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< Back Previous Next San Diego School District Passes Resolution to Include Antisemitism in Ethnic Studies The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Board of Trustees passed a resolution on October 26 to include the teaching of antisemitism in the ethnic studies curriculum. Aaron Bandler Oct 28, 2021 The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Board of Trustees passed a resolution on October 26 to include the teaching of antisemitism in the ethnic studies curriculum. The resolution stated that “reports of white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Israeli graffiti, bullying, harassment, and violence on SDUSD campuses has been on the rise in recent years such that administrators, teachers, and student leaders need updated and readily available training and resources to prevent and address antisemitism in all its forms” and acknowledged that “anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias can descend into antisemitism when they promote demonization, discriminatory double standards, and/or delegitimization of Israel and its existence.” “The Board of Education denounces the rise in antisemitic rhetoric and hate-motivated crimes and incidents that denigrate Jewish students and staff in the communities served by SDUSD,” it read. Read more: https://jewishjournal.com/news/341876/san-diego-school-district-passes-resolution-to-include-antisemitism-in-ethnic-studies/

< Back Previous Next A different perspective BVH student meeting marks first steps to ensuring a safe community Destiny Avila Ramirez Dec 15, 2023 On Dec. 5, Bonita Vista High’s (BVH) student-run publication’s the Crusader ’s Editorial Board members and Opinion Editors met with three BVH Israel Club members to discuss a recent editorial cartoon that had sparked conflict within the BVH community. For the Crusader, our goal was to take the first step towards creating a safe environment for the vulnerable individuals in our community—as stated in a Staff Editorial published on Nov. 13 by the publication. An editorial cartoon depicting a student’s view on the current Israel-Palestine conflict was published on the publication’s online website on Oct. 23 and featured in the third issue print of the Crusader which was distributed on the BVH campus on Nov. 3. After reading out a prepared message regarding the editorial cartoon in a Sweetwater Union High School District meeting (SUHSD) board members addressed the unintended harm the editorial cartoon may have caused and discussed the first step to meet with the Israel Club members; in hopes to listen to their personal experiences and insights regarding the Israel-Hamas war, and its impact on them. Read more: https://bonitavistacrusader.org/15897/opinion/a-different-perspective/

< Back Previous Next Anti-Israel resolutions on docket for US teachers union The American Federation of Teachers will vote on proposals that fuel “discrimination and hatred against Jews,” critics say. Schools & High Education Jul 19, 2024 At its upcoming convention in Houston, which begins on July 22, the American Federation of Teachers plans to vote on several anti-Israel resolutions, including those that oppose “weaponization” of Jew-hatred, and advocate divestment from Israeli bonds and halting U.S. military aid to Israel. “These resolutions not only marginalize our Jewish students, families and staff but also contribute to an environment of fear and hostility in our schools,” said Tova Plaut, founder of the New York City Public School Alliance. “By targeting Zionism and falsely equating it with colonialism and racism, these resolutions promote a dangerous narrative that fuels discrimination and hatred against Jews,” added Plaut, whose organization—along with StandWithUs, Educators Caucus for Israel and Partners for Equality and Educational Responsibility in K-12—condemned the resolutions. Read more: https://www.jns.org/anti-israel-resolutions-on-docket-for-teachers-union/

Members fear a resolution vote next week could encourage teachers to portray Israel as “a colonizing country committing genocide.” < Back Israel-Bashing on the Agenda for National Teachers Union Members fear a resolution vote next week could encourage teachers to portray Israel as “a colonizing country committing genocide.” A series of anti-Israel resolutions proposed by members of the second biggest teachers union in America has other members in revolt, saying they target Jews and “libel the Jewish state.” The resolutions before the American Federation of Teachers include calls to “halt U.S. military aid to Israel” and to “stop enabling genocide,” and include praise of pro-Palestinian protesters who faced “state-sanctioned violence.” They accuse the Jewish state of “apartheid” and “genocide,” and criticize Israel for “scholasticide,” a term referencing the destruction of schools in Gaza. One resolution calls for the AFT to divest from the Jewish state by pulling member pensions out of companies with even tangential connections to Israel—such as Boeing and Palantir. Of the eight proposed resolutions that mention Israel, only one advocates for a “two-state solution” and the “safe return of Hamas’s hostages.” The union, which represents 1.7 million members, will vote on the resolutions at its annual convention, which begins in Houston on July 22. Now, a group of members is circulating an anonymous letter, hoping to convince union leaders to drop the inflammatory resolutions and “avoid the public stain of antisemitism.” Anti-Israel resolutions from members of a teachers union are mostly symbolic and, if approved, won’t have any impact on Israel’s policy in Gaza or the West Bank. But what’s alarming is the extent to which they reflect the mindset of some teachers, said Tova Plaut, an AFT member and Jewish educator in New York City. Plaut fears the resolutions would have a spillover effect, encouraging teachers to portray “Israel as a colonizing country that is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” And she added the resolutions send a signal: “It’s telling their members this is what we want you to teach about.” As Robert Pondiscio reported for The Free Press in June, this is already a problem in U.S. public schools. According to an Anti-Defamation League complaint, teachers in Fort Lee High School in New Jersey tell students that the terrorist group Hamas is a peaceful “resistance movement,” while teachers in Berkeley, California, “indoctrinat[e] students with antisemitic tropes.” AFT President Randi Weingarten told The Free Press that the union has already “condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia and clearly established our values on this issue,” citing a resolution passed by the AFT’s executive council in January. She also defended union members’ rights to propose any resolution to be voted upon. “In a democratic union, members have the right to propose any resolution they like—and I will be advocating at the convention to uphold our position,” she said. Though Weingarten does not vote as president of the union, when asked if she would support or oppose the resolutions, her spokesperson said she would back a resolution that calls for a “two-state solution” but did not comment on the others. Amy Leserman, an educator and AFT member from Los Angeles, said the resolutions have nothing to do with the AFT’s mission, whose purpose, she continued, is to advocate on behalf of teachers and the quality of their workplace. “We are not international politicians,” she said. “And there is no foreign government that has any interest in what the teachers union or any labor union has to say about how they should function. . . . So the entire purpose behind these motions and these resolutions is that they generate a hostile teaching environment and learning environment for students.” Previous Next

< Back Previous Next Parents want to 'collaborate' over new ethnic studies course “The room was divided, almost as if you had two opposing sides,” said Nicole Bernstein, a concerned parent and co-founder of PeerK12. Ava Kershner Sep 14, 2024 A meeting grew tense Thursday night as the San Dieguito Union High School District took in feedback on the new Ethnic Studies unit being implemented next year across the state. “The room was divided, almost as if you had two opposing sides,” said Nicole Bernstein, a concerned parent and co-founder of PeerK12. But not every parent wants their kids in the course just yet, saying this year’s pilot program of the class seems to focus on the negative events certain ethnic groups went through- rather than positive. “Ethnic studies is supposed to bring us together, not rip us apart,” said Bernstein. The reason this course is getting a test run now is because a California state law is requiring the unit for all students- starting with the graduating class of 2029-2030. The State Board of Education is guiding the design of the course, but 10News was told teachers and the community will have a say as well. “And I feel like we're not being included in the way that we would want, which is simply as partners, we're parents, they're the educators, let us collaborate together,” said Bernstein. The County Office of Education will be giving teachers training on how to pilot these units as soon as next week. Teachers will then try out the first unit of the course and return with feedback. Feedback that parents want to add in as well- however, big changes in the actual curriculum may not be made due to demands from the state. “I encourage the parents who wanted a delay, I want to remind them that, their engagement, it's not over. So the input has to be evaluated through the lens of can that input be incorporated and we still comply with the requirements of ethnic studies,” said Rimga Viskanta, SDUHSD Board of Trustees President. The next community engagement night for SDUHSD where you can give your feedback on the ethnic studies course, will be Sept 17 at Earl Warren Middle School at 5:30 p.m.

