School Leaders Push Back on Charges of Tolerating Antisemitism (2024)

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Four takeaways from the antisemitism hearing.

The school leaders fielded rapid-fire questions from Republican members of a House education subcommittee on a broad range of accusations made by some Jewish students, parents, educators and advocacy groups. Those groups have filed complaints to the U.S. Department of Education, saying that the districts violated federal civil rights laws by allowing a hostile climate for Jewish students.

The leaders said that both students and faculty members who engaged in overt antisemitic acts had been disciplined. They also disputed some of the allegations, saying that subsequent investigations had not borne out the initial incendiary reports.

Here are four takeaways from the hearing.

Republicans failed to land the same heavy blows they did against university presidents.

The congressional inquiry into primary and secondary schools followed two contentious hearings on antisemitism in higher education.

At a hearing in December, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fell into the trap of relying on lawyerly answers rather than appealing to common sense.

Then last month, Columbia University leaders took a different approach, promising a crackdown. That helped stir further protests and eventually led to arrests on the school’s Manhattan campus, prompting a surge of pro-Palestinian activism across the country.

The public school leaders seemed to fare better on Wednesday than the university presidents, assuming a calm and unapologetic posture and at times pushing back against tough questions from Republican committee members.

They repeatedly stressed their dedication to the students in their districts. “We recognize the need to teach students to express themselves with respect and compassion,” said Enikia Ford Morthel, superintendent of the Berkeley schools, adding that the district passed a policy against hate speech last year.

Public school leaders seemed practiced in dealing with tough questions.

The three districts all serve diverse student bodies with a significant number of Jewish students. In all three, the school district leaders have had to respond to highly fractious debates over what kind of behavior and language veers into antisemitism.

They have also been through the crucible of the Covid pandemic, navigating the closing of schools and mask mandates.

At the hearing on Wednesday, that experience appeared to pay off.

David Banks, chancellor of the New York City schools, the nation’s largest district, in particular made it clear that he would not be cowed by tough questioning. “It is my responsibility to go before Congress to face this critical, complicated and highly charged issue head on,” he said in a Tuesday opinion column in The New York Post.

The three districts serve many students of color, as well as members of various faiths. In their testimonies, the leaders spoke to the necessity of protecting all of their students from discrimination.

“I stand up not only against antisemitism,” Mr. Banks said. “I stand up against Islamophobia and all other forms of hate. You can’t put them in silos.”

Mr. Banks pushed back especially hard, defending his actions and his city.

Mr. Banks responded forcefully at times to pointed questions from Republican lawmakers, including Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, who had tripped up university presidents at the December hearing on antisemitism.

He said that some of Ms. Stefanik’s accusations about antisemitic chanting at a Brooklyn high school had not been substantiated by an investigation.

At one point, Mr. Banks turned the tables on the politicians by blaming Congress for not doing enough to fight antisemitism.

The hearing, he said, felt like “the ultimate gotcha moment.” He added that the antidote to antisemitism is education.

“You have to raise the consciousness of young people,” he said.

Discipline of students and faculty was a major point of contention.

Republican representatives asked repeatedly about the kinds of disciplinary action that would be taken in response to acts of antisemitism on school grounds, and particularly whether educators accused of inappropriate actions had been, or would be, fired.

In response, the school leaders emphasized that antisemitism was unacceptable. “Let me be clear,” said Karla Silvestre, the school board president in Montgomery County. “We do not shy away from imposing consequences for hate-based behavior, including antisemitism.”

But the leaders mostly tried to avoid broad statements about the grounds for termination or suspension. In union districts, like the one in New York City, there are often lengthy processes that administrators have to follow when they pursue disciplinary action.

Ms. Ford Morthel said California’s strict rules regarding divulging personnel information can make people think teachers who cross a line are not punished. But she said that was not true, and action can be taken by district administrators privately.

Mr. Banks said that at least 30 students in New York City public schools have been suspended since Oct. 7, and roughly a dozen staff members were subject to discipline — the first time he has publicly shared specific details about repercussions related to antisemitic incidents.

Reporting was contributed by Troy Closson, Dana Goldstein, Annie Karni and Sarah Mervosh.

