Among untold number in state subjected to false claims of antisemitism

Throughout the past 13 months, claims of antisemitism have erupted locally and nationwide leading to high profile civil rights complaints, congressional outrage and news reports claiming a crisis of hate. But a parallel story of discrimination has gone largely hidden from public view: The stories of Muslim and Arab Americans and others who have had their careers and livelihoods thrown into jeopardy by baseless and defamatory claims of antisemitism.

Sampan is sharing the story of one such person, a math teacher in a highly affluent and liberal public school district in Massachusetts. The grade school educator was harassed online and had her photo and name made public in online posts. People even demanded she be fired from her job.

The teacher, Jenna Laib, who was approached by Sampan for an interview after learning about her story, declined to have her school district’s name and town printed to protect her privacy and the school district. She provided documentation to support most of her claims and the posts made about her online were reviewed to verify her story.

It all started when Laib spoke at a conference in Canada for teachers several months ago. After the presentation, the teacher’s name and reputation would be smeared for what she believed would be an innocuous presentation on data literacy and graphs that included the state of Palestine. During her demonstration, she briefly showed a graph that included data from 12 Arab-majority locations in Africa and the Middle East: Lebanon, Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Libya, Yemen, Kuwait, Sudan, and Algeria. It showed what percentage of people from those places agreed with a woman being head of state, based on data by the Arab Barometer, a nonpartisan research network.

She gave little thought about the presentation until she discovered someone at the conference complained to the organization that sponsored her talk. The person questioned her intent of using a graph that included Palestine, but not Israel.

“From there, people made the assumption that I was excluding Israel, even though it was a sampling from (Arab majority nations) and it happened to include samples from people in the West Bank, in Palestine . . . It was a critical literacy thing,” Laib said. “We had looked previously at a different graph that had some Western nations, and I was positioning it as, ‘What do you notice about these countries and how do you think the shape of the graph would change if we included data from other places in the world?’”
Within a short time, false accusations that she purposely tried to wipe Israel from existence exploded online. A large online activist group posted her photo, full name, job title, and school district on its Twitter, or X, page, claiming she “erased Israel from the Middle East and replaced it with Palestine.”
Soon, she said, dozens of hateful messages began to flood her work and personal email inboxes, her blog, and her social media accounts, including Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin. Her X account, typically used for answering math questions, was bombarded with more than 100 comments calling her antisemitic and calling for her to be terminated from her job.

“People were saying, ‘You erased Israel off the map,’ and I’m like, ‘There was no map. I didn’t erase Israeli data.’ It all was just so ludicrous,” she told the Sampan.

Then, she said, calls for her to be fired were sent to the administration at her school.
The teacher said she had, in fact, long avoided the topic of Palestine at school, because she didn’t feel she could talk about it openly.

“I work in a place that’s pretty liberal, where we’re able to talk about race and gender and capitalism. I’ve always felt really secure in that,” she said. But “I knew that talking about Palestine was actually not a safe topic.”

Her intent when showing the graph at the conference, Laib said, was to show how the shape of the data changes when different places are surveyed.

“I feel like it would have been really problematic to have Israel listed as an Arab-majority state,” she said. “It’s like 20 percent Arab,” she noted, so to have included Israel in the graph of Arab states, she said, would have appeared to be an “erasure of the Jewish majority.”

But that rationale did not stop the rapid spread of false claims of antisemitism. The accusations spread further online and became more personal.

“They were posting lots of information about my family, spouse and children,” she said. “That’s when it got more scary for me, I think, and started to feel much more targeted.”

“It was so baffling, like ‘Why do you hate me this much?’,” she said of the person who first complained about her presentation. “I don’t understand.”

What happened to the teacher has happened to others as well, locally. The Sampan and other local media reported earlier this year of a photo exhibit in Newton during which a Palestinian American spoke and was shouted down, and called a “rapist” and “terrorist” and the entire exhibit, exploring the Nakba of 1948, was called antisemitic by an overwhelming group of protesters. In addition, the Sampan has learned of a campaign by a group of parents in a Greater Boston area school district who had contacted parents about supposed instance of antisemitism that in some cases simply included a teacher showing support for Palestine or making similar expressions.

“I had a lot of sadness that this is how people react over something so small, something that is so deeply and truly innocent,” she said, while being interviewed at a mosque in Boston. She asked to be interviewed at that location, feeling it was a “safe” place to discuss her ordeal.

The teacher is a convert to Islam, saying her father’s side was Ashkenazi Jewish and her mother’s, Catholic. After exploring other religions, she said the Muslim faith connected with her the most.
She started teaching about 20 years ago, and as a math specialist, she teaches grades K-8 and occasionally speaks at events, like the conference for teachers.

“I really just love it,” she said. “There’s something about being in classrooms and to hear from students and reflect on their learning that I just really love.”

Laib said some families at the school disparaged her over the graph presentation, but that that doesn’t change the care she has for the children she works with.

She said neither she nor the district at which she teaches seemed to anticipate what would happen to her after the presentation, so they were slow to act in response. But, she eventually received support from the administration.

The school weeks later sent a district-wide email after the incident, calling Laib’s harassment “offensive” and based on a “false” premises, and that the school district “will not tolerate harassment in any form.”
The school also affirmed its support for Laib.

“I think it was very jarring, not just for me, but for my district,” she said. “That they didn’t anticipate this, that I didn’t anticipate this.”

-Sampan staff contributed
to this story.