Sign up for Chalkbeat New York’s free daily newsletter to get essential news about NYC’s public schools delivered to your inbox.Can a program for New York City high school students designed to fight hate change hearts and minds?For Matthew Canzius, a sophomore at Hillcrest High School in Queens, the answer is yes. During his freshman year, he saw the fallout on social media from Israel’s bombardments of the Gaza strip, following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas. And he grappled with having antisemitic thoughts while attending a school with several Jewish teachers. Those thoughts “made me feel ashamed in a way,” Matthew told Chalkbeat. Recognizing they came from a place of ignorance, he applied for the fellowship. As part of a yearlong Combat Hate Fellowship, Matthew joined 26 other students from five New York City high schools designed to help them recognize — and confront — antisemitism, racism, and other forms of hate. They visited cultural institutions, at each stop hearing from speakers who shared personal stories of facing injustice. They participated in facilitated conversations exploring their own identities and experiences. And they later gave workshops in their own schools about hate and how to be an upstander in the face of bullying and harassment. “This isn’t something that I usually like to share out publicly,” Matthew told the crowd of students and educators gathered at the fellowship’s year-end celebration last month in midtown Manhattan, “but I’d say that I used to think in a way that was more based on prejudice.” After nine months in the program, he believes he gained “a sense of deeper empathy.” The fellowship is a partnership between the anti-hate organization Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation and New Visions for Public Schools, the city’s largest high school network that serves 37,000 students, including those at Hillcrest. Now in its second year, the fellowship is largely funded by the City Council.It comes at a time that New York City middle and high school students say they’re seeing and experiencing more bullying related to identity. Roughly 40% of New York City middle and high school students last year reported seeing classmates bullied or harassed based on race, ethnicity, religion, or immigration status, according to annual school survey data. That was up from 30% in 2019. In terms of documented incidents, the city has started to see a downward trend. Schools reported roughly 700 incidents related to ethnicity or national origin in the 2024-25 school year, down nearly 15% from the year before, according to public data. There were nearly 320 reports related to religion last year, down about 56% from the 2023-24 school year. In the seven months following the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas and subsequent bombing by Israel on Gaza, former schools Chancellor David Banks reported that out of the 281 incidents of religious bias in city schools, 42% involved antisemitism and 30% were directed against Muslim students. One of the highest profile incidents took place at Hillcrest High School in November 2023 — a year before Matthew enrolled there — when students rioted in the halls after seeing a health teacher’s pro-Israel social media post. The school has changed principals since then and made other changes. And in the spring, members of the fellowship gave presentations to their peers at the school. They also created a video raising awareness about cyberbullying for their final presentation for the program. “From day one, I knew that confronting hate in our schools wasn’t optional, it was essential,” said Noah Angeles, the superintendent of New Visions who took over the network in 2024, not long after the clash at Hillcrest. Creating safe spaces for hard conversationsAt the fellows’ first stop in October, the students toured an Anne Frank exhibit at the Center for Jewish History and met with Leo Ullman, a Holocaust survivor who was hidden as a baby from the Nazis by a non-Jewish family in the Netherlands. Their last trip was to the Islamic Cultural Center, where they met Mohammad Ravzi, who became a prominent advocate for Muslim New Yorkers after 9/11. In between, they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; El Museo del Barrio; the Stonewall National Monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history; and the Museum of Chinese in America. Jack Simony, Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation director general, left, interviews Holocaust survivor Leo Ullman during the Combat Hate Fellows' trip to an exhibit on Anne Frank at the Center for Jewish History on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025.Meeting speakers who experienced hate and hearing how they were affected but were able to “push through despite that hate,” was eye-opening for Matthew. He said it helped him “learn and grow as a person, from seeing all these people who experienced such horrific acts, or horrific acts of prejudice still continue to thrive and try and help the society.”Chayanika Chakravorty, another Hillcrest sophomore, also felt transformed by hearing people’s stories.“I feel like a new whole world opened up to me, like things that I never even knew existed,” she said. After the Anne Frank exhibit, she felt a deeper understanding of what happened to Jewish people in Nazi Germany, and said it resonated with her as a Hindu from Bangladesh, where most people are Muslim.About Ullman, she said, “not a lot of people have that mentality, that strength in their head, and seeing someone like that really inspires me to do the exact same thing.”Angeles said he wanted to build a program to foster that kind of empathy rooted in experiential learning through the city’s diversity and cultural institutions. In talking to students across the city, Angeles saw they were hungry to discuss world events but needed the space to do so. “The adults didn’t always want to talk about it, because it could be controversial, and people are afraid,” he told Chalkbeat in October. Jack Simony, Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation director general, said that creating a peer-to-peer model felt essential. “You can’t tell people not to hate. It doesn’t come top down, it comes bottom up,” he said. Officials across the five boroughs have been trying to find school-based solutions. The Education Department has continued to develop its “hidden voices” history program, featuring stories of figures overlooked by traditional textbooks, including lessons on Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans. The department last school year also launched an anti-hate hotline (718-935-2889) to anonymously report incidents related to hate, harassment, and discrimination.A City Council task force to combat hate recently issued recommendations, including expanding arts programs that expose students to current events and diverse perspectives, and ensuring that teachers have the resources and training to connect historical context to current events. The committee also suggested funding peer educator “train-the-trainer” programs for restorative justice interventions in the 15 schools with the highest rates of student-to-student bullying, harassment, and discrimination. Marcia Cudjoe-Forrest, a Hillcrest special education and global studies teacher who was the adviser for her school’s Combat Hate fellows like Matthew, believes what happened in 2023 at her school exposed the need for students to dive into the stories of other cultures to help them see “we have a lot more similarities than differences.” She’d like to see more spaces for kids, not just in her school, where they can have these kinds of conversations. “We can always agree to disagree,” Cudjoe-Forrest said, “but we have to agree to at least learn, listen, and understand.”Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.
