My parents never had a conversation with me about antisemitism. For the most part, they didn’t need to.

I grew up in Orlando, Florida—about 160 miles north of where the vast majority of Jews in the state tend to congregate, but home to a decent-sized Jewish community all the same. I went to public school my entire childhood. Depending on the year, I was either the only Jewish kid in my class or one of two or three, though I was never the only one in my grade. It was never an issue. Or at least antisemitism was never something I was conscious of—which was probably the point.

Except it was an issue. I just didn’t know it yet.

The year was around 1998. The Spice Girls were all the rage. I was your typical eight-year-old girl—head-to-toe Limited Too, platform Skechers, trying my absolute hardest to be one of the cool kids. Given the Spice Girls obsession and the frizzy curly hair, the natural path to optimum cool-girl status was, in my mind, to channel Scary Spice. I made the half-up, half-down mini-buns situation she popularized my signature look. And I loved it.

Until the day I realized people were laughing at me. Whispering behind my back. A girl in my neighborhood—let’s call her Madeline—someone I thought was my friend, had started a rumor that the reason I wore my hair like Scary Spice every day was to hide my horns.

I was eight. I had no idea what that meant. I just knew kids were being cruel and it felt awful. So, I stopped wearing my hair that way. The rumors passed. I stopped being friends with Madeline. It became a blip.

It was not until years later that I understood what actually happened. Madeline was not just a mean girl. She was a mean girl deploying one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in existence—the medieval myth that Jews have horns, rooted in a centuries-old mistranslation of the Bible, used to dehumanize Jewish people for over a thousand years. She was eight. I was eight. And that particular piece of hatred had already traveled from her parents’ dinner table to our third-grade classroom.

Here is the thing about my story: in the end, it did not matter. In 1990s suburban Orlando, that incident was an anomaly. I went back to school the next day and the next year, and nobody else said a word about horns. I did not need the framework to name what happened to me, because it happened once and then it was over.

Kids today are not that lucky.

The world they are growing up in is fundamentally different from the one I grew up in. Antisemitism is no longer an occasional schoolyard cruelty a child might encounter once and never again. It is in the classroom. It is in the curriculum. It is coming from teachers and administrators and the institutional structures of the schools we send children to every morning. And nearly all of the public conversation about antisemitism in education has been focused on college campuses—which matters, of course—but it is obscuring a crisis that starts much, much earlier.

What Is Happening in K-12 Schools Right Now

In September 2025, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing on the spread of antisemitism in K-12 schools.[1] Witnesses testified that in some states, the........

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