September 19, 2023 The Cult of ‘Antizionism’ Izabella Tabarovsky 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. Originally Posted In: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cult-of-antizionism-icsz < Back 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

July 24, 2024 Wikipedia’s Jewish Problem Izabella Tabarovsky The site seems to be intentionally trafficking in disinformation related to Jews, Israel, and Zionism Originally Posted In: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/wikipedia-jewish-problem < Back In June, a group of Wikipedia editors and administrators rated the Anti-Defamation League as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “roughly reliable” on antisemitism “when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.” They also evaluated the ADL’s database of hate symbols, deeming it as “reliable for the existence of a symbol and for straightforward facts about it, but not reliable for more complex details, such as symbols’ history.” The anonymous editors, with unknown backgrounds or academic credentials, accused the ADL of “conflating” anti-Zionism with antisemitism and relying on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which, they claimed, brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic and stifles pro-Palestinian speech. They also accused the ADL of “smearing” Students for Justice in Palestine by calling on universities to investigate whether the group provided material support to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. All of these critiques are assertions not of fact but of leftist dogma, designed to create the impression that left-wing antisemitism does not—indeed, could not—exist. “Wikipedia’s leadership are clowns,” tweeted Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, in response. Sanger had earlier declared Wikipedia’s neutrality—on all issues—effectively dead . But the general public has yet to catch up. With 6.6 billion visits in June, Wikipedia ranked the fifth-most-visited site worldwide, outranked only by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. For many students and scholars, it serves as a starting point for research—a source of sources to be investigated further. Closer to home, what’s clear is that Wikipedia’s articles are now badly distorted, feeding billions of people—and large-language models that regularly train on the site, such as ChatGPT—with inaccurate research and dangerously skewed narratives about Jews, Jewish history, Israel, Zionism, and contemporary threats to Jewish lives. Wikipedia was launched on Jan. 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger announced the launch on the mailing list of Nupedia, Wikipedia’s predecessor, which he and Wales had also created. Whereas Nupedia was a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia with a seven-step approval process, Wikipedia, as stated in its name, is a wiki: a collaboratively edited site managed directly by its users through a web browser. The site is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, but is a “self-governing project,” whose largely anonymous volunteer editors—referred to internally as Wikipedians—are subject to a set of “policies and guidelines .” Wikipedia’s key principles are codified in “five pillars,” which include writing from a neutral point of view and using reliable sources to document key arguments. Another pillar urges editors to treat each other with respect and seek consensus on contentious topics. Disputes are resolved by volunteer administrators and can be escalated all the way to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (aka Wikipedia’s “Supreme Court”). Punishment can include bans varying in severity and length of time. Today, Jewish people and the Jewish story are under an unprecedented global assault, and Wikipedia is being used as a weapon in this war. Wikipedia also prides itself on radical transparency: Every edit can be seen by everyone on a specially designated page. Discussions related to each article are documented on “talk” pages and publicly available. Today there are some 330 language editions of Wikipedia hosting over 60 million articles. In theory, Wikipedia’s model of self-governance sounds unimpeachable: a crowd-sourced, transparently run project democratizing knowledge and empowering every person on the planet to participate in its creation. Yet problems started to emerge from the beginning. Civility quickly went out the door. Conflict-resolution mechanisms proved increasingly byzantine, and mechanisms meant to assure neutrality proved easy to manipulate. Hierarchies formed, as old-timers acquired greater clout and wielded it to prevail in increasingly bitter edit wars. Newcomers found it difficult to break through old-timers’ “fortress mentality.” “Wikipedia is amazing, but it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess,” observed one writer in 2014. Structural problems soon translated into content related ones, including on Jewish topics. In 2004, a spokesperson for the Polish branch of Wikimedia Foundation created an article in English describing an extermination camp in Warsaw, where the Nazis gassed 212,000 Poles. The story—a fiction—remained on the site for 15 years before the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed the problem in 2019. By then, the article had been translated into multiple languages, and its claims incorporated into multiple other Wikipedia articles. An estimated half a million people got exposed to the lie. Last year two historians published a bombshell paper demonstrating how a group of ideologically driven editors spent years systematically distorting Polish Jewish history across multiple Wikipedia articles to align it with far-right Polish nationalist preferences. Working in concert, the group falsified evidence, promoted marginal self-published sources, created fake references, and advanced antisemitic stereotypes. It whitewashed “the role of Polish society in the Holocaust,” “minimize[d] Polish antisemitism, exaggerate[d] the Poles’ role in saving Jews,” blamed Jews for the Holocaust, and generally steered “Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events,” wrote the authors, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein. Wikipedia’s mechanisms proved entirely inadequate in the face of this motivated, organized assault. Working “as a monolith,” the group manipulated the procedures, coordinated edits, and rallied to each other’s support when challenged. Users seeking to correct the group’s edits found themselves outnumbered and outmaneuvered. “Challenging the distortionists takes a monumental amount of time, more than most people can invest in a voluntary hobby,” wrote Grabowski and Klein. The distortionists exhausted their opponents with endless debates, aggressive “battleground behavior,” rudeness, and “mass deletions,” leading some to simply give up on editing the topic. Volunteer administrators called upon to resolve conflicts were unqualified to adjudicate content issues and unwilling to invest the hours required to sort through sources. Another case involved Croatian-language Wikipedia. There, a right-wing group of “real-life friends, ideological sympathizers and political allies” captured the entire site and proceeded, among other things, to whitewash the history of World War II-era Croatian fascist organization Ustaše, its Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia(NDH), and the Jasenovac extermination camp where tens of thousands of Serbs, Roma, and Jews were murdered. Interlinked articles created a “web of deception” whose goal was “to influence the reader’s final moral or value judgment” of events, wrote an independent consultant Wikimedia hired in 2021 to evaluate the situation. The distortionists learned how