Empty chairs stand in front of a blackboard in a classroom. Photo: Michael Brandt via Reuters Connect.

High school students are less likely to believe in antisemitic tropes when the public education system intervenes early to apprise them of their history as well as the social harm they pose to society, according to a novel study published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday.

Prepared by the organization’s Center for Antisemitism Research, the report found that students who were assigned to take a 45-minute course on contemporary antisemitism saw their experimental cohort’s propensity for the ancient hatred plummet.

Specifically, students who received the lesson across nine middle and high schools in one public school district in a large southeastern US city were much more likely than controls to disagree with the statement “Jews have too much power in the United States today” (91.4% vs. 76.9%).

The course also achieved a 15.5-point reduction in the group’s belief in the “dual loyalty” conspiracy which smears Jewish Americans with the accusation that they lack true allegiance to their home country.

“We’ve long believed that education is one of our most powerful tools in the fight against antisemitism and hate — and this research confirms it,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “As Jewish students across the country are experiencing increased antisemitism, we believe we can provide a clear, practical path forward for schools to address this scourge everywhere.”

The results were reproduced again with a larger, national sample size of 5,005 students using an online module, demonstrating the content’s power to “de-influence” the thousands of hours antisemitic social media reels, post, and videos barraging American youth around the clock.

The study found that content “presenting antisemitism as a recurring, cyclical conspiracy — the same core approach used in the classroom lesson — reduced trope endorsement as well, including among students with attitudes typically considered the hardest to shift,” according to the ADL.

The ADL study comes amid a slew of action to address antisemitism in K-12 schools across the country. Last October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a K-12 antisemitism law which created an Office of Civil Rights and an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator while strengthening procedures for investigating discrimination in public schools.

Elsewhere in the US, students have shown that the mainstreaming of antisemitic beliefs is most infectious among the younger demographic.

In June, administrators at a small-town high school in western Pennsylvania scurried to assure parents and media that neo-Nazism is frowned upon after a student contributed a quote promoting Holocaust denialism to the annual yearbook of Franklin Regional Senior High School. According to local news outlets, the student slipped the quote “271k or not enough” past the yearbook committee’s editors, none of whom knew its connection to the neo-Nazi community’s belief that Nazi Germany killed nowhere near the 6 million Jews murdered in World War II.

As explained by the ADL, the false “271k” figure emerged from a pseudo-historical claim that the Red Cross kept internal documents reporting that Adolf Hitler’s regime murdered no more than 300,000 Jews, a fabrication the organization has discredited numerous times.

In June, law enforcement officials in Essex County, Massachusetts, launched an investigation into an antisemitic graffiti incident at Beverly Middle School, where school officials said a message praising Hitler was discovered. As told by local media reports, Beverly Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Peter K. Cushing said the graffiti may have been connected to a classroom unit on Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s harrowing account of his imprisonment in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

The problem has prompted civil rights complaints and lawsuits while drawing growing attention from Jewish advocacy groups.

In May, the Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Bay Area settled a lawsuit accusing district officials, faculty, and staff of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment that intensified after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.

Meanwhile, in the Berkeley Unified School District, also in California, teachers have been accused of using classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes about Israel, including claims that the Jewish state is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing genocide against Palestinians.

The ADL’s classroom lessons give US public schools a fighting chance to squelch hatred now, the Center for Antisemitism Research’s vice president Matt Williams said on Thursday.

“We now have data showing that a single, well-designed lesson, taught by educators with no special training, can measurably shift how teens think about antisemitism,” he said. “That’s a solvable problem for schools. Based on our research, districts don’t need a semester-long unit or a major new investment to make progress; they need the right 45 minutes, and now we’re closer to knowing what that looks like.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.