Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Israel School Red-Faced After Teachers’ Unvarnished Opinions of Students Go Public

Students at an Israeli high school were in an uproar on Monday after a teacher mistakenly sent them an internal email that spelled out what faculty members really thought about them.

“Not too bright”, “Liar”, “Tactless”, “Big Baby”, “Anti-social”, “Has a thing for boys” and “Sick-o” were some of the descriptions on an Excel spreadsheet that landed in students’ email boxes.

Protesting outside the Yitzhak Rabin High School in Kfar Saba, a town north of Tel Aviv, students pinned some of those descriptions on their shirts and demanded an apology, which its principal made.

“We will draw conclusions about our behaviour and the way we express ourselves,” the principal, Ruth Lazar, was quoted as saying by the YNet news site.

The list, which also contained praise for a number of students, was compiled by teachers as a guide to potential misbehaviour by the teens due to take part in a school visit to Holocaust sites in Poland, a trip that has become a rite of passage for many Israeli youngsters.

One of the teachers inadvertently copied the list to students who signed up for the trip, the school said.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.