to “dynamically” adjust “their behavior in order to avoid raising too many alarms or triggering reaction by the global community.” They established sock-puppet accounts to undermine voting procedures, and obstructed discussion with the help of “well-known disinformation tactics” such as “relativization of facts, whataboutism, discreditation of other participants and outright bullying.” So complete was the capture that local press began to refer to Croatian Wikipedia as “Nazi Wikipedia” and “NDH-pedia.” The most incomprehensible part about this is that it took Wikimedia Foundation 14 years from the time the first complaints began to surface to do something about it. The report apportioned much of the blame to Wikimedia’s failure to act in a timely and forceful manner. It warned that the entire situation gave a green light to other bad actors to come in and do the same and that “a more resourced and better-organized attempt could be harder to detect and eventually reverse.” Sounding a similar alarm in their paper on the Polish Jewish Wikipedia capture, Grabowski and Klein noted, on the basis of a leaked email, that the Polish government had “picked up” on “Wikipedia’s weakness” and was making plans to hire an adviser to introduce changes to the Hebrew-language Wikipedia. “We need to be super discreet on this score,” wrote a Polish government official and noted that the adviser “will need a larger budget to cover this expense. It can be arranged if the Foreign Office allocates more money.” And that was all before Oct. 7, 2023 These days, Wikipedia ranks its “perennial ” go-to sources—The New York Times , The New Yorker , NPR, MSNBC, and BBC—as “generally reliable” and extends the ranking to the openly partisan far-left outlets like Haaretz , The Intercept, The Nation , and The Guardian . Al Jazeera and the NGO Amnesty International (both known for their anti-Israel bias) are rated as “generally reliable” as well. The far-left Israeli NGO B’Tselem isn’t included on this list, but, as Aaron Bandler notes in Jewish Journal , Wikipedia editors have staunchly defended its reliability and referenced it in articles. On the other hand, conservative sources such as Fox News, The New York Post , Washington Examiner , and Washington Free Beacon are coded various shades of unreliable, with the Beacon getting the “generally unreliable” grade—one notch above “deprecated.” The Palestinian leader’s scholarly abstract sheds light on the crude deformations of Soviet Zionology and how they are reflected in today’s universities This ranking tells us what kind of slant we can expect in Wikipedia’s articles about Israel, Zionism, and anti-Zionist antisemitism. In the wake of Oct. 7, “generally reliable” sources have trafficked in disinformation, as when The New York Times splashed the Al Ahli hospital bombing hoax over its front page, helping spark violent anti-Jewish riots across the world; or when The New Yorker legitimized Holocaust inversion—a long-running staple of anti-Zionist propaganda originating in the 1960s USSR. Conservative outlets, on the other hand, have produced reporting that tells Israel’s side of the story and have looked far more critically at the anti-Israel campus protests. The “generally unreliable” Washington Free Beacon has arguably produced the most extensive reporting on the protests. Wikipedia editors, however, are warned against using the Beacon as a source, which is why of the 353 references accompanying Wikipedia’s article on the pro-Palestinian campus protests, the overwhelming majority is to liberal and far-left sources plus Al Jazeera. One-sided sources are just one among a host of problems in Wikipedia articles related to Oct. 7 and the war that followed. In a World Jewish Congress report released in March, Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Nir documents numerous ways in which relevant Wikipedia entries have become de facto anti-Israel propaganda. From biased framing to omissions of key facts to stressing anti-Israel examples while ignoring the Israeli side of the story, to promoting fringe academic perspectives on Zionism—Wikipedia’s editors and administrators have actively worked to subvert the site’s neutrality policy on this topic. As in other instances, conflicts and bullying behavior predominate, with Israeli editors describing uniquely “hostile and disrespectful” treatment. Israeli users, who are most knowledgeable about the Oct. 7 events, often found themselves locked out of editing key articles, which were open for editing only to users who’d made over 500 edits. Several editors told Aharoni Nir that there were a number of activists who operated anonymously and were “responsible for the anti-Israel tone.” Among some of the most troubling instances Aharoni Nir documented were calls for deletions of crucial articles. These included articles describing individual massacres on Oct. 7, such as those at Netiv HaAsara, Nir Yitzhak, Yakhini, and other kibbutzim and moshavim, as well as articles describing Hamas beheadings. Some of the calls succeeded. So did the call to erase the article about Nazism in Palestinian society (a “documented historical and sociological phenomenon,” notes Aharoni Nir). By contrast, the article normalizing equations between Israel and Nazi Germany—a propagandistic concept that has been weaponized against Jews for decades––remains on the site. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s Arabic site openly abandoned the principle of neutrality last December when it temporarily went dark in solidarity with the Palestinians, then added the Palestinian flag to its logo and posted a pro-Palestinian statement at the top. Israel’s Wikipedia community protested. Wikimedia Foundation—you guessed it—did nothing. Many, undoubtedly, will note the irony of the ADL being attacked by the Wikipedia woke, given the criticism the organization and its head Jonathan Greenblatt have faced from the Jewish community for their progressive tilt and failure to focus on left-wing antisemitism. But the ADL has long been in social justice warriors’ crosshairs. In 2020, 100 hard-left groups signed an open letter demanding that the left “ drop the ADL ” as an ally. Ten days after Oct. 7, the director of the pernicious Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism attacked the ADL for daring to stand up against anti-Israel hate. And in January, The Nation published a piece whose title, “The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the US,” read like a Pravda headline circa 1970. The Wikipedia editors who won the battle over downgrading the ADL used this piece to back up their arguments, along with articles in the hard-left Guardian and Jewish Currents , further confirming that the action had been driven not by an honest consideration of sources but political bias. In response to a letter by 43 Jewish organizations requesting it review the decision, Wikimedia issued a press release referring to Wikipedia’s supposedly inviolable mechanisms that must be preserved to keep it “neutral and free from institutional bias.” All content decisions are made by “Wikipedia’s volunteer community” in a transparent manner, with clear processes in place, and Wikimedia dares not interfere in the magic of that process. The brush-off, however, reads like an evasion so crude, it borders on deception. It’s true that Wikipedia’s old-timers tend to resent interventions from the foundation, but the foundation isn’t as powerless as it claimed in the release. In fact, Wikimedia’s senior management says something else entirely in its other communications. See, for example, this blog Maryana Iskander, Wikimedia’s CEO, published three weeks after Oct. 7. There she extolled Wikimedia’s crucial role in fighting “mis/disinformation, censorship and other threats,” listing