(Jewish Group) Fighting anti-Semitism where it starts

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently acknowledged "that the Jewish community in particular has suffered violence and faces very real threats from really across the hate spectrum."

Tragically, each week brings further examples of that hate Wray referenced. During one seven-day period in February, Massachusetts School superintendent John Buckey reported that anti-Semitic taunts and swastikas were found in elementary school bathrooms as well as a middle school in another part of the state, while three different South Carolina schools experienced anti-Semitic incidents. In New York, home of the nation's largest Jewish community, a Jewish school bus carrying children, was attacked by a man who used his car to block the bus and then got out and smashed the bus windshield.

Fighting skyrocketing anti-Semitism in K-12 schools requires mobilizing federal, state, and local government resources to combat this scourge, and a critical component, and one that is particularly timely right now, is for the U.S. Department of Education to expand its Civil Rights Data Collection.

Data-gathering must cover religious bias more extensively, and it should specifically identify which religious group is being targeted. This is important because you can't solve a problem unless you know what the problem is. Schools, local educational authorities and the federal government need this valuable and specific information. They need to understand precisely which religious groups are being victimized and which specific hate crimes students face to know how to effectively reverse the trend in religious harassment. The FBI takes the same approach to hate crime reporting. Now, with religious crime in schools on the rise, we must apply the same standards. As Brandeis Center Chair as well as former Assistant Secretary of Education Kenneth L. Marcus, said "The appalling number of religious offenses underscores how essential this data is."

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