“It is like we don’t exist” – schooling experiences of Jewish children and adolescents in Malmö, Sweden
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Abstract
This qualitative case study analyses questions of exclusion in Swedish education from a Jewish minority perspective. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with 14 Jewish pupils aged 10–20 in Malmö about their experiences of attending non-Jewish schools. The interviews were interpreted through critical race theory and HebCrit. The findings show: (1) a structural privileging of Christian-Protestant norms in school routines and celebrations; (2) limited and stereotypical curricular representations of Judaism that exoticise Jewish pupils and position them as “Others”; (3) the normalisation of antisemitic jokes and slurs in school environments; and (4) the development of defensive or adaptive strategies that sometimes weaken connections to Jewish identity. These results contribute to understanding antisemitism as a form of structural racism within Nordic education and highlight the need to reconsider how multiculturalism and minority inclusion are enacted in Swedish schools.
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Antisemitism Schools: Non-Jewish Jewish Children In Mainstream Schools Teenagers Interviews Main Topic: Education
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This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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“It is like we don’t exist” – schooling experiences of Jewish children and adolescents in Malmö, Sweden. 2026: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/00313831.2026.2623286