< Back Previous Next San Dieguito board passes resolutions denouncing antisemitism, discrimination On Nov. 18, the San Dieguito Union High School District passed a resolution addressing antisemitism and affirming the value of Jewish students, faculty, staff, and families. Karen Billings Nov 18, 2021 On Nov. 18, the San Dieguito Union High School District passed a resolution addressing antisemitism and affirming the value of Jewish students, faculty, staff, and families. The resolution denounced the rise in antisemitic rhetoric and hate-motivated crimes and incidents that denigrate members of the Jewish community served by San Dieguito. A second resolution affirmed the protection of students against discrimination, harassment, intimidation and bullying, aiming to make changes in district procedures that could help identify and address acts of discrimination. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2021/11/23/san-dieguito-board-passes-resolutions-denouncing-antisemitism-discrimination-4/

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< Back This is a Title 03 This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Want to view and manage all your collections? Click on the Content Manager button in the Add panel on the left. Here, you can make changes to your content, add new fields, create dynamic pages and more. You can create as many collections as you need. Your collection is already set up for you with fields and content. Add your own, or import content from a CSV file. Add fields for any type of content you want to display, such as rich text, images, videos and more. You can also collect and store information from your site visitors using input elements like custom forms and fields. Be sure to click Sync after making changes in a collection, so visitors can see your newest content on your live site. Preview your site to check that all your elements are displaying content from the right collection fields. Previous Next

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< Back Previous Next SWC Commends Jewish Community Parents Proposed Resolution Passed by San Diego Unified School District to include Anti-Semitism in its Ethnic Studies Curriculum Staff Oct 27, 2021 The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauds the San Diego Unified School District’s unanimous approval of a resolution which updates its ethnic studies curriculum to include anti-Semitism. The resolution, which was passed during a board meeting on Tuesday night, urged that anti-Semitism be included in all ethnic studies education in its efforts to educate students about equity and inclusiveness. The decision comes on the heels of a recent rise in anti-Semitism and multiple incidents on campuses across San Diego. “We applaud this important victory that took place in San Diego but has national implications. All of the credit for this breakthrough resolution goes to local Jewish parents who drew a line against demonizing Israel and the inevitable bullying of Jewish students and teachers in San Diego schools who love Israel and are proud of their heritage. Read more: https://www.wiesenthal.com/about/news/wc-commends-jewish-community.html

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< Back Previous Next How a photo of Hitler in a 7th-grade classroom sparked a debate over antisemitism and school oversight Parents and Jewish community members say a teacher’s inclusion of the photo in a classroom display shows the need for ‘real education’ on antisemitism. Kristen Taketa Oct 23, 2022 A group held a protest before San Dieguito’s most recent board meeting last week. The protesters said they were upset that the board had placed a discussion-only item — not an action item — about the incident at the end of its agenda. The meeting ended up lasting six hours, until 11 p.m. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2022/10/23/how-a-photo-of-hitler-in-a-7th-grade-classroom-sparked-a-debate-over-antisemitism-and-school-oversight/

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And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. < Back California Teachers’ Union Ruins an Earnest Effort to Confront Antisemitism And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. California has a problem with antisemitism in its public schools, but the proposed remedy — a massive new regulatory agency outlined in a bill on the governor’s desk — will do approximately nothing to end the madness. But not exactly nothing: If you’re a leader of the state’s powerful teachers’ union, debating “settler colonialism” in Israel, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, genocide, the virtues of Hamas, and whether American Jews are “white” or “white-adjacent” (and in either case equally “privileged”) is far better than confronting the union’s role in the 40-year decline of public education in California. In February, months before it arrived on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, Assembly Bill 715 started life as a laser-focused response to the problem of antisemitism in the state’s schools. Approved unanimously in the state assembly, it seemed certain to move through the state senate with a standing ovation, ticker tape falling from the gallery, and a college drumline. Instead, the bill ran into the state’s powerful California Teachers Association (CTA). Lengthy negotiations followed. By the time the state senate approved the bill and moved it to the office of Governor Newsom, AB 715 had become something different and even malign : a blueprint for the creation of a massive new office of civil rights attached loosely to California’s education department — an office charged with policing “violations” of the civil rights of all of the familiar racial, ethnic, and gender-fluid identities favored by the far left . . . plus antisemitism. It’s small comfort that, among its new employees, AB 715 “would also require the Office of Civil Rights to employ the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to be appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate” — all of whom benefit magnificently from CTA political campaign activities. The legislation even helpfully provides a job description for that employee: “to, among other things, develop, consult, and provide antisemitism education to school personnel to identify and proactively prevent antisemitism and to make recommendations, in coordination with the executive director of the state board, to the Legislature on legislation necessary for the prevention of antisemitism in educational settings.” That’s a lot of developing, consulting, and recommending in the proposed law. But there’s little — if any — obvious authority. And that’s one reason to bet that Gavin Newsom will sign the bill: In this fight between his allies in the state legislature’s Jewish Caucus and the California Teachers Association — itself a kind of fourth branch of government — AB 715 is the perfect political solution: a do-nothing law that promises to do everything. But there is a silver lining. In blocking real reform, AB 715, the California Teachers Association has revealed why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. * * * In its July letter opposing the assembly measure, the CTA makes it clear that its highest priority isn’t the education of students. It’s about progressive politics. The letter opens with a prefabricated declaration that the union is (of course) “firmly committed to schools that are free of racism, sexism, religious and gender discrimination.” The implied “but” arrives promptly: “We are also concerned with academic freedom and the ability of educators to ensure that instruction include perspectives and materials that reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of all of California’s students.” The union tips its hand immediately, and all of its cards are political. Supporting the assembly version of AB 715, the union says, would offer comfort to the real enemy — “a regime [a regime! ] in Washington D.C. that sows division at all levels of academia and seeks to drive a wedge between communities that should be working together to address hate and discrimination.” To make matters worse, the CTA says, the assembly version “would unfortunately arm some others” — “ill-intentioned people” — with the tools they “seek to weaponize public education.” The CTA knows this will happen because, it says, these “extremists” have already filed “meritless” complaints “meant to disrupt or challenge policies that support LGBTQ+ inclusivity or to target LGBTQ+ students and staff.” But the CTA’s biggest concern about the antisemitism bill is that it might “privilege” Jews over other groups, and that would undo the union’s primary political objective of advancing the rights of some groups above others — not of eliminating “privilege,” in other words, but of granting privilege to the people CTA believes deserve it. The letter allows us to watch as the CTA performs a magic trick in reverse, stuffing a rabbit back into a top hat, turning the problem of antisemitism into merely one problem among many. As approved in the assembly, the CTA asserts, AB 715 would “impose limits and define standards for course instruction regarding Israel, Palestine, Zionism, or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, something that we don’t do for any other active conflict in the world, e.g., conflicts in Ukraine, Rwanda, Congo.” Union “members have expressed concerns about lifting these experiences of inequity above those of other groups,” the letter claims. “Focusing on antisemitism alone might be seen as prioritizing one form of discrimination over others, potentially alienating groups facing other forms of systemic discrimination, such as racism, Islamophobia, or anti-LGBTQ+ bias.” The bill’s key provision, the creation of a state Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, would “not address any other forms of hate or discrimination, something that is equally needed.” “Equally needed”? Equating the very real problem of antisemitism in public education with other “forms of hate or discrimination” ignores reality. There is, thank God, no pedagogical effort in California schools — no curriculum, no program, no courses, no teacher, no third-party vendors or nonprofits — working to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan, marginalizing Muslim children, forcing young women into a handmaid’s tale of barefoot early motherhood, or campaigning to vilify gay kids. None of that exists. On the other hand, the CTA and its hundreds of local affiliates — and the thousands of state and local officials, from the governor to every local school board member, whose political campaigns those unions fund — have indeed run a very well-organized campaign to bash Jews. * * * The strange fruit of the teachers’ unions’ formalized antisemitism is evident everywhere in the state’s public schools. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis, the Oakland Unified school board backed Hamas. “We want to make sure Palestinians have the liberation they so rightfully deserve in their own land,” said board member Valarie Bachelor, switching seamlessly between singular and plural first-person pronouns . “I want to make sure we stand on our progressive organizing history and we don’t just sit on it. We stand on it and we say we need to do more and we need to do this now.” Leaders of the city’s teachers’ union, the Oakland Educators Association , amplified the board’s declaration with their own statement calling for the elimination of Israel. More than 30 Jewish families left the district. “I just felt that there wasn’t a path forward for Jewish families because I had reached out to OUSD and asked them to have a conversation about how they were going to keep Jewish families feeling safe and included,” one parent explained . “When there were lesson plans that were being taught that said, ‘Draw the Zionist bully,’ or ‘I for Intifada, J is for Jesus,’ to me, it felt like – honestly – we were being targeted and singled out and alienated.” In February 2024 , the Louis D. Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint against nearby Berkeley Unified, alleging “severe and persistent” antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. The complaint cited students being taunted with such slurs as “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” asking what their “number is” (an apparent reference to Holocaust tattoos), a teacher posting “messages of anti-hate” targeting the district’s only Jewish teacher, and antisemitic imagery in art classes. Some students have departed the district. Anti-Israel teachers marched students in Berkeley’s middle school and high school out of classes in 2024 protests — in one case to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack. Across the Bay, immediately following the October 7, 2023, attack, the San Francisco Unified School District hired the Arab Resource and Organizing Center to run student and teacher trainings “related to leadership development and cultural empowerment.” AROC describes itself as a group of “abolitionists, feminists, and internationalists who believe that the liberation of SWANA (South West Asian and North African) people is inextricably tied to the liberation of all oppressed people.” Meanwhile, the district’s antisemitism training for teachers ran into organized resistance from teachers’ union activists. By contract, the district could require teachers to attend the training — but not to listen. Members of the American Jewish Committee asked to run that training say that as soon as their training began, a leader of United Educators–San Francisco stood up and described “at great length” his own take on the problem of antisemitism: it’s an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, the union leader asserted. He then led most of the teachers out of the room for a separate conversation. By then, the clock on the formal training had nearly run down. We could go on and never exhaust the catalog of formalized antisemitism. In July 2024, federal officials concluded that Jewish students in the central coast town of Carmel were “subjected to pervasive, antisemitic harassment over a three-year period, exposed to repeated swastika graffiti in bathrooms and on desks, a Hitler reference and a verbal threat targeting Jewish people.” California officials say two ethnic studies teachers in the nearby city of Campbell violated state law by presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a “one-sided anti-Zionism” lesson. In Los Angeles, teachers at an August 2024 United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference were caught on video training their colleagues to “advocate and leverage your positionality” in the classroom in order to “globalize the intifada” — that is, to help Los Angeles students understand the putative link between the war in Gaza and their own struggles in California. In April, officials at a meeting of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District upbraided Jewish parents for their objections to an ethnic studies curriculum that singled out Jews for their white privilege. “I’ve been a little bit taken aback by the lack of acknowledgement of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community,” said board member Joy Flynn. “I don’t see you people at protests against immigration,” said board member Gabriel Medina. “I don’t see you at protests when people are being taken away right now. I don’t see you advocating to bring back Abrego Garcia or Mahmoud Khalil. I don’t see you guys doing that. You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are.” Days later, the district’s superintendent offered the usual anodyne explanation that, their Jew-bashing notwithstanding, Pajaro Valley “stands firmly against all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate.” The most prominent case erupted in Southern California’s Santa Ana Unified, where that district, the eighth largest in the state, settled a lawsuit in February 2025 over its ethnic studies courses. The highlight in that showdown came when district officials offered the defense that they were merely relying on guidance from the California Department of Education. The department’s 2019 draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum condemned Israel and otherwise omitted mention of Jewish Americans. The compromise version released a year later still allowed districts to include materials linked to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. * * * It’s much easier to opine on the plight of the Palestinian people and to assert what’s simply not true about Israel than to defend the 40-year decline of public education in California. And what a trajectory: Data emerging from the most recent national student testing shows that all U.S. students continue to fall behind their global counterparts in math, writing, and science . The decline has been especially steep in California. Despite spending more per student than any other state in the union, California consistently ranks among the nation’s worst states for public education . Some California teachers’ union leaders deny they’re running a political campaign with children as their targets. Others admit that’s the plan — and accept any learning loss as a necessary trade-off. Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, famously told a reporter , “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables...They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup .” It was Myart-Cruz who, confronted with a parent rebellion over lousy teacher performance, launched a UTLA “research project” to track the ethnic identity of the union’s public critics. Like most teachers’ union websites in California, the United Teachers of LA website looks like an advertisement for the Democratic Socialists of America: it’s a visual cacophony of demonstrations, bullhorns, protest signs, and clenched fists. To paraphrase the old joke, those who can’t do, teach — and those like Myart-Cruz who can’t teach fall back instead on controversial political ideologies they half-learned as college sophomores in order to lecture California K–12 students about the evils of Israel. It’s time to end that sort of pedagogical sleight-of-hand — to stop bashing Jews. Terminate teachers who, misunderstanding the actual job for which they’ve been hired, prefer to use their classrooms as indoctrination camps. California could follow that with a classic California practice: the burning of sage in every school and government building in the state, after which, having banished all bad spirits, it could return to the teaching of math, English, and science along with the classroom practices that once made a California education the envy of the world. Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast. Previous Next