In a combative hearing, New York’s schools leader sought to turn the tables on Republicans.

But Mr. Banks turned it into a moment of his own — taking an unyielding, fiery tone, denying accusations that his district had responded poorly to hateful incidents and, at times, unapologetically speaking over and pushing back against members of Congress.

In one heated exchange, Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican of New York, questioned why Mr. Banks had reassigned, but not fired, the principal of a New York City high school where students raucously filled the halls in protest after a Jewish educator posted support for Israel on social media.

Calling it “Open Season on Jews High School,” Mr. Williams asked, “How can Jewish students go to school knowing that he is still on your payroll?”

“I know whose payroll it is, sir,” Mr. Banks shot back. “And it’s not ‘Open Season on Jews’ school,” the chancellor continued. “It’s called Hillcrest High School.”

Mr. Banks and two other school district officials — from Montgomery County, Md. and Berkeley, Calif. — appeared to lean on their experience navigating tough questions from parents, teachers and students while testifying before a subgroup of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

In a fraught few years for public education, districts have been convulsed with debates over pandemic school closures, the teaching of race and the handling of pronouns for transgender students. For many leaders, contentious meetings — where parents and educators criticize school policies late into the night — are simply a part of the job.

The public school district leaders largely sidestepped some of the pitfalls that haunted the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who lost their jobs after giving cautious and lawyerly answers late last year, and the president of Columbia, who faced a rebellion on her home campus after taking a conciliatory tone in a hearing last month.

By contrast, Mr. Banks — wearing a New York City public schools pin on the lapel of his navy suit — seemed to put forward a defense of public education.

The chancellor said his demeanor was informed in part by the nature of his role, leading a diverse district of more than 900,000 children. In addition to forcefully pushing back against House Republicans, Mr. Banks also invoked personal stories to describe his fight against bigotry.

And while college leaders were coached for their congressional testimony by teams of white-collar lawyers and crisis-communications gurus, Mr. Banks said that he mainly prepared with top deputies and close friends like Mayor Eric Adams.

“The complexity of New York City prepares you for moments like this,” Mr. Banks said at a news conference after the hearing.

The two other school district leaders also appeared relatively confident. Enikia Ford Morthel, the superintendent of Berkeley schools, who was an administrator for San Francisco public schools through the pandemic, adopted her own unapologetic stance, referring to students in her district as her “babies” and smiling as she fended off questions.

Karla Silvestre, the school board president in Montgomery County, spoke little, and seemed to avoid major blunders.

All three public school leaders acknowledged incidents of antisemitism in their districts, and pledged strong responses. Mr. Banks noted that in New York, officials had disciplined about a dozen staff members and school leaders and suspended at least 30 students.

One Republican representative, Kevin Kiley of California, grilled Ms. Ford Morthel over Berkeley’s connections with a contested network of academics, teachers and consultants who support lessons that are critical of Israel. Ms. Ford Morthel called the group a “thought partner,” but said that Berkeley had not purchased curriculum from the group, and was using curriculum created in-house.

Materials created by Berkeley teachers were also the subject of intense questioning from Mr. Kiley, who pointed out that Ms. Ford Morthel had acknowledged earlier in the hearing that the contested phrase “from the river to the sea” could be considered antisemitic. He questioned why the phrase had been included in a lesson plan by Berkeley teachers, saying that it was no wonder students used the phrase, after being taught it in school.

Representative Aaron Bean, Republican of Florida and chair of the subcommittee, said after the hearing that he considered it “a starter conversation” on the issue of antisemitism in public schools. He brushed off a question about Mr. Banks’s forceful pushback against Republican efforts to portray the school leaders as failing to tackle the issue.

“We said we were going to have an open conversation,” Mr. Bean said. “I think it was very effective. Our objectives were shining the light that this is indeed happening. A lot of folks say it’s not happening.”

Still, by the end of the hearing, Republicans did not seem to have landed a breakout moment.

Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who was a fiery questioner of the college presidents, focused on the Hillcrest High School episode, and the decision to remove the school’s principal and reassign him to a post in the Education Department’s main offices, rather than fire him outright. “We are getting lip service,” she said, “but a lack of enforcement, a lack of accountability.”