them among the four top things the foundation does “to make sure Wikipedia can get closer to its vision of representing the sum of all knowledge.” Whatever Wikimedia does to combat mis/disinformation and censorship, when it comes to Jewish topics it is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, there are troubling signs that in the recent battle over the ADL, Wikipedia’s editors used some of the techniques we’ve encountered already—combativeness, manipulation, and taking advantage of administrators’ ignorance—to edge out their opponents and push through their own agendas. One Wikipedian who opposed the new ADL classification quit editing, having become “fed up ” with bias among the administrators. Editors told the Jewish Journal that Wikipedia’s existing system is “overrun by political actors who are running circles” around volunteer administrators. One editor said it would be easy for anti-Israel activists to make a case that everything the ADL does relates to Zionism and ultimately squeeze its content off the site completely. Another suggested that Wikipedia must shift from an all-volunteer oversight system to one based on “paid, vetted experts in each field that also have a strong grasp on the nuances of debate, mediation, and arbitration to ensure that Wikipedia policy and principles are actively enforced.” With Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism at the heart of the global disinformation endeavor, we may already be witnessing a concerted effort to capture these areas of Wikipedia and turn them into anti-Israel propaganda. The people doing this could be domestic zealots or state actors like Iran or China—or all of the above. What’s clear is that Wikipedia’s vaunted decision-making transparency aside, the anonymity of its editors and administrators is a major obstacle to understanding who produces content and for what purpose. Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s Croatia report notes that when it comes to ideological capture, time is of the essence. The longer Wikipedia audiences are “exposed to disinformation and bias while being assured by the Wikipedia community’s decades-long built reputation that they are reading neutral, fact-based information,” the greater and more irreversible the effects. Rewriting a subverted part of the site after 15 years does nothing to change the minds of those who had previously fed off of the propaganda. Today, Jewish people and the Jewish story are under an unprecedented global assault, and Wikipedia is being used as a weapon in this war. Yet there are no signs that Wikimedia—which washes its hands of any decision-making responsibility with regard to Wikipedia’s content yet raises millions off its back—recognizes its role and responsibility at this moment. Would it like to wait 10-15 years, the way it did with the Polish Jewish and Croatian projects, to see how bad things get before it intervenes? Or is it brushing off the Jewish community’s concerns because, like its editors, it, too, conflates left-wing bias with neutrality? Whatever the answer, it’s a terrible look for an organization that seeks to provide free access to “the sum of all human knowledge.” It’s crucial that we understand that the attack on the ADL in this case is actually an attack on any source of unbiased information about Jews or Israel. Zooming out, ideological capture of critical information resources is a threat to American society as a whole. If one of the world’s most influential conduits of knowledge decides it wants to turn itself into the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, that’s its prerogative. The rest of us need to get informed, warn the world about it, and demand accountability. ----------------------- Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a Research Fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP. Follow her on Twitter @IzaTabaro . Previous Next

December 18, 2021 BVH experiences hate speech, SUHSD responds with resolution Carina Muniz The anti-Semitic post created by students and directed towards IB Environmental Systems and Societies, and AP Environmental Science teacher Jennifer Ekstein is currently under investigation by BVH administrators. In Principal Roman Del Rosario’s statement addressing the hate speech at BVH, he made clear that, with support from SUHSD, BVH would not stand for hate speech. This photo was one of the two attachments in Del Rosario’s statement. Originally Posted In: https://bonitavistacrusader.org/8252/news/bvh-experiences-hate-speech-suhsd-responds-with-resolution/ < Back In light of the recent series of hate acts against Jewish and Black communities at Bonita Vista High (BVH), the Sweetwater Union High School District’s (SUHSD) adoption of Resolution No. 4761 aims to address anti-Semitic and other hate acts at a district-level. On Dec. 14—the day after SUHSD adopted the resolution—BVH Principal Roman Del Rosario officially issued a statement to the BVH community addressing the hateful acts committed on campus. “Bonita Vista High stands with our board of trustees in affirming the rights of Jewish students, staff, and families and will continue to work with the community and other organizations dedicated to addressing anti-Semitism,” Del Rosario’s statement read. “We will continue to investigate all issues related to hateful language, rhetoric and/or actions.” Since the hate-vandalism that took place on Oct. 31, a series of independent hateful acts have ensued in the following months. BVH staff and students alike have become victims of hate speech in and out of campus. As a result of these actions, Del Rosario held a faculty meeting on Dec. 8 addressing the hate speech occuring on campus and allowing teachers to share their own experiences and thoughts regarding these situations. “I thought it was important that I raise the level of consciousness of staff, students and parents. I had these teachers that were impacted share their first hand account of the incidents, and read an article by Dr. [Mica] Pollack from UCSD regarding hate speech in classrooms and our duty to confront it when it happens,” Del Rosario said. “I thought it was very good timing for us to bring more attention to that resolution and to also give out a statement that we do not tolerate any manifestation of hate, and [show] the respect we have towards our Jewish community.” Previous Next

November 23, 2025 Qatar's Got Talent Eve Barlow Essentially Hosier is in the business of identifying who the next big thing will be. He is on the hunt for future anti-Israel, anti-America, anti-West political superstars, and he is urging pro-Israel networks to come together to mitigate these rises. If Qatar produced a reality talent contest for upcoming American insurgent politicians, Hosier would be the one spotting the winners. Originally Posted In: https://evebarlow.substack.com/p/qatars-got-talent?