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Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to start the school day with an ‘emotions check-in.’ Abigail Shrier on the rise of ‘trauma-informed’ education. < Back How Bad Therapy Hijacked Our Nation’s Schools Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to start the school day with an ‘emotions check-in.’ Abigail Shrier on the rise of ‘trauma-informed’ education. American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an also alarming 14 percent. What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children. What’s going on? That mystery is the subject of Abigail Shrier’s fascinating, urgent new book: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Longtime readers of The Free Press will surely know Abigail’s name from her groundbreaking reporting in our pages. She is also the author of the best-selling 2020 book Irreversible Damage, which tackled the difficult subject of the enormous rise of gender dysphoria among teenage girls. It was named by The Economist as one of the best books of the year and has been translated into ten languages. In Bad Therapy, out today, Abigail heads into the breach once more. The book makes the case that the advent of therapy culture, the rise of “gentle parenting,” and the spread of “social-emotional learning” in schools is actually causing much of the anxiety and depression faced by today’s youth. In other words, Abigail argues that in our attempt to keep kids safe, we are failing the next generation of American adults. The best journalists are fearless. And that adjective certainly applies to Abigail, whose bravery in following the evidence wherever it leads is what has made her work on some of the most important and controversial issues of the day so essential. Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity. Since a child’s first mental or behavioral diagnosis often comes from school, the Child Mind Institute—one of the premier nonprofits devoted to adolescent mental health—provides an online “symptom checker” specifically to help parents or teachers inform themselves about “possible diagnoses.” I began to wonder what schools were doing in the name of improving kids’ mental health. I was in luck. Each year, the state of California sponsors a three-day public school teachers’ conference to showcase its vast array of emotional and behavioral services. Immediately, I registered. That is how, in July of 2022, I came to join more than 2,000 public school teachers at the Anaheim Convention Center, right next to Disneyland. At the convention, ankle tattoos winked over fresh pedicures, Anne Taylor cardigans abounded, and the occasional mohawk sliced indoor air cool enough to crisp celery. We talked about “brain science” based on a YouTube video many of us had seen. It explained that the brain is like a hand, with the thumb folded into the palm. “Our amygdala is really important in serious situations,” said the voice-over. This sounded right. We felt like neuroscientists. We lamented the burdens placed upon school counselors, now part of an expanded psychology staff, which oversees every public school the way diversity officers dominate a university. We were leery of these new bosses, but we had to admit, they had a big job to do. Our kiddos were bonkers. (The word we were careful to use was dysregulated.) Counselors now routinely monitored the social-emotional quality of our teaching, sniffed out emotional disturbance in our students, and decided what assignments to nix or grades to adjust upward. We talked about the need to give kids “brain breaks,” the salvific power of “Mindfulness Minutes,” and the importance of ending each day with an “optimistic closure.” Our purview was the “whole child,” meaning we needed to evaluate and track kids’ “social and emotional” abilities in addition to academic ones. Our mandate: “trauma-informed education.” We pledged to treat all kids as if they had experienced some debilitating trauma. Subsequent interviews with dozens of teachers, school counselors, and parents across the country banished all doubt: therapists weren’t the only ones practicing bad therapy on kids. Often traveling under the name “social-emotional learning,” bad therapy had gone airborne. When I first heard the term social-emotional learning, I assumed a hokey but necessary call for kids to get a grip. Or maybe it was the new name for what they used to call character education: treat people kindly, disagree respectfully, don’t be a jackass. Proponents insist it arrives at those things, albeit through the somewhat circuitous route of mental health. Sometimes described by enthusiasts as “a way of life,” social-emotional learning is the curricular juggernaut that devours billions in education spending each year and more than eight percent of teacher time. (Many teachers say they try to ensure that social-emotional learning happens all day long.) Through a series of prompts and exercises, SEL pushes kids toward a series of personal reflections, aimed at teaching them “self-awareness,” “social awareness,” “relationship skills,” “self-management,” and “responsible decision-making.” Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to inaugurate the school day with an “emotions check-in.” School counselor Natalie Sedano advised our assembled conference room of teachers to ask kids: “How are you feeling today? Are you daisy-bright, happy and friendly? Or am I a ladybug? Will I fly away if we get too close?” This prompted great excitement in the audience, and teachers jumped up to share their own “emotions check-ins.” One teacher said every day, she asks her kids if they feel it’s a “bones” or “no bones” kind of a day, borrowing the verbiage from a viral TikTok video in which a pug owner shares the mood of his 13-year-old pug, Noodle. If Noodle sits upright, it’s a bones day! If he collapses, it’s a no-bones day. “That is so fun!” Sedano enthused. “Love it! Thank you!” I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated. If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead? “I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.” There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them. Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge. “If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said. Ethical Violations In 2022, California announced a plan to hire an additional ten thousand counselors in order to address young people’s poor mental health. A new law encourages California school districts to bill federal Medicaid for mental health services allocated to kids in school. Meaning, however much in-school therapy kids have already received, they likely will soon be getting much more. California school psychologist Michael Giambona provides individual therapy sessions to his middle school students during the school day. Giambona also routinely runs interference with kids’ teachers on kids’ behalf. “My teachers have special training in working with individuals with behavior needs and mental health needs,” he told me. “And we meet weekly, and we talk about what’s going on with each student and how we can approach them and support them when they need it.” There’s a problem with in-school therapy, an ethical compromise, which arguably corrupts its very heart. In a remarkably underregulated profession, therapists still have a few ethical bright lines. And among the clearest is—or was—the prohibition on “dual relationships.” “The relationship in the therapy room needs to be its own, distinct and apart,” psychologist and author Lori Gottlieb explains in her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. “To avoid an ethical breach known as a dual relationship, I can’t treat or receive treatment from any person in my orbit—not a parent of a kid in my son’s class, not the sister of coworkers, not a friend’s mom, not my neighbor.” This ethical guardrail exists to protect a patient from exploitation. A patient may reveal her deepest secrets and vulnerabilities to her therapist, who could then rule over her like a czarina does her kulaks. Anyone possessing this much knowledge of a patient’s private life may be tempted to exert undue power. And so the profession makes “dual relationships” off limits. Except that school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them. They know all of a kid’s best friends; they may even treat a few of them with therapy. They know a kid’s parents and their friends’ parents. They know the boy a girl has a crush on, what romantically transpired between them, and how the relationship ended. They know a kid’s teammates and coaches and the teacher who’s giving him a hard time. And they report, not to a kid’s parents, but to the school administration. It’s a wonder we allow these in-school relationships at all. The American Counseling Association appears to have noticed the obvious problem. In 2006, it revised the ACA Code of Ethics. While still prohibiting sexual relationships with current clients, it decided that “nonsexual” dual relationships were no longer prohibited—especially those that “could be beneficial to the client.” As school counselors and psychologists came to see themselves as students’ “advocates,” they slipped into a dual relationship with their students: part therapist; part academic intermediary; part parenting coach. Today, school counselors and psychologists commonly evaluate, diagnose, and treat students with individual therapy; meet with their friends; intervene with their teachers; and pass them in the lunchroom. A teen who has just spent a tear-soaked hour telling the school counselor her deepest secrets might reasonably be fearful of upsetting anyone with that much power over her life. But are school counselors and social workers exerting undue influence over kids? Over the past two years, I have been so inundated with parents’ stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child’s name without telling the parents, that I’ve almost wondered if there are any good school counselors. One parent I interviewed told me that her son’s high school counselor had given him the address of a local LGBTQ youth shelter where he might seek asylum and attempt to legally liberate himself from loving parents. There are good school counselors; I have interviewed several. But the power structure’s all wrong. Grant a leader the powers of a monarch, and he may gift his subjects freedom—but what’s to tether him to his promises? That’s placing a whole lot of trust in an individual counselor’s conscience. You might respond at this point: fortunately, my child has never been to see the school counselor. But more likely, you don’t know. In California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Maryland, minors twelve or thirteen and up are statutorily entitled to access mental health care without parental permission. Schools are not only under no obligation to inform parents that their kids are meeting regularly with a school counselor, they may even be barred from doing so. As long as a parent has not specifically forbidden it, a school counselor may be able to conduct a therapy session with a minor child without parental consent. School counselors are encouraged to make “judgment calls” about what information, gleaned in sessions with minor children, they may keep secret from the children’s parents. School Staff Who Play Therapist Ever since her school adopted social-emotional learning in 2021, Ms. Julie routinely began the day by directing her Salt Lake City fifth graders to sit in one of the plastic chairs she’d arranged in a circle. “How is each of you feeling this morning?” she would ask, performing a more intensive version of the “emotions check-in.” One day, she cut to the chase: “What is something that is making you really sad right now?” When it was his turn to speak, one boy began mumbling about his father’s new girlfriend. Then things fell apart. “All of a sudden, he just started bawling. And he was like, ‘I think that my dad hates me. And he yells at me all the time,’ ” said Laura, a mom of one of the other students. Another girl announced that her parents had divorced and burst into tears. Another said she was worried about the man her mother was dating. Within minutes, half of the kids were sobbing. It was time for the math lesson, but no one wanted to do it. It was just so sad, thinking that the boy’s dad hated him. What if their dads hated them, too? “It just kind of set the tone for the rest of the day,” Laura said. “Everyone just was feeling really sad and down for a really long time. It was hard for them to kind of come out of that.” A second mom at the school confirmed to me that word spread throughout the school about the AA meeting–style breakdown. Except this AA meeting featured elementary school kids who then ran to tell their friends what everyone else had shared. Thanks to social-emotional learning, scenes of emotional melee have become increasingly common in American classrooms. In 2013, The New York Times reported on a near identical scene that took place after a California teacher conducted a similar social-emotional learning session with his kindergarteners. “With children especially, whatever you focus on is what will grow,” Laura said. “And I feel like with [social-emotional learning], they’re watering the weeds, instead of watering the flowers.” Advocates of social-emotional learning claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn. They also insist that having an educator host a class-wide trauma swap before lunch will help such kids heal. Neither claim is well-founded. But the predictable result is precisely what Ms. Julie saw: otherwise happy kids are brought low and a child seriously struggling has his private pain publicly exposed by someone in no position to remedy it. Sometimes when a kid plunks himself down on the rug for morning circle, he is in no mood to exhibit a painful experience no matter how much it might expand the class’s emotional horizons. This leaves teacher-therapists with a problem: How to get kids to dish about their emotional lives when they really don’t want to? One presenter at the conference, Amelia Azzam, a regional mental health coordinator for Orange County Public Schools, told a story that seemed to answer this quandary. She knew of a teaching assistant who trailed a seventh grader to lunch. She “goes out to lunch where this young student sits, and she always says ‘hi’ to him. And she has casual interactions with him.” And one day, he told her that his dad was getting out of jail. “Nobody else knew that,” Azzam said. Good therapists know that it may be counterproductive to push a kid to share his trauma at school. Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions. Rumination is a well-established risk factor for depression. But school staff who play therapist rarely seem aware that they might be encouraging rumination as they stalk a kid at lunch, waiting to see if he’ll open up about his father’s incarceration minutes before a history test. Injecting Anxiety into Math Class Social-emotional learning enthusiasts happily disrupt math or English or history because, to the true believers, education is merely a vehicle for their social-emotional lessons—the corn chip that carries the guac straight to a kid’s mouth. “I can’t think of a content area that needs more social-emotional learning than mathematics,” educational consultant Ricky Robertson told our assembled conference room. But how would a teacher manage to make social-emotional learning the goal of a math class? To discover the answer, I sat through a presentation titled “Embedding SEL in Math.” Our mock lesson commenced with—you guessed it—discussion of our feelings about math. “Anxiety!” more than one teacher volunteered. The presenters showed us a series of kindergarten-level “math problems” that asked us to look at a bunch of shapes and asked: “Which one doesn’t belong?” At the end, they revealed the correct answer: they all belong. No wrong answers! Everyone wins! See, that wasn’t hard. I turned to the high school math teacher next to me and asked her how she could possibly incorporate this sort of approach into Algebra II. She stared back at me, a frozen rictus pinned to the corners of her mouth. She seemed to think Big Brother was watching us. The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning. A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone. In the minds of social-emotional learning advocates, healthy kids are those who share their pain during geometry. That is how a teacher knows they are emotionally regulated. They are willing to cry for the benefit of the class. Excerpted from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier, in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Abigail Shrier, 2024. Previous Next