Yet even she could not seem to fully crack the chancellor’s confidence.

“You said you fired the principal,” Ms. Stefanik said, urging him to “check the testimony.”

“I never said I fired the principal of Hillcrest — you check the record,” Mr. Banks countered.

(Both were, to some degree, technically correct. Ms. Stefanik’s colleague, Representative Lisa C. McClain, Republican of Michigan, had asked, “So you fired the people?” Mr. Banks replied, “Yes,” but quickly clarified: “We remove people, absolutely.”)

Mr. Banks also sought to use his background to undercut Republican attacks. He said that as a Black man who understands the “history of racism in America,” he was acutely aware of the importance of fighting all forms of hate, including antisemitism.

He also described how his own children learned about antisemitism from their neighbors — who he said were Holocaust survivors in New Jersey — and recalled a “profoundly moving” visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

It was not clear on Wednesday whether Mr. Banks and the other two public school leaders would fully escape backlash at home. Some Jewish parents in their districts have said that school administrators are doing too little to address antisemitism, and are putting their children’s safety at risk.

But in Washington, all three were helped by blunders from House Republicans, who at one point asked whether any students had been expelled or “fired.”

“We don’t fire students,” Mr. Banks said, quick to catch the mistake.

Later, he accused lawmakers of looking for a viral moment, and said the real solution was in the work the New York City public school system was doing every day: educating young people.

“Ultimately, if we really care about solving for antisemitism — and I believe this deeply — it’s not about having ‘gotcha’ moments,” he said. “It’s about teaching.”

Dana Goldstein, Heather Knight and Annie Karni contributed reporting

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Before the hearing, a Jewish teacher in Montgomery County who said she had been punished and ostracized in her community said she hoped school district leaders would “be forced to sit and listen. They will be the ones silenced now, instead of us.” But there was not much silencing, at least of Banks.

The Washington police broke up a protest encampment, sparing the mayor a House grilling.

Asked about the timing of the operation, only a few hours before the scheduled hearing, Chief Smith said that the decision to clear the camp was made on Monday “based on public safety.”

Mayor Muriel Bowser said at the news conference that she had spoken with Representative James Comer, Republican of Kentucky, who had scheduled the hearing about the city’s response to the encampment, and said she believed the hearing would be canceled, which it was.

The mayor defended the city’s actions, saying that the police had “maintained a presence” at the university throughout the protests and that the city had “demonstrated and upheld our values and constitutional responsibilities.”

Chief Smith said the trouble that led to the clearance began last Thursday when a campus police officer “was pushed by protesters, and an item was grabbed out of the police officer’s hand.” On Monday, she continued, police learned of a “simple assault” that had been reported to campus police, as well as indications that counterprotesters were “covertly in the encampment,” that protesters were studying ways to get inside campus buildings, and that items were being gathered at the camp “that could potentially be used for offensive and defensive weapons.”

As police cleared the encampment, she said, more protesters arrived from outside the area and “engaged the officers,” leading the police to use pepper spray, Chief Smith said. Thirty-three people were arrested, 29 of them for unlawful entry to the campus, she said, adding that several people were also arrested on charges of assault on a police officer. No one was seriously injured, she said.

Police officials said they were still on campus while the university cleared away tents and other items left behind by protesters.

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To protest the war in Gaza, Berkeley students staged walkouts from classes.

For an initial demonstration on Oct. 18, students at Berkeley High and some of their teachers put up posters in the school advertising the event. Dozens of students left class for the protest and wound their way through downtown Berkeley to the nearby University of California campus. One of the high school’s history teachers spoke to the crowd, imploring the students to remember the humanity of the innocent lives lost in Gaza.

Claims and counterclaims swirl in Berkeley about what was said or shouted at the student marches. For example, students have chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Is that a call for the demise of Israel, as many self-proclaimed Berkeley Zionists contend? Or is it simply about Palestinian freedom and justice, as protesters and their backers say?