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web < Back The week of Zohran Mamdani’s election, I met a really interesting guy at a Shabbat dinner. Not Jewish. He kept making sure that was understood, but to me he was as comfortable at a Shabbat table as most Jews. Turns out since graduating college, he has worked in and around the State of Israel in public affairs in various capacities. Dillon Hosier has now turned his time to his brainchild ICAN (Israeli-American Civic Action Network. He is CEO. At the dinner, the topical concern of what Mamdani’s election “means” and “what now” took precedence. Hosier indicated that he had identified Mamdani as a very real threat in 2023 because he has been monitoring emerging political dangers at local levels across the United States. Essentially Hosier is in the business of identifying who the next big thing will be. He is on the hunt for future anti-Israel, anti-America, anti-West political superstars, and he is urging pro-Israel networks to come together to mitigate these rises. If Qatar produced a reality talent contest for upcoming American insurgent politicians, Hosier would be the one spotting the winners. He whipped out his iPhone and showed one of the tech tools ICAN has initiated. I was blown away. Here was a live map of America, featuring red and green spots according to the most precarious areas for future Mamdanis. Alarmingly there is an incoming “Mamdani Strip” (Hosier’s term) in New York, full of more and more copycat candidates. Many are members of the DSA: Democratic Socialists of America, which is not officially tied to the Democrats but which works within its electoral system and runs candidates in their primaries. You know the story of AOC, right? Tonight onstage in West Hollywood, Hosier gave a presentation of ICAN’s objectives, before he was joined by three incredible voices I am proud to call friends: John Mirisch (former Mayor of Beverly Hills, now city council member), Loay Alshareef (Saudi-born, UAE-based reformed Muslim, and Abraham Accords activist) and Dr Sheila Nazarian (Persian Jewish activist, Fox news contributor, and plastic surgeon). Mirisch is an Ashkenazi Jew who has always been confounded by antizionism, and has tied his mast to Israel since he was growing up in LA. Nazarian fled Iran with her parents via Pakistan then Vienna, before they received papers to come to America. Alshareef is a would-be posterchild for a new Middle East. He is based in the UAE, was radicalized as a child to hate Jews and Christians but had his own awakening about Islamism. He prays, he fasts, and he believes that there is a way to modernize Islam so that those who practice can not only co-exist in the Western world, but so that the Middle East can evolve out of its past, normalize relations with Israel and cease to demonize America and the West. Alshareef is a really exceptional human. To be in his presence is to feel a sense of calm about the future. All three were together tonight to discuss Mamdani, who promotes radical Islamist ideals, preaches the genocide lie about Gaza, and the Apartheid lie about Israel, and has often been found supporting the screams of “From the river to the sea.” “Mamdani has never been to Israel,” opens Alshareef, who says he would accept an invitation to sit down with New York’s incoming Mayor. Whether he will receive one or not is another question. I don’t believe Mamdani to be a good faith actor. Neither does Alshareef, who has visited Israel more than a handful of times, and says that almost immediately everything that an Arab Muslim has been indoctrinated to hate about Israel is shattered completely by the experience of going there. Dr Nazarian noted that Congressman Richie Torres once said about the DSA that they ask only two foreign policy questions in order to secure funding and support for a prospective candidate. The first is that any candidate must promise to support the BDS movement against Israel. The second is that they must promise to never visit Israel. No wonder AOC doesn’t know where the Jordan river is. And yet, so many play along. The motivation cannot possibly be integrity but opportunism. For money, for political power, for fame and instant success. And yet what is the cause of this unholy marriage between leftists and Islamism? According to Alshareef it’s two-fold. First, the American Left suffer from the same guilt that the Europeans experience, and they believe that to support the radicals is to support the “right cause”. “What they don’t realize,” he says, “is that they are the first sheep to the slaughter.” Second, they are totally ignorant to – and don’t understand –the Middle East. They have handed human rights to extremists and radicals who only seek to misuse the liberal freedom that America is giving them. The idea is to destroy democracy through democracy itself. “Listen to those of us who know,” says Alshareef. “This is so dangerous.” Alshareef, as mentioned, is a reformed Muslim, and makes a distinction that he insists is not a majority position. He doesn’t waste time denying that the majority position in the Muslim world is not yet shared by him, but were Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords it could change everything. Saudi’s leader Mohammad Bin Salman according to Alsharif is earnest and honest, and does want to commit to the peace deal, and yet his hesitation is due to the position of Saudi among the Muslim world, and the pressure on him from other Arab nations to insist upon some recognition for the Palestinians in advance of signing. Saudi is a key piece of the puzzle. If and when they join the Abraham Accords, many other Muslim countries will follow. The issue is that Mamdani and his ilk are also yet to meet Alshareef in his evolved peaceful state. “He is not peaceful,” says Alshareef. “He is dishonest.” He explains that there are two types of Muslims; those who fled their countries to start anew, and those who believe that Muslims like Alshareef should not be tolerated, and that America should be turned into a caliphate, where eventually Muslims will wind up murdering other Muslims. Case in current point: Sudan. According to Alshareef, too many moderate Muslims are silent. “Speak up. Distance yourself from the radicals!” he says. It’s worth watching this 8-minute clip of Alshareef explaining his viewpoint after Dr Nazarian pushed back with her own reality-based fears of Islam, due to her experiences fleeing the Islamic Regime of Iran. Upon coming to America, Dr Nazarian studied at Columbia University, and took classes on Islam, only to read the Quran and discover the verses detailing the Muslim impression of Jews as a sworn enemy who need to be eradicated. Alshareef’s response is so sensible it should be the real radical approach. Essentially, for him it comes down to moving away from a politicized interpretation of the Quran that is completely irrelevant in the modern day. If only Alshareef had run for the New York mayoral position, yet he has more important things to do. Today, President Trump announced that he is going to ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and label it a foreign terrorist organization. A great move. “But the devil is in the details,” says Mirisch. Indeed. How will this be enforced? And the question still looms large about Qatar’s tentacles on US soil, and the already seismic damage of decades and billions of dollars infiltrating not just university education with its anti-American ideology, but high school programs too. Alshareef believes that Qatar could join the future map of the Middle East, but only if it does two things. Separates itself from Muslim Brotherhood, and eradicates Al Jazeera. “Al Jazeera made many of us believe Bin Laden was a hero,” he says. “They were the exclusive outlet for his videos. They made us feel indifferent to 9/11. In Arabic, AlJazeera is the official spokesman for Hamas. In English, it’s the official spokesman for the LGBT community.” Maddening, and the exact distortion that the Islamists are so brilliant at. It’s as though we live in a parallel universe. The useful idiots who know nothing about the Middle East are being led blindfolded by regressive radicalized Arab Mamdanis who will discard of them the instant they no longer serve a purpose, while those of us who have been pushed out of the so-called “liberal” room are sitting alongside the warriors of progress in the Arab world who have more reverence for America, Israel, President Trump, Christianity and Judaism than a questionable proportion of our white majority neighbors. Last week I had the honor of witnessing Omer Shem Tov, released Israeli hostage, speak at Sinai Temple in Beverly Hills. Shem Tov was captured from the