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American progressive ideologues have formed a new ideology based on the negation of an all-powerful phantasm they call ‘Zionism.’ To fight them, we need to understand the origins of their beliefs in the Soviet academic propaganda apparatus. < Back The Cult of ‘Antizionism’ American progressive ideologues have formed a new ideology based on the negation of an all-powerful phantasm they call ‘Zionism.’ To fight them, we need to understand the origins of their beliefs in the Soviet academic propaganda apparatus. A group of anti-Israel academics and BDS activists have taken a new step toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of “scientific antizionism” on American campuses. The “founding collective” of 10 has established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which aims “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.” The new institute defines Zionism as a “political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.” This October, ICSZ will hold its inaugural conference titled “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition’: Theory and Activism.” The ICSZ’s website presents a vision of an overtly academic institution that will churn out politically motivated “research” designed to move the American public toward the idea of doing away with American support for Israel and, ultimately, with Israel itself. Coming at a time when American Jews and Jewish identity are under comprehensive attack within mainstream institutions, ICSZ sounds like bad news—and it is. American progressives have scored numerous successes in recent years by using the power of tenured academic positions, in-class bullying, and threats of physical intimidation to enforce anti-Zionist culture at American universities and within the elite cultural spaces that employ American liberal arts graduates. Now, they have taken opposition to Zionism a step further, by transforming their hatred of “Zionists” and rejection of the historical dynamics of Jewish self-identification and national self-determination into its own free-standing ideology, which is politically aligned with, but not dependent on, the wider progressive movement. Anti-Zionists, as part of the broader far left, are eerily reproducing elements of the cultural deformations that once defined the lives of the citizens of the communist bloc: They have introduced Americans to the practices of collective demonization, blacklists, and denouncing friends and colleagues. They have injected political reeducation and oversight committees into workplaces and academic institutions as part of a new cultural revolution that overtly targets “Zionists” as present-day villains and boogeymen, on a par with “white supremacists” and “fascists.” And they have forced colleagues and coworkers who don’t agree with them to either hide their true opinions, or, more often, to stop having opinions at all, in order to keep their jobs. Within academia, progressives who primarily derive their personal and professional identity from expressing extreme loathing of Israel have notched additional victories. They have reorganized the missions of entire academic disciplines, including Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Israel studies, around demonization of the Jewish state. They have pushed states to introduce radical “liberated ethnic studies” maligning Jews and Israel in K-12 schools. They have coopted countless academics into signing defamatory anti-Israel petitions that are of questionable academic validity and, word has it, are now working to place signatories on the synagogue lecture circuit, as part of their strategy of legitimizing the openly racist, and even genocidal, views at the heart of anti-Zionist ideology by co-opting wealthy Jewish institutions and funders who seek to buy protection from progressives, despite the radical unpopularity of their views among ordinary American Jews. The establishment of ICSZ marks a new stage in the relentless regressive march of this bizarre progressive movement. How delighted would the institute’s forebears in the Soviet security and propaganda apparatus have been to witness the spectacle of Americans, including Jews, coming together of their own free will to provide academic legitimacy and a Jewish institutional imprimatur to conspiracy theories about Zionism that they spent their entire careers developing, and then inculcating with sympathetic audiences around the globe? The ICSZ’s founders are known figures in the BDS movement and the movement for the academic boycott of Israel. They include Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, who tried to bring convicted PFLP terrorist and airline hijacker Leila Khaled to SFSU; Lau Barrios, who has served as campaign manager at Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change and as a co-organizer of the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign geared at pressuring Google and Amazon to end their work with Israel; and Emmaia Gelman, ICSZ’s founding director, who serves as a trustee of the Sparkplug Foundation, a funder of IfNotNow and Palestinian Youth Movement, and also a co-sponsor of the ICSZ conference. ICSZ’s advisory board, which has grown from 16 to 29 members as of this writing in less than two weeks, now includes the UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler, an academic superstar of the American BDS movement who famously described Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive social movements that are “on the Left” and are “part of a global Left,” and New York University’s Lisa Duggan, who defended Rasmea Odeh , a PFLP operative who helped organize two deadly bombings inside Israel. ICSZ claims it has the backing of well-funded pro-BDS NGOs like Jewish Voice for Peace and American Friends Service Committee , both listed as co-sponsors of the conference, and that it plans to grant “annual fellowships for students and academics, conferences, [and] publications.” The ICSZ’s apparent affiliation with the NYU and University of California at Santa Cruz, which the founders have claimed will be hosting their first conference, furthers its veneer of academic legitimacy, though both the NYU and UCSC have denied affiliation with the conference or providing space for it but remain listed on the site. Those who are tempted to dismiss ICSZ as fringe today need only to remember that it is part of a network of NGOs that also began on the margins before raising millions of dollars and going mainstream on campuses like NYU and UCSC. The rapid expansion of ICSZ’s advisory board and the inclusion on it of celebrity BDS activists such as Butler, suggests that ICSZ is already capturing the imagination of the anti-Israel crowd. ICSZ presents the clearest articulation yet of the philosophy, goals, and methods of the anti-Israel hard left as it breaks free from conventional modes of progressive analysis and coalition-building and becomes its own self-contained ideological universe. The first thing that an examination of ICSZ’s website makes clear is that, contrary to their claims, ICSZ’s founders are not, in fact, anti-Zionists. ICSZ describes Zionism as “a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it.” It views it as a “political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession” and intends to demonstrate “how the critical study of Zionism is deeply and essentially connected to the study of global forces including contests over power, race, colonialism, capital, militarism, and violence.” This deeply contrived view of Zionism bears no relationship to how the founders of Zionism framed their beliefs, nor how Jews have historically perceived and experienced Zionism. Jews who argued against Zionism as the answer to the “Jewish question” in the run-up to World War II (an entirely legitimate debate until the war proved Zionism right in the most terrible way possible) would not have recognized in this description the Zionism that they opposed. Calling ICSZ founders anti-Zionists, then, is a profound misnomer. To find a better term for them, let’s turn to the work of British scholars David Seymour and David Hirsh. In a 2019 paper , Seymour argues that the philosophy of those who oppose an imaginary, rather than real, Zionism should be framed not in opposition to Zionism but as a free-standing ideology and should be spelled, akin to antisemitism, as “antizionism”—i.e., without the hyphen. Just as “the ideology of antisemitism tells us nothing about Jews” but everything about antisemites, writes Seymour, “the ideology of antizionism tells us more about itself” than it does about Israel or Zionism. Expounding on this, Hirsh notes in his essay in the forthcoming The Routledge History of Antisemitism that the “‘Zionism’ against which antizionism defines its ideology” is “something conjured by the anti-Jewish imagination.” The antizionist conceives Zionism as “colonialism, apartheid, racism, the surveillance state, as being like Nazism, and as everything else that good people oppose”—in other words, as a phenomenon that is “profoundly different” from the Zionism embraced by Jews. Just like antisemites do battle against a fantasy of “the Jews” that exists in their own heads, the new antizionists battle a “Zionism” that exists nowhere on earth, and is instead conjured up by their own fevered imaginations. Dropping the hyphen may not seem like the radical step this moment calls for, but just like changing the spelling of anti-Semitism to antisemitism, it has important conceptual implications, and helps us view the phenomenon from new angles. While most American Jews understand why it is important to know the history of Nazi Germany and its antisemitic ideology, even though Nazi Germany has ceased to exist and its ideas are widely discredited, few American Jews can identify the provenance of ideas espoused by today’s antizionist left. As I have noted here , here , here , and here , today’s antizionists reproduce, with extraordinary fidelity, the tropes, the motifs and the explanatory logic of Soviet antizionism. But Soviet history vanished from Americans’ curricula as though that vast totalitarian empire never existed. Americans’ understanding of communism today seems limited to opposing McCarthyism, resulting in a deeply provincial perception of communists as a powerless minority of well-meaning idealists standing up to a bigoted, nativist American establishment. It is no wonder, then, that American Jews are unable to trace the kind of demonizing antizionism that ICSZ’s founders preach to its source. Nor do they know that ICSZ’s language associating Zionism with racism, fascism, capitalism, colonialism, and militarism was once monotonously weaponized against millions of Soviet Jews, who suffered exclusion, professional and educational discrimination, and severe limitations on their Jewish identity as a result. Only a fraction of Soviet Jews were openly Zionist (these were tried in kangaroo courts and given lengthy sentences in prison colonies), but the antizionist campaign put a mark on every Soviet Jewish citizen. A million and a half Jews left the country the moment they could. What American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of antizionism spreads in left-of-center spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s-80s USSR. American Jews increasingly find themselves under pressure to disavow their connection to Israel and lower their Jewish profiles. They are excluded from progressive groups. They are losing professional and educational opportunities. Some were physically attacked during the 2021 flare-up of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Nearly 60% of American Jewish college students report being targeted by antisemitism directed against them, personally. Even more alarming than this explosion of anti-Jewish bigotry is the blanket silence with which it has been greeted by institutions whose reactions to even a handful of such incidents targeting other social groups is easy to imagine. The fact that there is no formal apparatus of state repression behind American antizionism offers only a measure of relief. If there is anything the last few years have shown, it’s that the radical left is capable of imposing its norms on society without directly capturing institutions of the state. One implication of viewing antizionism as a standalone philosophy with a distinct historical and political lineage, then, is that it gives the lie to ICSZ’s claim that it is not anti-Jewish (we’ll come back to this in a moment). Another is that there is nothing remotely organic about contemporary antizionist language. Far from being an outgrowth of grassroots activism on behalf of Palestinians or an attempt to speak truth to power, this language is imposed from the top down, by antizionist ideologues and activists whose own views are the products of professional Soviet Cold War propagandists such as Yuri Ivanov and Yevgeny Yevseyev (for more on them see here and here ), Vladimir Bolshakov , Valery Yemelyanov , and others like them—right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theorists employed by an authoritarian regime that perceived Zionism and Israel as its biggest ideological enemies. Contemporary antizionists should ask themselves whether this is a political tradition they want to associate themselves with. What American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of ‘antizionism’ spreads in left-of-center spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s-80s USSR. ICSZ leads with the bizarre proposition of supporting “the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies.” Doing that is as weird as, say, attempting to describe Armenian or Basque nationalism outside the context of the history of Armenians or the Basque. “Zionism’s project,” on the other hand, ICSZ informs us, “extends beyond the borders of Palestine,” and so the study of Zionism needs to be spread “across multiple fields ,” to include “Asian American studies, Asian studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, queer studies, Palestinian studies and beyond.” This idea could be dismissed as silly if it weren’t so malicious. The point being that Jews are the universal oppressor, and so the Jewish story can be maimed as the haters please. There is a reason, of course, why ICSZ’s founders are so keen on amputating Zionism from its Jewish context, and that is to avoid being labeled as antisemitic. If you can convince the gullible that Zionism is not related to Jews, then you can demonize the former with impunity: Accusations of antisemitism will not apply. Here, too, the founders walk firmly in the footsteps of their Soviet predecessors. Soviet propagandists cannibalized the history of Zionism to underscore its supposedly inherent evil nature, ripping Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau quotes out of context and presenting Zionists as the Jewish people’s greatest enemy. For ICSZ to cut Zionism off conceptually from its roots in the Jewish faith, Jewish history, and Jewish collective popular memory is an obnoxious attempt to undermine the integrity of the Jewish story, and to propagandize its followers. What draws the antizionist left’s special ire is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Alone among several existing definitions, the IHRA definition, which has now been adopted by over 1,100 global entities and 43 countries and numerous other political entities, provides tools to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and demonization. ICSZ’s upcoming conference intends to help out those battling the definition, which, it claims, “both amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.” The conference also plans to address IHRA’s “enabling conditions,” which range from the “neo-liberal university” to “the ways that the idea of antisemitism has been constructed,” to “student organizing,” to “the DEI as a cooptable and abusable format for leveraging demands for rights and attention” (presumably, by Jews and Zionists). ICSZ intends to center the work of “activists and communities whose lives are shaped by Zionist institutions’ political work” through “points of unity” that all academics will be expected to sign onto, in order to continue engaging in academic work. Zionist Jews, obviously, will not be part of the conversation. ICSZ’s “points of unity” are the most obvious proof that ICSZ’s academic mission is a fiction. “Is it even legal to impose loyalty oaths on a college campus?” asked Jarrod Tanny, a Jewish history professor and founder of the Jewish Studies Zionist Network with reference to its upcoming conference. In a letter to UCSC, David Bernstein and Marcy Braverman Goldstein of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values argued that ideological litmus tests go against university policy and urged it to “immediately withdraw sponsorship from this event.” The “points of unity” betray ICSZ as a political project in search of academic legitimacy. What kind of scholarship a project like this might produce is, once again, apparent from the history of “scientific antizionism” in the Soviet Union. One of its emblematic products is Mahmoud Abbas’ dissertation , which the Palestinian leader defended in 1982 at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies—the linchpin of Soviet “Zionology.” The dissertation is shot through with factual errors, decontextualizations, distortions, and outright falsifications of sources. It is a safe assumption that ICSZ’s “scholarly” output will be of similar quality. When it comes to conceptualizing Zionism, ICSZ’s founders think big—very big. In their minds, Zionism is a global, powerful, and malevolent entity. It needs to be studied “transnationally” because of its “direct work for the Israeli state and its ‘other work,’” ICSZ informs us, leaving unexplained the insinuating quotes around “other work.” Not only is Zionism central to such societal ills as “racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation of liberatory rhetoric by repressive political forces, among other harms,” but it is impeding numerous crucial “political pursuits” animating the good people of the earth, ranging “from democracy to decolonization.” It doesn’t end here, however. “The study of Zionism,” we learn from the institute’s FAQ page , “extends to Zionist institutions and logics, their role in the production of racial and gendered knowledge, their function in naturalizing and reproducing structures of militarized colonial violence, and the ways that Zionism interplays with, and relationally shapes, bigger spheres including politics, culture, the movement of capital, and ways of thinking about the world.” ICSZ’s vision further incorporates “research on the role of Zionism in the development of U.S. hate crimes policy and homonationalism , the linkages between Zionist and Hindutva politics, the ties between Zionist institutions, the Israeli state, and the evangelical Christian right , the Zionist surveillance technology deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border , the destruction of Indigenous agriculture in Guatemala, the centrality of Zionism in the opposition to and attempted cooptation of ethnic studies in the United States, and the fostering of post-9/11 interventionist human rights politics with regard to North Korea .” As if this were not enough, critical study of Zionism, we’re told, is “deeply and essentially connected to the study of global forces including contests over power, race, colonialism, capital, militarism, and violence.” In a Mondoweiss op-ed, Abdulhadi and Heike Schotten, another ICSZ co-founder, tell us that new and “exciting” work on Zionism is being done in “seemingly unexpected domains” such as “surveillance, education, farming, and critically analyzing how Zionist logics are reproduced and utilized in ideas and arguments about race, policing, land usage and climate change, and neoliberal capitalism.” Cue in cartoons of hook-nosed octopuses and spiders holding the world in their tentacles. It’s unsurprising that contemporary antizionists trade in the tropes of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theory, replacing the word “Jew” with the word “Zionist.” Soviet Zionology grew out of the right-wing Russian nationalist movement that emerged in the USSR after Stalin’s death and was nurtured on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . ICSZ founders may hide behind contemporary academic jargon, but they are reproducing eliminationist antisemitic conspiracy theory under the guise of progressive language. The fact that some antizionists may not be entirely aware of the origins of their ideas doesn’t diminish the damage that they are doing. Peeking through the lines of ICSZ’s web pages is a deeply dismal vision of society that is as anti-Jewish as it is anti-democratic. The complaint about DEI councils as a “cooptable and abusable format for leveraging demands for rights and attention” hints at a desire to put an end to all the democratic nonsense of discussion and compromise. The intention to keep “Zionist” Jews—i.e., the majority of American and Israeli Jews—out of discussions about Israel, Zionism, antisemitism and other topics crucial to the well-being of the community—reveals a vision that is dangerous not only to Jews but to any other minority that gets in the way of the hard-left manifesting its utopia. The founders think nothing of trashing a fundamental aspect of the academy—academic freedom—while arrogating to themselves the right to decide who has a right to speak. ICSZ is the latest product of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment on the left, but it most certainly won’t be the last. The confusion that has greeted its establishment is symptomatic of the failures of the Jewish leadership, which has for decades looked exclusively to the right for sources of danger to the community. In the current environment, it is entirely possible that ICSZ will manage to secure a valid academic base and respectable sources of funding and start churning out anti-Jewish propaganda couched in the language of antizionism. Unfortunately, American Jewish institutions are three decades too late coming into this fight, and it is still not clear that they fully grasp the landscape in which they are operating. We need to recognize that teaching about the dangers of Nazi antisemitism does nothing to prepare the next generation of American Jews to defend themselves against antizionist antisemitism. Along with German Nazism, American Jews need to be learning about Soviet communism and the disasters that the left visited on the Jews in the 20th century. Young American Jews in particular need to be inoculated against the siren song of woke antizionists seeking to usurp their Jewish identity and draw them into fighting their own people, before it is once again too late. Previous Next

