A town in New Jersey has become the center of controversy after the local high school’s yearbook removed the names of Jewish students from a page and replaced their photo with one of Muslim students — an incident that the town’s mayor called a “blatant antisemitic act.”

The 2023-2024 yearbook for East Brunswick High School replaced a photo of the Jewish Student Union (JSU) with Muslim students and erased the names of the members of the JSU, leaving a large blank space on the page.

East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen expressed outrage over the incident and said new yearbooks would be ordered.

"At a minimum, I have … been assured that new yearbooks will be ordered and distributed with the correct pictures and names,” Cohen wrote in a Facebook post on Tuesday. “Hate has no place in East Brunswick and antisemitism will not be tolerated.”

Of course, it’s good that those yearbooks will be swiftly replaced. But what remains is the shock and pain felt by Jewish students and their parents when they first discovered the sinister replacement of a photograph of a Jewish student group and the removal, too, of their names.

Cohen announced there would be an investigation into the incident.

“The administration will need to determine: 1. How did this happen? 2. What person or persons are responsible? 3. Who are the yearbook advisers and who signed off on this page? 4. Did this act occur on the publisher's end? 5. How will perpetrators be held accountable? 6. "Does this constitute a hate crime and how will this be prosecuted?” the mayor added.

Dr. Victor Valeski, superintendent of the East Brunswick Public School System, has also addressed the incident.

“We are aware of an error in the yearbook,” Valeski said in an email on Tuesday. “We are working with the publisher to correct the yearbook. We are also investigating how the error occurred and will address that as appropriate at the conclusion of this investigation.”…

Was it merely an “error,” a slip by someone who by mistake removed a photograph of Jews and replaced it with one of Muslims, or was it, which is far more likely, a deliberate attempt at antisemitic sabotage, a way to remove Jews from the yearbook, which represents the collective memory of the students, so that those memories will be Judenrein?

This Case-of-the-Judenrein-Yearbook takes place at a time of steep rises in antisemitic acts that between 2022 and 2023 increased by 135 percent in K-12 schools, and by 321 percent at colleges and universities. Outside of schools, antisemitic acts among the general public soared by 140 percent.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) opened an investigation into the Berkeley Unified School District in California based on a complaint that it has allowed “severe and persistent” antisemitism since Oct. 7, with Jewish students experiencing bullying and harassment.

In January, OCR also opened an investigation into the Oakland Unified School District after it hosted a “teach-in” that gave educators guidance on how to address Israel and the Middle Eastern conflict in their classrooms. Resources included the website “Decolonize Palestine,” which claims Israel is not a democracy and does not have the right to exist. It also claims that the creation of the state of Israel was a result of the “transference of Europe’s guilt onto the Palestinians.”…

Here we have Jewish students in the Berkeley School District enduring harassment and bullying, with no help provided to them by school administrators. And next door to Berkeley, things are even worse at the Oakland Unified School District, that distributes materials for classroom use, putting on a “Teach-in” to provide teachers with “Resources” for classroom discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Among other things, those teachers were provided with the dreamy misinformation that Israel is not a democracy, and what’s more, the Jewish state “does not have the right to exist.” The Teach-in concluded by claiming that Israel was created not by the Zionists themselves, but by Europeans, who wanted to “transfer Europe’s guilt” for having allowed the Holocaust to happen by laying that guilt on the innocent Palestinians, who had done nothing to warrant Israeli enmity.

That Oakland School District Teach-in further calls for supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, whose aim is to isolate Israel from the rest of the world (the so-called “international community”), by way of preparation for the eradication of the Jewish state and its replacement by a 23^rd Arab state. A pseudo-documentary that was also part of the Teach-in, claimed — with a straight face — that Israel wants to take over not just the West Bank and Gaza, but also parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, a preposterous charge for which there is not the slightest evidence. But the anti-Israel cabals working quietly across the land to gain power in our school systems, so that they can brainwash both the teachers, and the children, to hate Israel, are only just now being uncovered. And only now are pro-Israel groups beginning to fight back.