Nova festival. He paced the stage for an hour uninterrupted, seamlessly recalling the “light” version of the story of his 505 days in captivity. Shem Tov’s mother Shelly was one of my first interviewees in Israel in the months after October 7. She left an enormous impression on me, and her determination to bring her son back from hell stayed with me. I remember she told me she could not even brush her teeth without the guilt of knowing her son may not be able to do the same. When he was released, I cried. I could barely hold back tears as he walked out to a standing ovation of hundreds last Thursday. He recalled how he was held in a cage underground in pitch black darkness for 50 successive days of those 505. He received one pita or less per day. He found faith in the tunnels. He wraps teffilin every morning now. He talks to G-d every day. He believes in miracles. The way Shem Tov spoke, and the way Alshareef speaks, is light years away from the victim-orientated, power-hungry, truth-avoiding gang of progressive Western elites and wannabes. They have worked overtime to shut them out, but these voices cannot be repressed. They refuse. They defy intimidation. They are brimming with a purpose that cannot be faked. We must uplift them. ICAN too is providing an essential service. Here is Hosier with his presentation . You can see four local California politicians, and on the left hand column is how JPAC (Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California) is scoring future Mamdani’s. It’s marking them according to housing, environment, policing, social policies etc, but crucially it doesn’t pick up where they’ve voted on issues surrounding Israel and the Middle East. ICAN does factor these in, and scores them accurately. If they’re red it means they’re future Mamdani’s. If they’re green, they’re not. Not only does ICAN identify where the problem candidates are, it’s identifying where the wrongly maligned candidates are. This analysis then becomes crucial for killing bills, such as the Ethnic Studies bill in California, because accurate intelligence is available for who to target. We cannot afford more Mamdanis. We cannot afford any more successes for any political candidates in America who would support what happened to Omer Shem Tov in Hamas captivity, or who would refuse to protect the vision for the Middle East that Loay Alshareef so passionately wants to help actualize. To find out more about ICAN, visit their website . Photos by Joseph Pal @palphotography on Instagram. Previous Next

July 9, 2024 StopHateInSchools: Ethnic studies in K-12 Staff Writer Lessons learned and a roadmap for protecting the rights of Jewish students and teachers Originally Posted In: https://www.stophateinschools.org/blog/ethnic-studies-in-california-lessons-learned < Back A big thank you to the PeerK12 team (Nicole Bernstein, Tamar Caspi and Eveie Schwartz) for sharing their research, insight and practical experience confronting the individuals, organizations and ideologies that are either contributing to or actively promoting systemic anti-Jewish hate in K-12 schools. We also want to thank everyone who attended the webinar and contributed great questions to the discussion. PeerK12 is a San Diego-based, grassroots, non-profit that works across public, charter and private schools to champion the rights of Jewish students and teachers. They've been at it for several years and have learned a lot along the way. Their approach, detailed in the video below, provides a pragmatic model for parents and community leaders to follow. VIDEO CLIP ONE The webinar also covered the long history of geopolitical events and cultural shifts from the advent of the Cold War through the end of the 20th century that laid the groundwork for the emergence and, later, the widespread adoption of ethnic studies. Ideological differences like capitalism v. communism and democracy v. totalitarianism have, over time, been intentionally transformed into promoting conflict, for example, between those labeled as oppressors and those identified as oppressed or colonizers v. indigenous. This lens through which events are interpreted and people are sorted, which has become embedded into our educational system, now also uses words like "apartheid" and "genocide" to assert (false) moral authority and pressure Jewish students and teachers to declare for one side or the other with Jews and Israelis identified as on the "bad" side. (For example, this incident from a Bellevue Washington elementary school .) With this backdrop, PeerK12 drilled into the specifics of how ethnic studies entered the education system in California (video below). These slides also include a number of details regarding the emergence of ethnic studies in Washington State. VIDEO CLIP TWO. One of the webinar attendees asked the central question, "given the scale and embedded nature of this content on every level of our education system, what actions should we be taking and what has proven to be most effective?" PeerK12 detailed a number of critical steps including: Thorough and ongoing research. Understand the perspectives, intentions and organizational relationships of the decision makers whether those are elected officials or professional educators (teachers and administrators). Build trust based relationships with principals, superintendents and school board members. Whether you align with their political views or not, there are many well-meaning individuals who are simply less-well educated on this topic or may be navigating difficult waters with their staff and peers. And, because this topic is nuanced and hard, you're going to find yourself across the table from someone who has a different perspective and you need to be open minded enough to learn and understand why they hold their beliefs. Be a reliable resource for these people. Pay attention and speak up. People behave differently when they know they're being watched carefully and when the tone of the dialogue is respectful, positive and solutions oriented. Know and use the school or school district's rules and policies. Follow them with regard to who to contact, how to escalate, etc. Cite specific, documented policies and hold schools accountable to adhering to their own rules. Show up when people do the right thing. Thank people when they take positive actions. Don't only attend school board meetings or send emails to complain. Acknowledge the good work and efforts that educators are doing along the way. Be nimble and able to mobilize quickly when action is needed. This short video offers a high-level roadmap for what you can do in your community and school district: VIDEO CLIP THREE. Please contact us if you are interested in watching a recording of the full webinar or would like to be notified of upcoming webinars. Thank you. Previous Next