Local parents say Kathy Rallings has been controversial for how she treats other board members during meetings and her suggestion to take more than $3 million out of the district reserve funds. < Back Carlsbad Unified approves budget at special meeting with board president absent Local parents say Kathy Rallings has been controversial for how she treats other board members during meetings and her suggestion to take more than $3 million out of the district reserve funds. CARLSBAD, Calif. (FOX 5/KUSI) — The Carlsbad Unified school board held a special meeting Wednesday to approve the district budget, but the board president was absent. Local parents say Kathy Rallings has been controversial for how she treats other board members during meetings and her suggestion to take more than $3 million out of the district reserve funds. Ahead of that special meeting, a rally was held calling for accountability and for Rallings to be removed as board president. “I was shocked at the tone of the meetings, the bullying, the incivility in those meetings by the board president ,” said Teressa Wallace. “Everybody can disagree, but the decorum needs to matter. This is a professional setting,” said Jeff Adams. Beyond behavior, concerns have been raised about Rallings’ suggestion to move more than $3 million out of the district’s reserve funds with no specific way to spend the money. Members of the public and the board disagreed, citing uncertainty at the state and federal level for education funding. “Staff has recommended that we keep the reserves in place until we know what the budget is going to look like and that’s one of the main issues why we don’t want this $3 million transferred out of the reserves. We want to keep that to make sure we can keep our teachers and maybe hire a couple more if we have the room to do that,” explained Scott Davison, Executive Director for the Carlsbad Education Alliance . With disagreement over the budget, the special meeting was scheduled, but Rallings did not show up. She did provide a statement that reads in part: “I have consistently advocated for these dollars to be invested in our students and classrooms, rather than sitting unused in an account for over a decade. It is difficult to justify the existence of a $3.1 million reserve when we are telling parents and teachers, they need to buy basic classroom materials like tissue paper and glue sticks, or when the district staff claims, they can’t afford to reduce class sizes or counselor caseloads.” Ultimately all four board members present voted unanimously to pass the budget without withdrawing the money Rallings requested. Previous Next

