Cryptic statements linked to Holocaust denial have surfaced in yearbooks at several schools across Canada and the U.S.
A Toronto District School Board high school is reprinting and revising yearbooks after cryptic remarks tied to antisemitic internet culture were published in its 2025-26 yearbook, prompting an apology from the school and renewed questions about whether schools are prepared to recognize coded hate speech.
In a June letter to students, parents and guardians, Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute’s principal, Lorraine Sutherns, said the school had recently learned that “unacceptable remarks” were included in this year’s yearbook.
“What first appeared to be innocuous comments to the students and staff who reviewed the content, has since been identified as antisemitic language,” Sutherns wrote. “There is absolutely no room in our school for hate or discrimination of any kind, and it will not be tolerated.”
TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird said in a statement that the phrases themselves were not overt slurs, which is precisely why they escaped notice.
Based on the images The CJN saw, one published phrase read: “One baker can only bake so many cookies.” A second appeared as: “Most likely to receive 7 thousand dollars.”
Bird said the phrases did not immediately register as hateful to reviewers. “It wasn’t like blatant hate that someone skimmed by or anything like that,” he said. “Someone had to explain it to me.”
The “baker” line appears to be a variation on a Holocaust-denial meme sometimes framed around “cookies.” The Anti-Defamation League has documented the “six million cookies” phrase as a dog whistle in which extremists use “cookies” as a stand-in for Jews and cast doubt on the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The ADL says the phrase has circulated in extremist spaces for years and was popularized on far-right internet forums.
One student familiar with the references, who chose to remain anonymous, explained the logic of the Holocaust-distorting analogy. “If you have a factory and the factory can only churn out this many cookies a day, then how could it be six million cookies?” He described it as “a form of Holocaust denial veiled in like weird internet slang.”
The second Lawrence Park phrase — “Most likely to receive 7 thousand dollars” — is more context-dependent. Bird said he had been told it appeared to refer to allegations that the Israeli government had paid social media influencers to post positively about Israel. “Someone had to explain it to me,” Bird said, adding that, taken alone, he initially thought the interpretation was “a bit of a stretch,” but that “combined together” with the other phrase, it appeared the student was deliberate in his messaging.
There is a public record behind some recent online debate about Israeli government-backed influencer campaigns. U.S. foreign-agent filings and subsequent reporting have described a campaign involving Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Havas Media Group Germany and Bridges Partners, including influencer-related spending under the name “Esther Project”. Reporting by JTA and the Jerusalem Post said the campaign was designed to manage a U.S.-based influencer network, while Responsible Statecraft magazine reported that the spending amounted to an estimated US$7,000 per post. That figure, however, has been disputed by pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting, which argued the filings did not establish a fixed per-post payment and included broader production, travel, editing and management costs.
Although a reference to a foreign government’s public-relations campaign is not inherently antisemitic, when paired with a Holocaust-denial dog whistle, the “$7,000” phrase can be read differently, Bird told The CJN.
As one parent put it, the “$7,000 line is meant to convey the idea that Zionists are paying people to spread propaganda.”
Bird said Lawrence Park’s yearbook process involved a student yearbook committee and a staff member assigned to review the content before it was sent to the publisher. “This is something that [is] dealt with at the school level,” he said. “School staff would review the content prior to publishing, and then it would be sent off to the publisher to print.” But when the comments were seen, he said, they did not “trigger any concern at that time because it was not clear what it was referencing.”
The ambiguity of the phrases is a hallmark of modern extremist internet slang, experts on antisemitism say: phrases are crafted to be legible to insiders while remaining deniable to everyone else.
The school said it would reprint yearbooks that had not yet been distributed and provide revised copies at no additional cost to students or families who wanted to exchange copies they had already received. Students who had already collected signatures and personal messages could also bring in their yearbooks for revision so those messages could be preserved while the offending material was removed, according to the letter.
“We sincerely apologize that these comments were included and for their impact,” Sutherns wrote, adding that the school was taking “all necessary steps with regard to student discipline” and that social work supports were available to students.
The larger trend of coded Holocaust denial in yearbooks
The Lawrence Park case appears to be part of a wider pattern this spring in which Holocaust-denial references and other coded antisemitic messages have been printed in school yearbooks before adults recognized their meaning.
CBC News reported June 17 that graduating students at two Canadian high schools, including Lawrence Park, had submitted Holocaust-denial quotes in their yearbooks and that the quotes were published before the schools took action.
At West Bedford High School in Nova Scotia, a yearbook quote included the phrase “6 million? Nah, 271k,” according to a report by the National Post. The school asked students to return their yearbooks so they could be reprinted without what the principal described to parents as “antisemitic and polarizing content.”
The number “271k” is a Holocaust-denial code. The Anti-Defamation League says it refers to the false claim that only about 271,000 Jews died in the Holocaust, rather than the historical consensus that Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews. The Arolsen Archives in Germany, the largest archive on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution, whose records are frequently misused by Holocaust deniers, has said the document used to support the “271k” claim refers only to death certificates issued for some concentration-camp prisoners and excludes millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps, ghettos, mass shootings and other Nazi killing operations.
A similar incident was reported in Pennsylvania. CBS Pittsburgh reported June 9 that Franklin Regional School District faced backlash after an antisemitic quote was printed in a high school yearbook. District officials said a student faced discipline after the quote referenced a figure commonly associated with Holocaust conspiracy theories.
Another yearbook incident surfaced in New Jersey later in June, though it was less coded. East Brook Middle School in Paramus recalled yearbooks after a photo of Adolf Hitler as an infant was printed in a student baby-picture section. The school principal told families the image was “unacceptable” and that Hitler “represents hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust,” according to local media reports.
