Massachusetts didn’t suddenly arrive at this moment. We were watching it happen. A Jan. 16 Boston Globe report on hate crime data captured a sobering milestone: antisemitic incidents were the most commonly reported hate crimes in the commonwealth in 2024, with anti-Jewish bias outpacing every other category. Antisemitic bias accounted for about
85% of religious hate crimes and roughly one in four hate-crime reports statewide, with Massachusetts law enforcement recording 147 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024.
The numbers are shocking, but for many Jewish residents they are not surprising. Antisemitism didn’t begin on Oct. 7, 2023. It was rising long before the: in schools, public discourse, and in the way institutions struggled to respond with clarity.
In communities like mine, the warning signs weren’t subtle. Even when a 2023 resolution formally condemned antisemitism, the follow-through too often disappeared when it mattered most. The normalization begins when leaders soften language, minimize or conceal incidents, and hesitate to name antisemitism directly. But it doesn’t stop there. When protecting optics becomes the priority, when administrators focus more on “how it looks” than what it means for Jewish students, institutions don’t reduce harm. They contribute to it. They sanitize the record. They avoid hard conversations to preserve comfort and reputation.
That avoidance has consequences. When advocacy is treated as disruption, the community loses the very voices trying to prevent escalation. When public officials and school leaders discourage speech, redirect concerns into silence, or attempt to discipline those who speak plainly about antisemitism, they become part of the pipeline that produces those statewide statistics.
I worked on a municipal framework to address antisemitism before the state commission even existed, and later testified to it because what I witnessed wasn’t theoretical. It was escalating and so was the pressure to stop talking about it.
Massachusetts has a blueprint. Now municipal leaders must choose whether it will be used. Mayors, city councils, and school committees should stop treating antisemitism as a reputational risk to be managed and start treating it as a civil rights obligation to be addressed publicly, consistently, and without euphemism. That also means engaging local Jewish organizations and community partners. Not as a symbolic gesture, but as part of prevention, training, and informed response: naming antisemitism plainly, responding quickly when it appears, tracking and reporting incidents transparently, and protecting the students and residents who speak up.
The test is implementation, town by town, school by school, with moral clarity, transparency, and equal dignity for Jewish residents.
Owen Zaret, former city councilor
Easthampton