Some people in Berkeley say that other, more definitively vile and antisemitic words have been heard at the marches. But in this city, what really happened remains a subject of heated debate.

And the school leaders seem to have largely emerged unscathed, at least compared to college leaders.

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Reported antisemitism in Montgomery County included swastikas and ‘Jews Not Welcome’ graffiti.

Since Oct. 7, the Zionist Organization, which seeks to defend Israel, has also accused Montgomery County schools of having a “weak response” to the Hamas attack. It noted that the district had publicly condemned incidents against other groups, like the police killings of Black Americans in 2020. And it said the district had at times failed to properly include mention of antisemitism in training and curriculum meant to reduce bias.

“What I want to see is a stop to this double standard,” said Susan Tuchman, a lawyer for the Zionist Organization of America. “You have got to treat the harassment and intimidation and bigotry against Jews in the same forceful way, and they are just not doing that.”

Some actions by the district have also been criticized by Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is suing the district on behalf of three teachers who were temporarily suspended, and later transferred, after expressing pro-Palestinian views.

The school district serves about 160,000 students in a county that is about 10 percent Jewish, and about 3 percent Muslim.

In a statement, a representative for the Montgomery County Board of Education said, “Our commitment is to ensure that schools are welcoming and safe spaces for all our very diverse student body.”

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What are the demands being made to the school districts?

A competing definition of antisemitism, known as the Jerusalem Declaration, is more tolerant of anti-Israel or anti-Zionist critique, and tends to be favored by Jewish groups on the left.

The groups that brought the complaints also want stronger messaging against antisemitism from school leaders. They ask that superintendents and principals communicate clearly to their communities that antisemitism will not be tolerated, and that they enact tougher consequences for students and staff members involved in any antisemitic incidents, including suspensions, expulsions and firings.

Additionally, they are hoping to see districts train teachers and staff members on how to identify and respond to acts of antisemitism.

Underlying all of these demands are broader criticisms many Jewish groups have of the American education system: that it is ignorant of Jewish history and issues and that it has not taken antisemitism as seriously as it has other forms of discrimination.

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Virginia Foxx’s focus on antisemitism on college campuses has raised her profile.

Ms. Foxx, 80, grew up in a rural part of her district. She often speaks about how her childhood was spent living in houses without running water or electricity.

She worked her way through college and emerged with a doctorate in education. She was president of Mayland Community College, an experience that some people say may account for her antipathy toward elite schools.

“She’s sharp,” said Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at the Stetson University College of Law. “There’s no question that she has political savvy.”

In a purple state, Ms. Foxx represents a solidly Republican district, and she is known for her blunt conservative politics, including on education.

She supports school choice, including vouchers, and for-profit institutions. She has said she has “little tolerance” for students who graduate from college with large student loan debt. She opposes diversity, equity and inclusion programs, saying they do not promote merit, and she is against allowing trans women to compete on women’s teams in college sports.

She championed a “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which Democrats said would ban books but which she said would expose progressive politics in the classroom.

And she called it a “hoax” to say that Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student, was killed because he was gay. After an outcry, she apologized to his mother.

She attributes her politics to her pulled-herself-up-by-her-bootstraps life. “Because we’ve made it under the most difficult circ*mstances — I mean extremely difficult circ*mstances,” she said, speaking of herself and her husband. “We didn’t need a government handout to make us successful.”

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I suspect they are happily sitting in silence every minute the questions focus on Banks.

Stefanik said that the witnesses have paid “lip service” to the issue of antisemitism, but said that there was “a lack of enforcement and a lack of accountability.”

Banks has tried to find a middle ground so far in discussing discipline details. While Berkeley’s superintendent declined to share broad details of punishment against educators, Banks offered an overview with some specifics earlier. But he refused to delve into individual cases.

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A lawsuit in Brooklyn over antisemitism has raised many questions.

The suit depicts a cohort of students who launched a campaign of “unabashedly antisemitic” hate speech after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack against Israel. It describes teenagers drawing swastikas on desks, praising Adolf Hitler and one performing a Nazi salute in a hallway.

And it says a Jewish teacher was threatened. She received an anonymous email in March — shortly after the issues were first reported in local media — that said, “All Jews need to be exterminated.”

