by removing the targets from the school and expelling the girl and her two siblings.
This is evil. The Nysmith School is teaching children to be Fascists, to hate Jews enough to want to see Jewish children dead. This is not an education. It is indoctrination. It will lead to violence. This so-called “elite” school is training the next generation of doctors who refuse to treat Jewish patients or worse, deliberately harm them, of adults who scream obscenities at Jewish children for the crime of existing, of killers who shoot up synagogues and Jewish schools or firebomb Jewish events.
While Nysmith is an extreme case, this evil is not limited to one school. Across the nation, radical teachers are “educating’ students that Jews are colonial interlopers in the Middle East and that Hamas’s genocidal ambitions are completely justified. Antisemitic harassment, bullying, and violence are tolerated and encouraged. Maybe they do not teach students to admire Hitler as Nysmith does, but they teach students to agree with Hitler about Jews.
In The Plot Against America, the country’s pro-Nazi turn comes to an abrupt end when First Lady Anne Morrow Lindbergh makes a statement calling for unity and non-violence following the disappearance of her pro-Nazi husband. In real life, combating such hate after it has spread so far and been implemented at the governmental level will be far more difficult and painful.
And confront it we must. Because what happened at the Nysmith School is how Fascism rises. This is how people who support evil ideas such as “globalize the Intifada” get elected. This is how tolerance turns to persecution.
This is how freedom and democracy die.
Gary Willigis a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.
