LEXINGTON — Just as the statue on the Lexington Battle Green commemorates the first acts of resistance by locals against imperial oppression, the leaders of Lexington United Against Antisemitism see themselves as the vanguard of a movement to liberate Jews from Christian antisemitism.

“Because the Christian community is the majority community, and it has a huge responsibility for past antisemitism,” noted Stephen Van Evera, one of the group’s co-chairs.

This insight came out of a 2023 presentation at Lexington’s Temple Emunah by the Rev. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, a professor at Boston College, who spoke on why antisemitism is a problem that Christians, in particular, should be working to address.

Van Evera, who attends Lexington’s Pilgrim Congregational Church, and Francine Jacobs, a member of Temple Emunah, attended the presentation and were inspired to form the interfaith Lexington United group in April 2023.

At the time, they had no reason to think their Waspy town had an antisemitism problem. “There was no incident that animated this effort,” Jacobs said.

Two months later, a swastika was discovered in the town library.

“It got a conversation going,” Jacobs said. “But the thought was, ‘Oh, Lexington is really doing well in this regard; we haven’t heard much.’”

“Our sense is we are less put upon than the surrounding towns,” said Van Evera. “Arlington is worse. Medford is worse. Concord is way worse.”

“As it turned out, there were more than a handful of incidents within the schools,” Jacobs said. “And kids and parents are very, very worried about that.”

Lexington schools have been the sites of antisemitic incidents as far back as 2017. As recently as December 2025, antisemitic and anti-Black graffiti was found in the Diamond Middle School boys bathroom.

“We have a history,” Jacobs said. “There were parents who complained. There was apparently not a great response from the school, from the school department. There is some sense, again, that this is not an issue that we need to be concerned about the way we are concerned about antiracism, LGBT. There’s movement that has to happen along that dimension.”

This narrative, of incidents in a town’s schools revealing more widespread antisemitic sentiment, is similar to what happened in neighboring Concord. This past April, a civil rights complaint alleging antisemitism brought against Concord-Carlisle School District was settled by the U.S. Justice Department. Since the complaint’s filing in June 2025, the community group Concord-Carlisle Against Antisemitism has worked with the town and the school district to address perceived antisemitic sentiment in Concord.

The leaders of Lexington United see themselves as the vanguard in the wider fight against antisemitism. “We found out that there was no sort of recipe book or template for communities to take action on the issue,” Van Evera said. “To my surprise; I thought the ADL or somebody would have a cookbook, but they don’t.”

So Van Evera, a retired professor of political science at MIT, and Jacobs, a retired professor of human development and urban planning at Tufts, set out to design a program for educating the wider Christian community about its role in historical and contemporary antisemitism.

Through their efforts, they aim to change the dominant Christian culture of the town: To make antisemitic behavior taboo by stigmatizing it.

“Both change people’s hearts and change their sense of what’s appropriate,” Van Evera said. “Because humans are herd animals, and when they figure out where the herd’s going, they tend to want to go there.”

The group resolved to pursue three approaches. Jacobs said the most active is its Christian reflection group. Led by Van Evera, the group considers the Christian community’s “huge responsibility” for past antisemitism. “[The Christian community] tends not to do that because it doesn’t know the history,” he said.

The second approach is community education: The group has hosted speakers such as James Carroll, author of “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews”; held film screenings and panel discussions; and convened community conversations.

The third approach, community action, was originally envisioned as a quick response team – sort of minutemen against antisemitism – but that has yet to manifest, Jacobs said. Van Evera said community action now includes training Christians to be active bystanders and creating tools for Christian communities to combat antisemitism.

It also includes “talking to churches about the way they practice the liturgy,” he said. “Preaching culture and how to handle the ‘dark scriptures,’ the anti-Jewish scriptures. As a church community, we created a guide for churches to use, and now we are getting together curriculum for teaching, for Christian education.”

Lexington United has been buoyed in its interfaith fight against Jew-hatred by community funds. Since its establishment in March 2024, Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ (CJP) Center for Combating Antisemitism has awarded thousands of dollars in grants to initiatives of Framingham’s Temple Shir Tikva and the Greater Framingham Community Church; Hebrew College’s Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership; the Parents Diversity Council of Bedford; and the statewide nonprofit Arts for Social Cohesion.

While Jacobs, Van Evera and the rest of its members are volunteers, Lexington United Against Antisemitism has received the lion’s share of funding from CJP – $62,000 over three years – enough to hire a part-time project manager.

“Financial need is the number one thing that most grassroots organizers articulate,” said CJP Associate Vice President Melissa Garlick. “They can’t do this without some backing or infrastructure.” Θ

Contact reporter Brett M. Rhyne at brett@jewishjournal.org.