Jim Walden, the lead counsel representing one of the teachers in the suit, said education officials were “in a fantasy land if they can’t appreciate that there’s an urgent crisis.”

“I hope Congress comes down on them with both heels,” Mr. Walden said.

But New York City education officials say that administrators of the school punished misbehaving students, and that a number of claims of unchecked bigotry are false or misrepresented.

The complaints at Origins High School first spilled into public view in March. The New York Post reported that several dozen students had marched through the school in the fall, some chanting “Death to Israel” and “Kill the Jews.”

The city’s schools chancellor, David C. Banks, denounced the news coverage at a meeting with reporters before the lawsuit was filed, calling it “completely blown out of proportion.”

His top deputy, Daniel Weisberg, acknowledged that some students had made antisemitic comments, and said the principal, who is Jewish, “reacted decisively” to enact discipline. But he also said officials found no evidence of a raucous march and chants, adding that it was not helpful “to demonize and paint with a broad brush students at an incredibly diverse school.”

“The cause of combating antisemitism is not served by people exaggerating or putting out false claims,” he said at the time.

The suit argues that school leaders have failed to report many antisemitic episodes. It also takes issue with how some students were punished for misconduct, saying that the use of restorative justice practices, in which students might talk through conflict rather than face discipline, and “peer mediators” failed to address core problems.

When the problems did not stop, one Jewish teacher “was forced to hire” 24-hour private security, the suit says.

“There’s so much attention on older kids in private universities,” Mr. Walden said, “and not enough attention on the new generation of hatred that is being created as we speak.”

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Elise Stefanik has gained widespread attention in recent antisemitism hearings.

Now, she will test if the approach has the same impact on a very different set of leaders, the little-known heads of public K-12 school districts who have inspired far less public scrutiny.

Ms. Stefanik, 39, was already a rising star within her party before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War turbocharged concerns about antisemitic incidents in American education. A Harvard graduate herself, she is the top-ranking woman in Republican House leadership and considered a potential presidential running mate.

But her exchanges with the leaders of Harvard and Penn attracted enormous attention and won some rare plaudits from grudging liberals. In April, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2024.

Ms. Stefanik struggled to land a clear blow in a follow-up hearing with the president of Columbia, Nemat Shafik, in April. But she still elicited some of the most memorable testimony, demanding that Dr. Shafik remove from an academic leadership position a professor who used the word “awesome” to describe Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack.

“I think that would be — I think, I would, yes,” Dr. Shafik replied.

Ms. Stefanik later called for Dr. Shafik to resign anyway.

When Ms. Stefanik first won her seat in 2014, she was the youngest woman ever elected to the House. She beat a centrist Democrat, and in the early days of her career, she took on more moderate stances.

These days, she describes herself as “ultra MAGA” and “proud of it.” Democrats particularly detest her close embrace of former President Donald J. Trump and his lies about the 2020 election.

Banks forcefully pushes back to criticism over the fact that he is still employed, saying employees have due process rights.

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In Berkeley, anti-Israel lesson plans have stirred a debate.

In one incident relayed in the complaint, a history teacher at Berkeley High School asked students to respond to the prompt, “To what extent should Israel be considered an apartheid state?”

That teacher, who is Jewish, wrote in an opinion article for a local news site that she had been teaching about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an anti-Zionist, anti-occupation perspective for years, with the district’s knowledge. But since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, multiple students requested to transfer out of her classroom, she wrote, and the district denied her request to bring a Palestinian historian in as a guest speaker.

The complaint also mentions an art teacher at the high school who displayed posters that criticized Israel and celebrated Palestinian resistance, including an image of a fist punching through the Star of David, and another of a young man throwing a rock.

When Jewish parents objected to the principal, according to the complaint, their children were removed from the class. The art teacher is currently on administrative leave.

Both the state of California and the Berkeley school district require teachers to present “multiple viewpoints” on “controversial issues.” But educators and parents often disagree about how that should look in practice.

