NORTHAMPTON — As the number of antisemitic incidents began to pile up for some Jewish students at Northampton High School last school year — the complaints were far-ranging, from using “Zionist” and “Jew” interchangeably to telling Jewish and Israeli students with friends and family of Israeli hostages that their loved ones deserved to die — a group of parents and guardians decided to take action.

They penned a letter in May, some seven months after the Israel-Hamas war began in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, to Superintendent Portia Bonner and the School Committee alerting officials about bullying and harassment their children had experienced within and outside of the high school. The letter was signed by 85 parents, clergy and concerned community members.

“As the world grapples with the compounding violence in Israel and Gaza, we are disturbed to see how the discourse has been used to reignite generations-long hatreds against Jewish people, under the mask of activism,” the letter reads.

While antisemitic comments from students occurred throughout the year, the letter outlined one instance that caused an influx of antisemitism: the distribution of a flier from If America Knew around NHS. The flier contained statistics on the violence in Gaza, but framed them using antisemitic rhetoric.

“Multiple Jewish high school students were coming home and reporting incidents of harassment, slurs being thrown at them and hateful stuff being posted on social media,” Jewish parent Josh Levy said. “I recognize that there is a debate ongoing about what is hateful, antisemitic and legitimate protest, and I don’t know if that’s easily resolvable, but the way that it lands on a lot of kids is harassment.”

The authors asked school officials to look into providing antisemitic awareness training to address parent concerns and give staff a baseline understanding of antisemitism in contemporary life. They suggested hiring Project Shema, a Chicago-based organization that Levy said is known for its reputation as a “suitably progressive group” for Northampton that stresses a message of empathy and understanding.

Bonner followed their recommendation and hired Project Shema to lead a training that took place at NHS on Tuesday. Project Shema is a Jewish organization that hosts educational workshops on contemporary antisemitism and the ways it appears in daily life, as well as conversations around Israel and Palestine.

“Shema means to listen, to hear, to understand, so really we think about our work as a place to create space for people to feel nurtured and humanized, not for the sake of agreement but for the sake of curiosity,” said Oren Jacobson, co-founder and executive director of Project Shema.

In the week leading up to the training, another group of parents and staff started an online petition calling on Bonner to cancel the workshop, claiming that Project Shema’s teachings conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and actively shut down criticisms of Israel, according to Jewish Voices for Peace of Western Massachusetts. As of Wednesday, the petition had 627 signatures, many of whom identified themselves as Northampton students, caregivers and community members. Jewish Voices for Peace of Western Massachusetts endorsed the petition and provided the Gazette a list of the petition’s signatures, but did not provide the authors.

However, Bonner asserts that the training, which about one-third of district staff attended, was never about Zionism, the policies and politics of Israel nor the violence seen in Palestine or Israel over the past 11 months. She said the 90-minute Antisemitism 101 session focused on the Judaic history, discriminatory Jewish tropes used throughout that history and the way these motifs and symbols appear today.

“The purpose of today’s training was to build our understanding of Jewish identity and antisemitism,” Bonner said, “and to offer tools that can help us constructively address antisemitism in our schools.”

Most of the concerns detailed in the petition calling for Bonner to cancel the training were about Project Shema’s collaborations with the Anti-Defamation League in Houston, Philadelphia, Stamford, Boston, and other locations. Jewish anti-bias organization ADL has come under criticisms for insisting that opposition to Israel is antisemitic. However, both Jacobson and ADL Eastern Division Vice President Peggy Shukur said that while the organizations are independent of each other, both hold a shared mission to combat the rise of antisemitism. The organizations occasionally appear on panels together, with each representing its perspectives on strategies to address rising antisemitism, including education and engaging in constructive conversations.

“The ADL has always been fantastic to allow us to communicate our perspective, even when our perspective is in direct contradiction of their own,” Jacobson said. “The thing that they (the petitioners) are accusing me of what I said and believed is the exact opposite of what I’ve expressed time and again, including on stage with ADL leaders.”

Project Shema offers workshops specifically about conversations around Israel and Palestine, but that Tuesday’s training was not one of them.

“This is not a course that is set up to focus explicitly on the contexts of Israel Palestine, the war, etcetera,” Jacobson said. “It’s not focused on the war, it’s not rooted in the war, and it’s not ever rooted in the question of Israel and Palestine in general.”

According to Bonner and School Committee Vice Chair Gwen Agna, the workshop discussed the history of the Jewish people, starting from 3,000 years ago to today, and the creation and evolution of Jewish stereotypes throughout the religious group’s history. Israel was mentioned in context of this history, referring to European Jews in the 19th and 20th century looking to establish a homeland in the location of ancient Israelite civilizations Kingdom of Samaria and Kingdom of Judah. Zionism, she said, only came up during the question and answer portion.

“I just focused on Jewish kids in Northampton and how they go about their identities, but they are Americans too,” Agna said. “They don’t have any responsibility for the formation of Israel or the actions of Israel. I think she (the Project Shema presenter) was being very careful with that, and it’s very hard to separate.”

Jacobson noted that antisemitism includes any attempt to “demonize, dehumanize or exclude” Jews, for instance if a “student is being bullied and called a genocide supporter because they’re a 16-year-old Jewish kid.”

After the training, Jewish Voices for Peace of Western Massachusetts released a statement about the contents of the training affirming their previously stated issues with Project Shema’s workshop, specifically the a claim about the relationship between opposing Israel and antisemitism.

“JVP Western Mass is deeply alarmed by Tuesday’s district-wide staff training by Project Shema,” read a statement by representative Molly Aronson.

Jacobson said the goal of Project Shema trainings are not to prohibit people from thinking or saying a political belief, but to help people understand how to communicate about Israel, Palestine and Judaism in a way that minimizes harm. He admits that the perspectives of anti-Zionist Jewish organizations like Jewish Voices for Peace are important voices and shouldn’t be silenced, but also no one singular voice should represent an entire community. The voices of Jewish students who experienced harassment or feel threatened by antisemitic rhetoric around atrocities in Palestine matter too, Levy said.

“When it comes down to it, this whole process of bringing in Project Shema and having this training, at its core it’s about the safety of Jewish students and responding to real experiences that they have had,” said Rabbi Ariella Rosen, interim lead rabbi at Congregation B’nai Israel. “A lot of this discourse has been around Israel Palestine, and that’s not what it’s there for.”

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.