November 20, 2025 The Union Behind California’s Ethnic Studies Antisemitism Problem Tammi Rossman-Benjamin California’s AB 715 was a well-intentioned effort to curb antisemitism in K–12 classrooms, especially ethnic studies. But the bill passed only after teachers’ unions, including the California Faculty Association (CFA) - a politically powerful union representing faculty on all 23 California State University campuses - pressed for changes that stripped key safeguards. Originally Posted In: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/385098/the-union-behind-californias-ethnic-studies-antisemitism-problem/ < Back California’s AB 715 was a well-intentioned effort to curb antisemitism in K–12 classrooms, especially ethnic studies. But the bill passed only after teachers’ unions, including the California Faculty Association (CFA) — a politically powerful union representing faculty on all 23 California State University campuses — pressed for changes that stripped key safeguards, reducing it to one broad standard: that instruction be “factually accurate…rather than advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship”. An early sign that AB 715 would face serious obstacles came just days after the governor signed it. That’s when the CFA sent politicians a questionnaire asking whether they had received donations or endorsements from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) or the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC), insinuating these groups “harm working people” and that the union would not support any candidate who had accepted their backing. Framed as a way to “get to the bottom” of whether politicians supported AB 715 — and to punish those who did — the CFA’s questionnaire not only echoed familiar antisemitic tropes about Jewish money and influence, it revealed something even more telling: a strategy for using the union’s political muscle to promote a “liberated” ethnic studies hostile to Israel and its Jewish supporters, and to block any effort to restrain it. That strategy is being driven by three CSU ethnic-studies faculty who sit atop the CFA’s most consequential levers and the state’s ethnic-studies infrastructure. They also lead influential movements that center anti-Zionism and can supply the grassroots mobilization needed to keep “liberated” ethnic studies in California classrooms. A closer look at who they are and how they operate underscores the significant challenges awaiting AB 715. Start with Melina Abdullah, professor of Pan-African Studies at CSU Los Angeles and chair of CFA’s Political Action & Legislative Affairs committee, which sets the union’s legislative agenda and was responsible for circulating the controversial questionnaire. In a September class , Abdullah called AB 715 a “terrible” and “racist” bill and its supporters “antisemites.” She falsely accused JPAC of heavily funding the bill’s “Zionist” authors and buying legislators’ votes in its favor, and she directed students to sign a “veto AB 715” petition. Abdullah is also co-founder of Black Lives Matter and leader of its LA chapter, which mounted an aligned campaign opposing AB 715. Then there is Theresa Montaño, professor of Chicano Studies at CSU Northridge, former CFA executive board member and a leader of CFA’s Teacher Education Caucus, key advocates within the union for an activist-oriented approach to K-12 teaching, particularly in ethnic studies. Her “commitment to union activism” in opposing AB 715 was recently commended by the CFA. Montaño co-founded the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium after the State Board of Education rejected the model curriculum she helped draft, which was considered antisemitic by state legislators and the governor. Her group has produced curricular materials that smear Israel, vilify Jewish organizations and mobilize K–12 educators to fight “Zionist backlash.” It also spawned a national movement – the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies – that launched its own campaign in opposition to AB 715. Finally, consider Rabab Abdulhadi, founding director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas program at San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies. She heads the union’s Palestine, Arab and Muslim Caucus, which drives the union’s anti-Israel positions, including its adoption of an academic boycott of Israel, and actively opposed AB 715. Abdulhadi’s university program runs a steady stream of classes and events that promote anti-Israel activism and platform individuals tied to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. Abdulhadi is also a co-founder of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a branch of the international BDS movement that aims to delegitimize Israel and its supporters on American campuses. It is the intersection of union influence, university authority, and grassroots political organizing that has made CFA a driving force behind every major piece of ethnic studies legislation in the state, including the development of a model curriculum, the establishment of high school and college graduation requirements, and setting teacher certification standards. Though presented as critical for students, these legislative campaigns have been undeniably self-serving — preserving and expanding ethnic-studies departments and jobs by building a guaranteed K-12 pipeline for coursework, teacher training, and professional development. In the face of CFA’s entrenched campaign to institutionalize “liberated” ethnic studies and resist all efforts to curb the antisemitism it engenders, the real issue isn’t the strength of AB 715’s safeguards; it’s the state-mandated high school graduation requirement, AB 101, that made such safeguards necessary in the first place. That law was enacted in 2021 without any state standards or clear definition of the subject, and without any reliable evidence of academic benefit. Most legislators couldn’t say what the course was or why it should be required. Passing a costly, polarizing mandate under those conditions wasn’t just irresponsible. It handed control to the same union activists that now train teachers, develop curricula, and shape how ethnic studies is taught in K-12 classrooms. California still has choices. Districts can offer ethnic-studies electives that families select and communities evaluate on their merits. What the state cannot do is maintain a mandate with no standards or clear definition and entrust its implementation to a union–department–movement alliance committed to a “liberated” ethnic studies. AB 101 is currently unfunded and inoperative. It should remain that way — and be repealed as soon as possible. Rossman-Benjamin is the executive director of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit organization that combats antisemitism on college campuses across North America. She was also faculty at the University of California for nearly two decades. Previous Next

December 8, 2025 CDE Files Lawsuit Against OUSD (Oakland Unified School District) Zara Quiter Department of Education ruled Oct. 20, 2025 that OUSD had created a discriminatory environment for Jewish students and staff. Originally Posted In: https://tphnews.com/23152/news/cde-files-lawsuit-against-ousd/ < Back Over the last two years, Piedmont Unified School District has seen an influx of Jewish students transferring from Oakland Unified School District citing anti-semitism, with over 30 families transferring to PUSD after the first semester of the 2023-24 school year. The California Department of Education ruled Oct. 20, 2025 that OUSD had created a discriminatory environment for Jewish students and staff. A Bay Area attorney Marleen Sacks submitted the complaint on May 6, 2024, according to the CDE’s decision. Sacks is also suing OUSD for anti-semitism. The complaint to the CDE focuses on district material for Arab-American History Month which had maps that did not include Israel. The lawsuit, filed by the Oakland Jewish Alliance (OJA) and Sacks, focuses on OUSD not fully investigating anti-semitic incidents in the 60 days after they were reported, as mandated by California law. “[Sacks] is a lawyer who’s been stepping up to kind of aggregate all of the different complaints and put it into one larger document. It shows the extent of what’s happening with this discrimination,” said an anonymous OUSD employee and mother of two OUSD students. OJA is an organization founded after Oct. 7, 2023, a time when there was an increase in Jewish hate in Oakland, and around the country, according to OJA member JT Mates-Muchin, who works on issues of anti-semitism within schools. “There were two main incidents that are large factors in the lawsuit,” Mates-Muchin said. “One was that they were flying a Palestinian flag at