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The teacher, Rita Lahoud, who identified herself as a Palestinian American educator, told me in an email yesterday that she “felt abandoned and unprotected” by the city’s Education Department after the news of the classroom map drew backlash on social media. “Why is it that the teaching of Arab culture and language is faced with such bigotry and anti-Palestinian hate?” she said.

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While the principal of the school was removed, Mr. Banks has criticized news coverage that portrayed the students involved as “radicalized.” Mr. Owens questioned whether the district would have responded differently “if this was a Black teacher” facing backlash from a “white bigot.”

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A pro-Israel teacher was targeted in a raucous protest at a Queens school.

The demonstration immediately became a flashpoint, following initial reports that Ms. Marder was barricaded in a room and in direct danger. (Officials later said those reports were inaccurate.)

The city’s schools chancellor, David C. Banks, who attended Hillcrest in the 1970s, called the episode “completely unacceptable” at a news conference. He said that some of the teenagers in the protest had been suspended and that “violence, hate and disorder have no place in our schools.”

But he also called for a measure of understanding. Many of the school’s students were Muslim and felt “a kindred spirit” with Palestinians, he said. Mr. Banks also said that while some teenagers sought to protest the teacher, many who were in the halls appeared to have “no idea what was even going on.” One student leader said that the demonstration had been intended to be peaceful but that some of his peers had acted inappropriately.

Some teachers complained that the school’s administration had mishandled the situation. The Education Department later removed Hillcrest’s principal in December.

Ms. Marder had planned to teach a lesson about hate crimes on the day of the demonstration, she revealed in a recent opinion column published in USA Today.

Ms. Marder, who spent several days on leave after the demonstration, said in the column that upon her return, many of her students had hugged her and apologized for their behavior. But “those conversations were not easy,” she said, adding that she was still healing from what she found to be a traumatic experience.

Ms. Marder said she had been offered the chance to transfer to a different school. But she said she had declined in order to show her students that she “wasn’t going to run away” and “would not give up on them.”

But rapid-fire questioning can prove awfully tricky for witnesses. When she was Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay apologized after she got “caught up” in a back and forth exchange when she testified last year. That exchange helped unravel her presidency weeks later.

Four teachers were suspended at Montgomery County schools.

The three other teachers wandered into territory where the definition of antisemitic language is more contested. According to a federal lawsuit filed by these teachers, two of them were suspended when parents raised concerns about posts on their personal social media accounts, in which, among other things, they described Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide. The other was put on leave after a colleague complained of her putting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a signature line on internal staff emails.

In the lawsuit, which was filed with the support of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the teachers argued that the suspensions were violations of their First Amendment rights. They said that teachers in the district had advocated other political causes without discipline, some putting the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on their work email signatures.

The school board, seeking to dismiss the suit, responded in a filing on Monday that the teachers were put on paid leave not because of their views, but “due to the disruption caused to the school community,” pointing out that the school only acted after parents or staff raised concerns.

All four teachers have since been reinstated but were reassigned to different schools in the district.

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In the blitz of yes-or-no questions, Bean asks: Does Israel have the right to exist? Is the “from the river to the sea” chant antisemitic? He seemed to get the answers he wanted to hear.

Yes, Alan, the district leaders generally gave Bean the answers he was seeking. but Ford Morthel of Berkeley did respond that the “from the river” phrase is antisemitic if it is interpreted to mean the end of the state of Israel, but that some may use the phrase to mean something different.

New York teachers have faced backlash over their response to the war.

The map had been used for more than a decade in a class on Arab art and culture, which the school has offered through funding from the nonprofit Qatar Foundation.

But when a picture of the map was posted online, it drew swift outrage from local politicians and parents. The school ultimately removed the map and officials brought in a conflict resolution organization to help ease tensions.

Other educators around the city have also drawn fury from families. One prekindergarten teacher in Manhattan resigned earlier this year after posting on Instagram teaching guides about Palestinians that included terms like “ethnic cleansing.” And this month, a teaching assistant in Brooklyn was fired after receiving several complaints from parents about posts on social media and wearing a kaffiyeh in the classroom.

