Since October 7, 2023, internet communications spreading either anti-Semitic or racist content have been shared worldwide on a large scale and with enormous polarizing effects. For children and young people, these are an everyday presence and disrupt their development or can lead to discriminatory communications being integrated into their own identity processes without them actively and consciously reflecting on this. In general, organized online campaigns use popular hashtags to spread anti-Semitic and rassist messages in a targeted manner. The anonymity of comment sections also lowers the inhibition threshold for aggressive and inhuman statements, thus promoting the further normalization of discrimination on the internet (cf. Miehling 2024). What should students and teachers do when anti-Semitic or racist memes circulate in the WhatsApp class group? Is it advisable to delete them, discuss them, or report them directly to the police or civil society reporting centers? Such questions are the focus of the second semester of the program Certificate in Anti-Semitism-Critical Education for Teaching and Schools at the University of Würzburg (ZABUS). The advanced module on digital anti-Semitism-critical education specifically prepares prospective teachers for this situation.
This also promotes anti-Semitism-critical criticism of racism. The article provides insights into the discrimination-sensitive and, in particular, BIPoC-sensitive reflection and transformation of speech recognition systems. It presents the method of "empathy-based counterspeech" (Hangartner et al. 2021) in the context of hate speech, and uses narrative approaches such as critical media analysis with tools from the PLURV method to demonstrate targeted training in dealing with images, which enables both students and teachers to recognize and refute problematic narratives or counter them digitally.