IUPUI Institute of Integrative AI Collaboration Grant

Much like other forms of bias, oppression, and hate, the incidence of antisemitism has been on the rise in the United States since 2015. Data collected by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) indicate that schools, in particular, have been sites of antisemitic incidents. In the current sociocultural environment of permissiveness towards hatred (Bernstein, 2017; Hall et al., 2016; Prisk, 2017), hundreds of incidents ranged from high school students using Nazi symbols, imagery, and antisemitic language (Pink, 2019) to swastikas chalked onto the playgrounds of elementary schools (Bellafante, 2019). This collaboration between members of the IU School of Education-Indianapolis and the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI draws on the ADL’s database of reported antisemitic incidents in schools across the nation, layering these reported incidents with a variety of demographic, historical, geographic and media-related data to develop a set of “community types.” From a curricular, training, and intervention-based perspective, a school-based incident of antisemitism would need to be addressed differently in Driggs, ID, than Brooklyn, NY. The community types will provide a guide for curating different packages to offer to different kinds of communities based on the factors explored in this research project. We will later partner with the non-profit organization Facing History and Ourselves to create targeted interventions—both pro-actively and responsively—for these schools and communities based on the community type in the form of curriculum, training, and workshops.