A Tennessee high school teacher reportedly told a class “how to torture a Jew” during a lesson that was supposed to be examining the Bible as a piece of literature, not a religious document, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports.
Juniper Russo, the mother of an eighth-grade student at East Hamilton Middle School, posted on Facebook that she withdrew her daughter from a class that’s supposed to teach the Bible as literature, but the teacher was using the class to proselytize.
At one point, teaching a lesson about how Jews do not use the name of God verbally. “[The teacher] wrote an English transliteration of the Hebrew name of G-d on the whiteboard,” Russo posted. “This name is traditionally not spoken out loud, and is traditionally only written in the Torah. She then told her students, ‘If you want to know how to torture a Jew, make them say this out loud.’ My daughter felt extremely uncomfortable hearing a teacher instruct her peers on ‘how to torture a Jew’ and told me when she came home from school that she didn’t feel safe in the class.”
The teacher also crafted lesson plans that taught the Genesis Creation story was fact. On a test, students were asked, “It is important to read the Bible even if you are not Christian or Jewish?”; the correct answer was true.