Fremont High School and another one was in Nov. or Dec. of 2023, when the union called a teach-in, which is essentially taking class time to divert the lesson to teach about Palestine, in a way that is completely one-sided and did not consider Israel at all.” OJA originally started at the Beth-Jacob Congregation in Oakland, but has grown to include members from various local synagogues and members of the Jewish community to advocate for Israel’s right to exist and to fight against anti-semitism. “[The flag and the teach-in] are the big pieces of the lawsuit. The school district should have been investigating and finding out who did this and why they did this, and then doing things to make sure that that kind of thing does not continue to happen in the school,” Mates-Muchin said. Some families felt that these incidents were not being treated seriously by the district, and submitted inter-district transfer (IDT) forms to be released from OUSD, including PHS freshman Naomi Levy’s family. “I left Edna Brewer at the end of my seventh grade year because the school district had been making a lot of claims and putting out a lot of things that were pretty anti-semitic,” Levy said. “Say one of the teachers at your school is somebody who has their own biases around Jewish people or is anti-semitic, agrees with the things that the district is saying, and teaches that in their lesson. It can be scary.” Levy left at the end of the 2023-2024 school year. Approximately 30 families left OUSD earlier, in Jan. 2024, because of anti-semitism in the district, according to Mates-Muchin. Families are still considering leaving OUSD because of anti-semitism. “I think [people leaving OUSD] has to do with teachers wearing keffiyehs to showcase their support for the Palestinians, and taking it so far that it becomes anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. There is a way to be pro-Palestinian people and pro-Israeli people and pro peace, instead of pro the destruction of Israel,” said PMS math teacher and OJA member Karen Bloom. “The destruction of Israel, which is the only homeland for the Jewish people, means the destruction of the Jewish people.” PHS alumnus Dahlia Saffouri said that wearing keffiyehs had become a symbol of solidarity for Palestine, which is where her grandfather immigrated from. “I think there needs to be a distinction: someone being pro-Palestine does not mean they’re being antisemitic or anti-Israel,” Saffouri said. “I think that being Palestinian does not make you antisemitic.” Bloom said that a significant number of students are experiencing anti-semitism in ethnic studies courses in OUSD schools. “Students are experiencing anti-zionism in Liberated Ethnic Studies specifically, where they’re talking about a bunch of different libels or false statements about Israel, and turning it into a worldview,” Bloom said. “That anti-zionism turns into anti-semitism because it delegitimizes Israel and it delegitimizes every Jew who is connected to Israel.” PHS does not use the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, or Constructive Ethnic Studies, which is another curriculum that Bloom said does not follow an anti-semitic and anti-zionist narrative. “I left Montera because of an [English] teacher who put up anti-semitic posters,” said freshman Aodhan Brubaker, who transferred after seventh grade into PUSD schools. “It took forever for the school to actually do anything about it, and I had to be in the office during my English period. I didn’t feel welcomed.” The teacher Brubaker mentioned was no longer working at Montera Middle School as of Dec. 6, 2023. The posters put up by that teacher was the type of action that the OEA would have protected, according to their Nov. 6, 2023 resolution, which said that OEA leadership will support teachers that are “reprimanded for teaching about Palestinian liberation in their classrooms.” It also resolved to publicize educational materials for teachers, like the resource Teach Palestine. “Major incidents such as the “teach in” and hard-copy materials that were shared with teachers, were done by the Oakland Education Association without authorization by the District, and in fact, they were expressly disallowed by the District,” OUSD Director of Communications John Sasaki said. According to its website, the mission of Teach Palestine is to support educators bringing in curriculum about Palestine into the classroom. The OEA (teacher’s union) continues to promote an anti-Israel narrative, which trickles down to the classroom. Teachers and administrators are resistant to really unpack their role in cultivating an environment that’s leading to Jewish families feeling unwelcome and unsafe,” said Pamela Schwartz, a mother of two OUSD students. The anonymous employee said both she and her children feel unsafe in OUSD. “I think there’s been a lot of systemic anti-semitism in OUSD. It’s been blatantly obvious since Hamas’s attack on Israel how a lot of teachers feel about Israel, and then how that translates to how they feel about Jewish students,” the anonymous employee said. “I felt like it was so unfair to have to go to work somewhere where your identity was put on trial every single day.” Both Levy and Schwartz said that they were concerned about OUSD teachers that were a part of OEA promoting their own bias. “I think a lot of people in the teachers union just had their own biases against people,” Levy said. “At the time, and even now, I feel like it was trending to kind of say that you supported Free Palestine, but nobody knows what that means. A lot of people that were uneducated think that means Jewish people are bad because they think Israel’s bad, even though there’s no correlation.” Both Levy and Brubaker said that their transfer to PUSD was positive. “We’re really happy that we’re considered a district that our Jewish families feel safe to bring their students to, and we want to continue to hold that,” said PUSD Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Jean Takazawa. “The families and the students [that have transferred] that I talk to have been having positive experiences. Saffouri said that supporting Palestine and not the Israeli government does not have to be anti-semitic. “We need to remember that Hamas and the Israeli government are separate from the people, and the people are not in charge of what the governments do,” Saffouri said. “There are definitely people that support those political organizations, but that is not the whole of people who are Jewish, or people who are Arab or Palestinian.” According to Mates-Muchin, anti-semitism in OUSD has often gone unnoticed by people who are not connected with Israel or Palestine. “For the non Jewish people and people who don’t understand or don’t have a relationship to either Israel or Palestine, I feel like they can go through without being affected [by anti-semitism] at all,” Mates-Muchin said. Despite the CDE complaint and lawsuit, parents of students in OUSD are not optimistic about change happening in OUSD. “I have been deeply questioning whether OUSD is a place where we belong and the rise of antisemitism is just one part of it,” Schwartz said. In a statement shared by Sasaki, OUSD has said it will begin training in Dec. to respond to anti-semitism. Previous Next

