Three Shocking Antisemitic Attacks On Jewish Students in the Last Week

If you only looked at these news articles, you might think we were living in 1930s Europe. Shocking, disheartening and quite terrifying events occurred at two separate high school sporting events across the country in the last week. Other events occurred at the University of Denver.

Last Wednesday night, boys from Archbishop Coleman Carroll High School, a Roman Catholic school attacked a Jewish boy from Scheck Hillel Community School, a Jewish school in Florida, sending him to the hospital after a soccer game between the two teams. Prior to this, students from the school shouted antisemitic comments at the Jewish students saying, “Hitler was right,” among other vulgar statements. 

Administrators from both schools released a joint statement acknowledging an ongoing investigation into the incident and claim to have “zero tolerance for any kind of aggressive language and behavior, antisemitism or hate of any kind.”

This event was eerily similar to another that happened at a girls high school basketball game on Saturday night between the Shalhevet Firehawks and the Buena Park Coyotes. 

“The scores were really neck and neck and it was just overall a very intense game,” a Shalhevet student, who preferred to remain anonymous, shared. “My friend was standing across the gym by the other team when she texted me and told me they were chanting Kanye West at her the entire game. They were shouting at her and yelling that they were going to fight after the game.”

Another Shalhevet student, who also asked to remain anonymous, said that some Buena Park students pulled the Palestinian flag up on their cell phones and held it in the faces of Shalhevet students.

“I started to feel really unsafe,” the first student said. “The game got very hectic. When our girls were shooting foul shots, some Buena Park students held up pictures of Swastikas on their phones to distract them.”

The University of Denver reported separate incidents — seemingly strange, nonetheless terrifying. There was reported vandalism with pork products being glued to a student’s dorm room door and three separate cases of mezuzot being “taken down and defiled,” according to the school’s Hillel. The university released a statement denouncing the attacks.

“To us this is a bias-motivated crime and a message crime, with somebody giving the message that we don’t want you to feel safe as a Jew,” Daniel Bennett, the executive director for Hillel of Colorado said. “And it impacts not only those targeted, in this case Jewish students, but it impacts the broader Jewish community and all marginalized communities on campus. This stuff never stays localized.”

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