The letters stretch over 30 feet, written into the sand on a beach in New Jersey. The teenager in the photo rests casually on his side above the words, smiling, his head propped up in his hand.
“I h8 Jews,” the words read.
The anti-Semitic picture, taken on a school trip and texted to a group of classmates at a high school on the Jersey Shore in 2018, was portrayed to the group as an edgy joke.
“Yearbook cover,” the boy in the picture texted.
“Oh yea,” responded one girl, active in the yearbook club, adding that she had already submitted the photo to the faculty adviser. “Its gonna be great.”
Out of town with her parents, a Jewish student named Paige received the message on the group chat. She stared at her phone in shock. There had been other anti-Semitic slights at the high school, the Marine Academy for Science and Technology, a competitive military-themed magnet school in the seaside borough of Highlands, but nothing as blatant as this.
She’d seen classmates doodling swastikas. A group of students had been reading “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s autobiography, during free periods. And several students, Paige said, had been calling the SAT teacher an “obnoxious Jew.”
Feeling hurt and hated, Paige threw her phone toward her mother. Her father, horrified, sent a screenshot to the principal.
It was a moment that would derail her life, and the lives of the two boys most responsible.
