Earlier this month, anti-Semitic graffiti, including swastikas and a racial slur, were discovered at Heritage Middle School. A racist term was also recently found on a wall at Livingston High School. Last week, in response to these incidents, several of our community’s leaders held a largely productive conversation at Temple Beth Shalom to discuss the incident and what could be done to stop it from happening again.We are glad the community came together that evening, but we know that there is still more to do. After all, that Heritage graffiti was not an isolated matter. These incidents have occurred with enough frequency in recent years that we believe it would be beneficial for there to be some sort of speaker series or panel for Livingston Public Schools students.This community is a vast resource for such a program, which could feature some of our local rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations, and Holocaust survivors and their descendants, among others. They could share their own experiences, both of their faith in general but also their encounters with anti-Semitism. Hearing about how incidents such as the recent one at Heritage can have a lasting negative effect on individuals could be a deterrent to people who may not understand the weight of their actions; it was mentioned by a school official during the Temple Beth Shalom discussion that the drawings may have been created simply to get a rise out of people.We see no downside to launching such a program, while the potential benefits could be significant. Not every LPS student appears to be as educated on the gravity of these matters as they could be. That does not in any way condone the actions of those making these hateful drawings, but we do feel that more education, like a series of speakers on the subject throughout the course of the year, would go a long way in preventing these occurrences in the future.The recent incident at Heritage was not the first of its kind in Livingston schools, but we can do more to make sure it will be the last one.
