The Halloween joke that got a Jewish teenager accused of antisemitism

Chloe was fifteen, a varsity tennis player and academic star at a New York private school, when she and two camp friends traded jokes online about the worst possible Halloween costumes: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, too obvious; sine, cosine, and tangent, too geeky. Riffing further, they landed on "slaves, indigenous people, white settlers" and "Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin," clearly meant as entries on a list of costumes nobody should ever wear. Chloe posted the exchange to her private Instagram.

The next day, two classmates confronted her, claiming they'd been victimized by the post. Chloe apologized immediately and took it down. It didn't matter. Screenshots had already reached the administration, and other students, sensing an opportunity, piled on with claims that Chloe had joked about dressing as "slaves and slaveholders" and "Jews and Hitler," which she hadn't. The school held two full-grade assemblies, without Chloe present, to discuss her supposed racism. Nobody mentioned that none of her accusers, or the administrators judging her, was Jewish. Chloe is. Several of the students now calling her antisemitic had attended her bat mitzvah two years earlier. One administrator required her to deliver a "racialized apology," as a white girl. She did. It was never enough.

This happened at a school where empathy is an explicit, stated educational value. That's not a contradiction, according to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, whose book Against Empathy argues that empathy and cruelty aren't opposites; they can be the same mechanism pointed in different directions. Empathy, Bloom writes, is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. It makes you care intensely about whoever is standing in front of you, and it leaves you blind to everyone outside that narrow beam, including, in Chloe's case, the accused herself. You cannot empathize with more than one or two people at once, Bloom notes; try it. A school culture built around validating whoever claims to be hurt will systematically favor accusers over the accused, because the accuser's pain is the one currently visible.

Fairness works differently. Someone who returns a lost wallet to a stranger she'll never meet isn't motivated by empathy; she's never going to feel that stranger's relief. She does it because it's right, regardless of who's watching or who's crying loudest. Bloom's argument suggests that people who act from a sense of fairness, rather than from whoever currently has their sympathy, tend to treat everyone, including strangers and the unpopular, more decently. Schools chasing empathy as a virtue may be optimizing for exactly the wrong thing.

The next time you're pulled toward someone's visible distress, pause and deliberately ask what the person who isn't in the room, the one being accused or overlooked, would say if they had the same spotlight. Decide ahead of time what's fair and acceptable, and hold that line regardless of who happens to be crying loudest that day. Teach the young people in your life the difference between apologizing to keep the peace and being pressured into confessing to something they didn't actually do. Slow down whenever a claim gathers supporters faster than anyone checks the underlying facts, before adding your own voice to the pile.