The national turmoil about antisemitism and Israel’s attacks on Gaza has come home to Oak Park in a series of recent events.

At the end of the OPRF school board campaign, the Democratic Socialists of America handed out a flyer calling one of the candidates, Nate Mellman, an “Israel-first Zionist fanatic,” said he is “an apartheid denialist”, and described his day job as “denying working people Social Security and disability benefits”. This flyer was antisemitic, full stop. I condemn it entirely and utterly.

This antisemitic flyer plays into the narrative by some that antisemitism is prevalent in Oak Park. Truthfully, any single incident of antisemitism means it is too prevalent. We shouldn’t stand for any instances of bigotry in our community.

At the same time, I have a hard time with the word “prevalence” because I disagree that all of the local instances described as antisemitism actually are. Another recent event provides some examples to illustrate. In June 2024, subsequent school board candidate Nate Mellman filed a complaint with the Illinois State Board of Education against Oak Park River Forest High School, alleging that the high school has “a hostile antisemitic environment for Jewish students.” A few of the many examples in the filing can give us a sense of the allegations.

In one tweet described in the complaint, former OPRF teacher Anthony Clark condemned Israel for committing genocide, which the filing describes as antisemitic. Genocide consists of violence “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” according to the UN. Some Israeli officials have declared that the aim of their war is “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” There is reasonable evidence to make a case that any country engaged in similar behavior to Israel is engaged in genocide. As such, it is inherently not antisemitic to accuse Israel of genocide – instead, it is a valid criticism.

OPRF’s Middle East and North African student group posted the phrases “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” and “Free Palestine” on posters and online. The complaint claims that these phrases equate to calling for the killing of all Jews in the boundaries of the current state of Israel, when it is completely reasonable to use these phrases to call for the freedom of Palestinians without causing harm to Israelis or other Jewish people.

But there were claims in the complaint that I find more persuasive. For example, Clark liked a tweet that shows a number of media companies and their associations with Jewish owners and executives, but these examples were clearly cherry-picked to misrepresent these organizations as being exclusively controlled by Jewish people and stoke the stereotype that Jewish people have disproportionate control of media and other corporations, and as such, I see it as genuinely antisemitic.

I definitely don’t dispute how the Jewish members of our community feel. There is justification to those feelings – antisemitic statements exist in this community, as in most other American communities, and we should continue to call those out. But I also believe that we must be clear-eyed. The claim of antisemitism is being used throughout this country – in both good faith and bad – to silence criticism of Israel. We cannot allow that to happen. We can discern what is antisemitism, call it out, and redress its wrongs. And we can discern what is not, and protect the valid criticism of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and our government’s support for those attacks. In fact, it is vital that we do so nationally and here in Oak Park.

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