Holocaust denial on the rise
The yearbook cases also fit into broader concerns about Holocaust denial, distortion and Nazi-related harassment in schools. A 2025 report commissioned by the Office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, based on a survey of 599 Jewish parents in Ontario, documented 781 antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools between October 2023 and January 2025. The report estimated those incidents were directly experienced by at least 10 per cent of Ontario’s roughly 30,000 Jewish school-age children.
The same report found that more than 40 per cent of reported antisemitic incidents involved Nazi salutes, claims that Hitler “should have finished the job” or similar anti-Jewish hate. It also found that 9.2 per cent of responses describing what made an incident antisemitic involved Holocaust denial, minimization of the Holocaust or claims that Jews use the Holocaust to justify their actions.
The problem is compounded by gaps in Holocaust knowledge. A 2018 Canadian Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey by the Azrieli Foundation and the Claims Conference found that 54 per cent of Canadians surveyed did not know six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Among millennials, 62 per cent did not know six million Jews were murdered, and 52 per cent could not name a concentration camp or ghetto.
Revised yearbooks
At Lawrence Park, efforts continue to reprint and repair yearbooks, despite the school being closed for the summer.
“We recognize that many students have already collected signatures and messages from friends. Students who have signed yearbooks may bring them in for revision so that personal messages and signatures can be preserved while the unacceptable content is removed,” Sutherns explained in the letter.
The incident at a Paramus school prompted condemnation from school officials and local Jewish leaders.
Adolf Hitler cropped up in the student baby photos section of a New Jersey middle school yearbook, prompting condemnation from school officials and local Jewish leaders.
In a letter sent last Thursday to the school community, East Brook Middle School Principal Ryan Aupperlee said that the school in Paramus had launched an investigation into the incident in “coordination with law enforcement.”
“Adolf Hitler represents hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust, including the murder of six million Jews,” Aupperlee wrote in the letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “An image of him has no place in a yearbook created for our students. It does not reflect who we are or what East Brook stands for, and we condemn its inclusion without reservation.”
Sean Adams, the superintendent of Paramus Public Schools, told JTA in an emailed statement that the yearbooks were taken back from the students “the same day they were distributed, before the students left school for the day.”
“We are working with the yearbook company to develop a solution that will allow us to redistribute the yearbooks after removing the offensive content while still allowing students to retain the handwritten, personalized messages their classmates and teachers had already written in their yearbooks,” Adams said.
Adams said that an investigation into the incident was “ongoing,” and that “any details related to students must remain confidential.”
The incident comes amid a spate of allegations of antisemitism in New Jersey schools in recent years. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into Teaneck Public Schools after parents alleged the system had fostered an antisemitic climate since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in Israel. The same year, teachers at Fort Lee High School presented a lesson that described Hamas as a “Palestinian political party and armed resistance movement.”
A high school yearbook in East Brunswick, New Jersey, also drew condemnation and was recalled in 2024 after a photo of the “Jewish Student Association” was replaced with one of a Muslim student group.
Jason Shames, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, said that the incident was “shocking people to the core.”
“I’m not rushing to judgment, but again, if I know that it’s a minor, I want consequences. If I know that’s an adult, I want consequences,” Shames said, adding that the Jewish community “demands” to see accountability.
On Friday, Paramus Mayor Chris DiPiazza condemned the incident in a post on Facebook, writing that, “Any examples, like yesterday’s, does not reflect Paramus.”
Shames said that while he felt the school “handled it right,” he was still looking to other state leaders for a statement condemning the incident.
“There should be global condemnation,” Shames said. “If the school has already done it, and the mayor’s already done it, where’s the uproar?”
He said the incident reflected a broader normalization of antisemitism.
“It’s infuriating that it’s come to this. There’s a bigger statement about the illness in American society today, and the antisemitism, and the hate that’s involved in this,” Shames said. “Even if it winds up being two middle school kids who thought it was funny, we have a problem now with people thinking Hitler and Nazi jokes are funny.”
Rabbi Arthur Weiner, the leader of the Conservative Congregation Beth Tikvah in Paramus, said that he was first alerted to the yearbook by a congregant whose child attends the school.
On Monday, Weiner sent a letter to congregants saying that he was “angered by this blatant antisemitic incident,” and had been in contact with the school district and local elected leaders about their response.
“Events like these are of great concern to us both personally and as a community,” Weiner wrote. “Incidents involving Nazi imagery or references to Hitler are not merely offensive. They touch deep historical wounds and remind us why vigilance remains so important.”
Weiner said that the local Jewish community could “take heart in the reaction of the authorities to this particular event.”
“We have not always seen that clear and unambiguous response from school districts when similar incidents of antisemitism and bias have occurred,” Weiner told JTA. “I think we’ve been very, very proud of the response.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein of the Modern Orthodox Congregation Beth Tefillah in Paramus said that while many parents at his congregation had expressed “frustration,” “hurt,” and “concern” over the incident, they also felt “supported by the local government.”
Goldstein said that he nonetheless did “not feel that there’s nearly enough proactive measures in the local school systems.”
“These incidents don’t happen in a vacuum,” Goldstein said. “They happen because someone is taught at home on social media or informally amongst peers at schools, that it is okay to hurt Jewish people, that has to be made clear, that that is unacceptable.”
what gets me , and what @hidinginalaska was pointing out, is that it’s very obviously an old photograph, not one of a 2010s baby. you’d think someone could have reverse image searched it before printing it, at the very least.
this article is from 2024, and it’s only gotten worse:
School districts in New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota and Texas apologized and took action over yearbook material dealing with Israel and Oct.
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