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WITH parents, teachers, and students coming forward with information on mismanagement in their school districts, I believe it is even more important to reveal what I discovered in my almost two years inside Liberated Ethnic Studies. < Back Undercover with Liberated Ethnic Studies WITH parents, teachers, and students coming forward with information on mismanagement in their school districts, I believe it is even more important to reveal what I discovered in my almost two years inside Liberated Ethnic Studies. As the public becomes more aware of just how insidious the rot in K-12 education is, I expect more whistleblowers to come out from behind the shadows. I also expect that the powers that be will try to silence those who want to put student learning ahead of ideological agendas, as recently happened to a teacher in Hayward Unified who was suspended from teaching after revealing the fraud, waste, and abuse of federal funds in the sum of $250,000 spent on the “Woke Kindergarten” program . Make no mistake, his suspension is a scare tactic implemented by administrators who are attempting to brush their misdeeds under the rug, far away from public scrutiny. My name is Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, and I’ve spent the past two years undercover with Liberated Ethnic Studies. After seeing what appeared to be an attempt to hijack California’s public school system in order to institutionalize anti-Semitism in K-12 education, I decided to go behind the scenes with the group that was leading the charge. Much but not all of what I uncovered is included in this piece. In February 2022 I created an alias in order to register for what I thought would be a one-off webinar about the national roll-out of Liberated Ethnic Studies (LES). I, along with more than 200 registrants, quickly learned that the LES folks had much bigger plans, as demonstrated by the heat map below. After spending a few minutes going through the usual virtue signaling, pronouncement of pronouns, and land acknowledgements we were sent to regional break-out rooms to get to know one another before rejoining the main webinar room. Before I go into what was said, I want to mention who was there. The presence of activist organizations in public schools has become increasingly common as administrators lean on community organizations to provide programming for both teachers and students. Districts allow these activists into schools to provide teacher training, curriculum development, and oftentimes they are even given access to students by providing “programming.” Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource Organizing Committee (AROC), is one of these activists. Kiswani is a leader in the Liberated Ethnic Studies movement, and she is also well-known for her anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic beliefs. During the February 6, 2022, webinar, she stated that one of the reasons for the national launch of the LES is to counter Zionist participation in education. “As a lot of you know, they are very and you’re probably here because of this very reason, we are facing a moment in which the terrain of education is being attacked from all sides. Mainly? Right wing and other Zionist pro-Israel forces who are attempting to co-opt education to water down education ... to literally strip it of its potential liberatory potential. And specifically we see attacks on ethnic studies, whether that’s what happened in California with the California model ethnic studies, the ESMC . Just curriculum, which is meant to be a model where teachers across the state to use and they’re in their classrooms and was written by actual practitioners and scholars and ethnic studies. And then was co-opted by the California Department of Education, along with other elected leaders, who were working very closely with right-wing forces. Namely the ADLs, the Jewish community relations councils, and pro-Israel, Zionist, and racist organizations, and white supremacist orgs across the state.” Throughout the webinar it became clear that the purpose of the LES is not to expand on social studies, including the experiences of Black, Asian, Latino, and Native Americans, but rather to indoctrinate children with an ideology that exists solely to “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy. Cisheteropatriarchy capitalism, ableism, and anthrocentrism and other forms of power and oppression at the intersection of our society.” The activist leaders of the LES made it clear that their goals are to: • Critique the foundations of Western democratic values by labeling them as tenets of white supremacy; • Center “Palestine,” CRT, and BLM as essential components to ethnic studies; • Silence anyone they label as Zionist, or conservative (right-wing); • Hijack the experiences, histories, and narratives of ethnic communities; • Establish a monopoly over everything related to ethnic studies. Over the course of the past (almost) two years, I have uncovered the LES’ plans to spread their radical ideology, not only in California, but across the U.S. They have been working with a number of other organizations, identifying challenges and attacks, and coordinating responses. Unsurprisingly, LES activists believe the two most obvious challenges to spreading their ideology continue to be Zionists and public awareness. They spent months weighing the pros and cons of going public, trying to build up support while not exposing themselves to public scrutiny. However, this tactic meant that they would be unable to build the widespread support grassroots activism demands. I chose to join the northeast regional group for two reasons. First, it is the area of the country where I live, and second, it was one of the regions identified by the LES as a next target, with Boston serving as a sort of ground zero. The allies identified by Liberated Ethnic Studies in the northeast region included: • New Jersey Educators Association • Black Lives Matter in Schools in New York • Teaching While Muslim in New Jersey • CAIR in New Jersey • Saturday Freedom School in College Park, MD • BPS Black Studies Collective • BPS Asian American Studies Group • CARE Coalition in Boston As I continued participating in both regional and national meetings using my alias to gather information in order to blow the whistle on what seems to be a highly coordinated effort to subvert education policies, civil rights, and state and federal statutes, I started working for the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), an organization that counters radical ideology that fuels anti-Semitism. Countering the radicalization of our K-12 education system quickly became a major focus of my work with JILV. In April 2022 I obtained a LES document titled Ethnic Studies National Coalition Vision and Commitments Guiding Document . A few of the commitments in this guiding document include: • “Developing and supporting a national platform and a strategy for the communication and dissemination of a unified message related to Ethnic Studies, including a solidarity network and organizing strategy for rapid response to dehumanizing actions and pushback from zionism and right-wing zealots.” • “Courses titled “Ethnic Studies” are rooted in the LESMCC Guiding Principles” • “Educational institutions do not use the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-semitism or any other definitions that equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.” Again, the LES clearly expressed their desire to create and implement an ethnic studies framework that excludes anyone they label as Zionist or “right-wing.” They also made it clear that they are attempting to hold a monopoly over ethnic studies across the country. A major method the LES group is using, with support from California State Representative Wendy Carillo and unions like the California Faculty Association (CFA), is to pass legislation that requires all ethnic studies teachers to hold a specific ethnic studies credential. Of course, the activists who are part of the LES coalition would be in charge of what the credentialing requirements and process would ultimately look like. In May 2023 the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES) held a retreat for their core team , naming the following 15 as members: Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Anita Fernandez, Artnelson Concordia, Awo Okaikor, Aryee-Price, Brian Lozenski, Carlos Hagedorn, Deeyadira Arellano, Guadalupe, Carrasco Cardona, Jody Sokolower, JR Arimboanga, Lara Kiswani, Raquel Saenz, Sharif Zakout, Theresa Montano, and Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen. During the May 2023 retreat, using strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis , they developed a 5-point needs assessment to continue their national roll out. One of these points was to form a cohort of students from across the United States who would act as a youth activist arm of CLES, and advocate for Liberated Ethnic Studies in their respective school districts. Students had to apply and interview for a position within the cohort. Upon completion of the 8-week cohort, students were guaranteed a payment of $500. A source close to me infiltrated some of these youth sessions and provided me with resources used by the activists, including a statement of solidarity and land acknowledgement that reads: As LES activists faced pushback from parents, students, educators, and policy makers who felt that schools should teach rather than indoctrinate, they launched an initiative that seeks to use children for their ideological goals. It also is apparent that ethnic studies is being used to “teach Palestine,” which involves trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes and historical falsehoods. Liberated Ethnic Studies activists are well connected, highly organized, and deeply committed to establishing a radical pedagogy that seeks to undermine the liberal order by using our public school system as a vehicle to normalize their ideology. After spending almost two years using undercover aliases and sources, I realized how important it is to go public, exposing just how deep the rot has become. Our children deserve educators committed to teaching, not using students as their personal ideologically driven foot-soldiers. Liberated Ethnic Studies activists are well connected, highly organized, and deeply committed to establishing a radical pedagogy that seeks to undermine the liberal order by using our public school system as a vehicle to normalize their ideology. They are not limiting their efforts to states, like California, where ethnic studies is now mandatory, but are spreading their radical ideology by any means necessary, including through rethinking how all subjects are taught. Close to 50 million students are enrolled in public schools in the United States. These students are a captive audience to whatever pedagogy educators and educational policy makers mandate. Our kids are being exposed to ideology that forces them to conclude that the foundations of our democratic republic should be dismantled. After the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7th, Liberated Ethnic Studies groups ripped the mask off, publicly blaming those who were slaughtered for the massacre. They took the position that “all violence is rooted in oppression,” excusing terrorists for terrorism. Members of the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies used their access to students to organize and implement widespread student walkouts and demonstrations in support of the atrocities committed by Hamas, falsely defining the violence as legitimate resistance to the lie that Israel is a colonial state worthy of dismantling. LES made clear that their goal is to water-down teaching about Black, Latino, Asian, and Native Americans, and instead declare that “Palestine is Ethnic Studies.” I am choosing to make public Liberated Ethnic Studies’ plans at this time, mostly out of concern about the divisiveness and violence we are witnessing at K-12 schools. More than raising public awareness, I hope that public officials realize the very real harm being perpetrated by activists who are profiting by exploiting their proximity to policy makers and access to students. Previous Next

