I’ve seen hate up close. The antisemitism commission’s recommendations can help stop it.
Hatred of Jews is the common thread connecting extremist groups, and the report’s focus on this is overdue
December 11, 2025
Last month, my colleague Arno Michaelis and I spoke side by side at one of the final hearings of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism, sharing our expertise on how antisemitism spreads and which interventions can best help fight it.
We come to the work from very different backgrounds. I grew up in Morocco, the daughter of a Muslim father and Christian mother. Arno is a former neo-Nazi skinhead from Wisconsin.
I came to this mission after years of working in counseling and group therapy in juvenile detention centers and dual-diagnosis units. I began my career intervening with North African immigrants trafficked into sex work in Europe.
Arno became deeply involved in the white power movement as a teenager, believing white people were under threat from a shadowy conspiracy led by the Jews. Years later, fueled by love for his daughter, sobriety, and forgiveness shown by those he had once hated, Arno turned from a life of hate and began sharing his story with others vulnerable to falling into extremism.
As Arno said during his testimony, “The work I do today is done with the intention of helping others avoid making the mistakes that I made.”
Arno now works with me as an interventionist at Parents for Peace, where we work to deliver evidence-based interventions to prevent extremism and build stronger communities. We’ve partnered with some of the leading schools and organizations in the country to root out antisemitism and extremism.
We followed the commission’s work closely over the past year and, given the alarming surge in antisemitism we have witnessed since October 7, 2023, were disappointed by some of the criticism sent its way.
One critique we heard was that a proposed anonymous reporting hotline would chill speech, making students afraid to criticize Israel for fear of being labeled antisemitic. In reality, those of us working in extremism intervention know that bias reporting systems are important tools for victims to come forward. With the right oversight protections, hotlines don’t stifle debate – they amplify voices that might otherwise go unheard.
We believe the commission got it right by calling for the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to establish a statewide bias reporting program with an anonymous reporting option, recommending it provide information about how complainants can access support services, and for annual reporting about the number of incidents to be made public.
This isn’t theoretical. The need is urgent. At Parents For Peace, our helpline for those worried about their family members becoming radicalized is at capacity, with calls coming in at a level we’ve never seen before. These call lines offer people a safe, confidential way to come forward. The injustice isn’t someone feeling like a reporting system will chill their speech, it’s a victim of hate feeling they have no avenue to come forward.
Critics had also suggested that, with the commission’s focus, Jews are being singled out for special treatment, an argument that ignores both history and reality. Here’s what we see every day in our work: antisemitism is the most common thread in most forms of extremism that we encounter, making it one of the most adaptable, and therefore virulent forms of hate we see. Naming the problem and making recommendations to address it isn’t exceptionalism. It’s the overdue recognition of a distinct threat.
Parents for Peace addresses all forms of extremism—white supremacy, Islamist, eco-terrorism, and far-left violence. After a decade of interventions to help people leave hate behind, we see over and over that the common thread connecting all extremist groups is antisemitism. That is why antisemitism must be understood as a distinct danger and a gateway into other forms of hate.
The two of us are heartened that the commission voted unanimously to approve its final report, which includes many more critical and practical recommendations for comprehensively addressing antisemitism statewide. It’s an important step towards rooting out the scourge of antisemitism in our schools, campuses, and workplaces.
We know from our own lives that antisemitism doesn’t stay contained. Left unchecked, it metastasizes. We must confront antisemitism with interventions that work. The state commission offers reasonable, practical, common-sense safeguards against allowing yesterday’s hate to masquerade as today’s education.
Myrieme Churchill is the executive director of Parents for Peace, an organization that helps provide evidence-based interventions to prevent extremism.
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