In both cases, many Jewish families said their children’s well-being was put at risk, and demanded that the city’s Education Department take action. But others — including some Jewish parents — have pushed back, arguing that the school system has unfairly punished staff members and has done too little to protect them from doxxing and threats.

At Public School 261 in Brooklyn, the teacher, Rita Lahoud, said in an email that she had “felt abandoned and unprotected” by the city’s Education Department after the news of the classroom map drew backlash on social media.

“Why is it that the teaching of Arab culture and language is faced with such bigotry and anti-Palestinian hate?” said Ms. Lahoud, who identified herself as a Palestinian American educator.

Ginia Bellafante contributed reporting.

Ford Morthel, the Berkeley superintendent, notes her community’s connection to one of the hostages: Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, who born in Berkeley and has been held since Oct. 7. “Today is day 214,” she said.

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Who is Enikia Ford Morthel?

A spokeswoman for Berkeley Unified said in a news release last month that Ms. Ford Morthel “did not seek this invitation, but she has accepted,” and added that the superintendent “celebrates our diversity and stands against all forms of hate and othering, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.”

Before moving to Berkeley, Ms. Ford Morthel worked for six years in the central office at the San Francisco Unified School District. She was one of many top administrators to leave that school system during the chaos of the pandemic, when three school board members were recalled and the district struggled with a payroll system that did not work, major budget problems and the loss of thousands of students.

She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education from the University of California, Berkeley, and began her career as a third-grade teacher in Hayward, a city about 20 miles to the south, where she quickly became an elementary school principal. In 2009, she moved to Education for Change, a charter school network in Oakland, where she worked as a principal and then as the group’s chief of schools.

In her LinkedIn profile, she describes herself as “an urban educator and community activist” who seeks to create public school experiences that are “revolutionary” and “relevant.”

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Ms. Silvestre acknowledged reports of “antisemitic imagery, language, and vandalism” in Montgomery County schools, but said that there was a “range of consequences.” Many of the measures she mentioned have either recently been put into place or will be in the coming months, including mandatory hate-bias training for all staff starting this summer.

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An immigrant from Guatemala, Karla Silvestre has experience in education and local government.

The board position is not a full-time role. While on the board, Ms. Silvestre has worked as the director of community engagement at Montgomery College, a community college in Rockville, Md. Before that, she worked for the county government as the Latino liaison to the Montgomery County executive. Ms Silvestre earned a master’s degree in education at the University of Pennsylvania.

An immigrant born in Guatemala, Ms. Silvestre came to the United States when she was 8 and became an American citizen in 2007. She has been active in groups working with immigrants and Latino youth — a natural fit for Montgomery County, a majority-minority county where nearly a third of the population was born outside the United States.

Her presence at the hearing is a less obvious fit. According to some of those who have been heavily involved in the debates over antisemitism in the district, Ms. Silvestre has not been a prominent voice on the issue.

The subcommittee may have asked Ms. Silvestre to testify because the superintendent is serving on an interim basis and has been in the position for only three months. The previous superintendent resigned in February amid criticism about how the district had handled a principal accused of sexual harassment by co-workers.

David Banks has an extensive education portfolio, and an activist spirit.

Now, Mr. Banks, 62, faces a major test as he seeks to balance his congressional testimony on concerns over antisemitism in schools with his conviction that students have a right to demonstrate.

He enters the hearing on Wednesday with by far the largest portfolio of any education official so far to testify before Congress about the issue of antisemitism. He oversees a $37 billion annual operating budget and a sprawling system of 1,600 schools, 140,000 staff members and 915,000 students — more children than the entire populations of Seattle or San Francisco.

A native New Yorker, Mr. Banks was the son of a police officer and a secretary, and raised in working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. He earned a law degree from St. John’s University and served a brief stint in the state attorney general’s office.

Mr. Banks rose to prominence after founding the Eagle Academy, a network of public schools that primarily serve low-income Black and Latino boys. The schools promote discussions on race and culture, and they were created with support from Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Banks also has robust political connections in the city. He is a longtime friend of Mayor Eric Adams, who appointed him as chancellor in 2022. His partner, Sheena Wright, is the city’s first deputy mayor. His brother, Philip Banks III, oversees public safety efforts.