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Course has not been formally approved by the school board < Back Ethnic studies course is a disaster in the making in SFUSD Course has not been formally approved by the school board Should a controversial ethnic studies curriculum be mandated in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) without approval by the board of education? This is not a theoretical question. SFUSD is doing that right now. This is the second year the school district is forcing ninth graders to take the course without formal curriculum approval by the school board. And to add insult to injury, last year it was a required SFUSD ninth-grade course but it was not approved by the University of California as meeting the A–G requirements. A course that is not approved does not get credit toward the University of California/California State University entrance requirements. A course that is not approved does not get credit toward the University of California/California State University entrance requirements. Board responsibility One of the most important responsibilities of a school board is to approve what is taught. California Education Code § 60000(c) (2022) : Instructional Materials; Legislative Intent (c) The Legislature further recognizes that the governing boards of school districts have the responsibility to establish courses of study and that they must have the ability to select instructional materials appropriate to their courses of study.[2] For several years, the board and superintendent have been treating formal board approval of this curriculum like a hot potato. The inside scoop It’s not like they have not been asked to step up. I served on the district’s Public Education Enrichment Fund board, which has funded the course to the tune of millions of dollars. And I reminded staff and the superintendent more than once that the board should formally approve the curriculum. Spending millions on a course that is not required Below is a table showing SFUSD spending on this non-board-approved course. Ethnic Studies Support FY 23-24 Budget $1,505,958 FY 24-25 Projected Budget $1,748,890 Source: SFUSD Yup, that million dollar number popped right out at me. Why is a district in a financial crisis spending millions of dollars on a course that is not required for graduation by the state and is not required for entrance into California’s higher education system? Code Red concern of parents in the district To say that the ethnic studies curriculum is controversial is an understatement. There are lawsuits throughout the state calling out discriminatory content. It is so bad that Governor Newsom has refused to put funding in the budget to pay for a mandated state course. And a bill is pending in the legislature that prohibits the use of any curriculum or instructional materials if it would subject a pupil to unlawful discrimination. Better alternatives for teaching ethnic studies – Give high school studies more time for electives. The SFUSD one-year ethnic studies course does not give students enough time to take electives that interest them. Cut the course down to one semester and consider making it an elective. – Do not require the course in ninth grade. Most students do not have the background in United States or world history to put the course into perspective. – Revise the focus of the course. Ensure the ethnic studies course encourages students to appreciate and understand the many ethnicities in SFUSD. All of them have had challenges. All of them have many proud moments of success. A course that emphasizes a political philosophy of “us against them” loses the nuance of learning to work together and learning to value the strengths of each other. – Board review and approval. With so much controversy over what is taught, allow a thoughtful process with public input on the curriculum to ensure it is not discriminatory. Yes, it is a hot potato But it is our hot potato. With community input, the school board and the district should approve a curriculum that meets the test of not subjecting any student to unlawful discrimination. Previous Next

