We recently spoke to some 500 high school students, teachers and administrators at Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx. As the senior rabbis of two major Reform synagogues with which dozens of Fieldston families are affiliated, we presented the Jewish community’s perspectives on the surge in anti-Semitic incidents in our area and throughout the country. We clarified that while we do not claim to represent all Jews, our views do fall within mainstream Jewish opinion.

We shared statistics from the New York City police and the F.B.I. about the pervasiveness of attacks against Jews. We also addressed the controversy that had erupted in the aftermath of Fieldston’s November assembly, in which a guest speaker equated Israelis with Nazis and asserted that Israelis are an example of “victims becoming the perpetrators.” Several hours after we spoke last week, Fieldston fired a teacher who had posted tweets demonizing Zionism. Students reported that while we were speaking, the teacher flipped a middle finger at one of us.

We are deeply worried about the effect that hatred of Israel has on students. We emphasized in our remarks that for centuries, anti-Semitism emerged from both the right and the left of the political spectrum. We described what far-right anti-Semitism looks like, but, since we are liberal rabbis, we spent most of our time discussing anti-Semitism among the left. It’s especially important for us to speak against hate in our own camp. We stated emphatically that criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic. To the contrary: it is often helpful and motivated by sound principles.

But to accuse Holocaust survivors of inflicting Nazi-like violence on others, as the guest speaker at Fieldston had, is morally grotesque. It whitewashes the Nazis’ crimes and who they really were to accuse Jews of the very things that were done to them in an effort to defame the Jewish state.