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The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." < Back Beverly Hills Unified to adopt new flag policy after superintendent overrules Israeli flag display The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." After the Beverly Hills Unified school board reversed its decision to display Israeli flags on campuses during Jewish American Heritage Month. It adopted a permanent district-wide policy to display only U.S. and California flags. The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." "Given the volume of public attention, international media coverage, and ongoing threats against district staff and students, it is both urgent and prudent for the Board to adopt a clear, permanent policy defining what flags may be flown or displayed on district property," as written in the BHUSD special board meeting agenda. In a written Aug. 28 message to the BHUSD community, Superintendent Dr. Alex Cherniss cited Board Policy 2210 to reverse the board's vote, doing so out of "heightened safety concerns around the displaying of flags on our campuses." He said he decided to take immediate action for the safety and security of the students. At Tuesday's board meeting, the resolution to showcase the Israeli flag passed 3-2, with supporters saying it's needed in a time of rising antisemitism. "This should be a no-brainer for a school district that represents one of the only Jewish-majority communities outside of Israel," said Beverly Hills Vice Mayor John Mirisch during the Aug. 26 meeting. BHUSD Board Member Russell Stewart said at Tuesday's meeting that the resolution was in support of the district's Jewish students and the Jewish community. There was opposition at the board meeting, with some people speaking out against flying the flag of any foreign nation, while others pointed out that other groups of people face hate as well. "Jewish communities have suffered sharp increases in hate crimes, but other groups are not immune to these attacks either," said Gay Abrams, in opposition to the proposal. Previous Next