February 26, 2026 ‘Jewish Students Are Segregated’: Parents Sue California State Education System in First-of-Its-Kind Complaint Over ‘Anti-Semitic Propaganda’ and Harassment Adam Kredo One parent alleged that a ninth-grade teacher organized a walkout that featured chants of ‘f— the Jews,’ while others said schools punished their children for reporting anti-Semitism Originally Posted In: https://freebeacon.com/california/jewish-students-are-segregated-parents-sue-california-state-education-system-in-first-of-its-kind-complaint-over-anti-semitic-propaganda-and-harassment/ < Back A group of Jewish parents sued the California state education system on Thursday, alleging that the state’s public schools have become antisemitic cesspools in which "Jewish students are segregated and pulled out of classes so that teachers can spew anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda without pushback," according to a copy of the first-of-its-kind lawsuit shared with the Washington Free Beacon . The California State Board of Education, the California Department of Education, and state superintendent Tony Thurmond fostered a hostile environment throughout all of California, ignoring numerous reports from parents whose children had been targeted solely for being Jewish, according to the complaint. In one case, a teacher punished a 12-year-old student "because he was a Jew who dared to wear Jewish and Israeli symbols." In another, a ninth-grade art teacher organized a walkout "in support of Palestine" that featured chants of "f— the Jews." When one parent spoke up about the issue during a school board meeting, faculty members mocked her and called her a "Zionist Nazi bitch." State officials responsible for protecting students from discrimination allowed "California’s schools to indoctrinate children, from the earliest ages, to believe that Jewish Americans and Israelis - including Jewish and Israeli classmates - are racists, white supremacists, and oppressors who should be shunned," the lawsuit states. The case documents numerous anti-Semitic incidents across the state, according to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which is handling the lawsuit alongside the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs. It marks the first time legal advocates have sued an entire statewide system over pervasive anti-Semitic harassment and could set a precedent for those in other states to follow suit. Antisemitism in California schools, though, has been particularly prevalent since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel. The San Francisco teachers’ union, for instance, endorsed a curriculum that claimed many allegations of antisemitism are "fabricated" and used to silence pro-Palestinian activists. The public school system in Berkeley received a federal complaint in 2024 over its alleged failure to stem an escalating series of anti-Semitic incidents that culminated in hallway chants of "kill the Jews." Even before Oct. 7, the state’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum included a lesson that described Jews as having "experienced conditional whiteness and privilege." The California State Legislature passed a bill in late 2025 acknowledging "well documented" cases that "Jewish and Israeli American pupils across California are facing a widespread surge in antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying." Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.), though, was silent on a coordinated bomb plot that a radical anti-Israel group had planned before federal law enforcement foiled the operation, and is facing a lawsuit from a former California National Guard commander who says Newsom "facilitated" an antisemitic campaign that resulted in the former commander’s wrongful termination. The Brandeis lawsuit implicates at least one individual vying to replace Newsom in this year’s gubernatorial election: Thurmond, the state superintendent, declared his candidacy back in September 2023, though polling averages have him with 2 percent of the primary vote. The Jewish families who collectively filed "hundreds of formal" complaints with their respective schools and the California Department of Education maintain that state school administrators were aware of antisemitic harassment but either recommended segregating Jewish students from the rest of the class or swept the reports under the rug. The alleged behavior violates California’s constitution, which provides protection for minority groups, as well as federal and state civil rights laws, according to the lawsuit. Plaintiff Melissa Alexander, for instance, said a teacher repeatedly punished her 12-year-old son solely because he wore clothing that could identify him as Jewish and a Star of David necklace. The teacher, whose name is not included in the filing, "openly proclaimed that Zionists are the enemy" and "had a public social media account filled with virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel content." When Alexander presented this evidence to school administrators and reported that the teacher had mistreated her child, the officials "actively chose to ignore it." Instead, the school put the student "into new classes in the middle of the school year." A similar incident occurred in the weeks after Oct. 7 at Berkeley High School, where plaintiff Ilana Pearlman’s ninth-grade son endured anti-Israel diatribes from an art teacher who "boasted to the class about his latest artwork: an image of barbed wire fences in the shape of a Star of David with a giant fist punching through it," according to the complaint. The same instructor allegedly used his classroom to promote a walkout "‘in support of Palestine,’ spending time and resources to advertise the demonstration." The event that followed "was filled with chants that included, ‘Fuck the Jews.’" When Pearlman reported this behavior to school administrators, those officials allegedly pulled her son from the class and sent him to learn separately in the school’s library and student health center. "The school’s decision to punish the targets of antisemitism rather than the perpetrators made a lasting impression on" Pearlman’s son, who now hides his Jewish identity in fear, the filing states. At Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Los Angeles - named after a Jewish journalist slaughtered by Islamists in 2002 - a teacher repeatedly subjected a student to alleged pro-Hamas activism inside the classroom. Plaintiffs Dawn and Michael Rosenthal said that their son’s honors chemistry teacher littered the classroom with anti-Israel propaganda. The Rosenthals reported the conduct to Los Angeles Unified School District, which responded with a statement that "the teacher was refusing to remove" anti-Israel posters, according to the complaint. By Oct. 7, 2025 - the two-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks - the chemistry teacher allegedly wrote on the blackboard, "‘Oy vey, it’s free’ with an arrow pointing to ‘FREE PALESTINE.’" As in other cases, the school pulled Rosenthal’s son from the class and ordered him to take a "remote online chemistry course," as well as "additional academic burdens to accommodate his chemistry teacher’s antisemitism." The teacher in question was only removed from the classroom after stapling a student’s arm in an unrelated incident that carried felony charges. The lawsuit also included examples of anti-Israel teaching materials used in California classrooms. A curriculum for kindergarten through third grade, for instance, includes links to a read-aloud book called "P Is for Palestine." It states that "I is for Intifada ," defining it merely as "rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grownup ." Teachers in Oakland, meanwhile, used an unauthorized December 2023 "teach-in" to have students draw "The Zionist leaders of Israel receiv[ing] money and support to conduct [a] two-tiered (unfair) system where Palestinians are mistreated and attacked." Neither the California Department of Education nor the California State Board of Education responded to requests for comment. Previous Next

November 18, 2021 San Dieguito board passes resolutions denouncing antisemitism, discrimination Karen Billings 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. Originally Posted In: http://sandiegouniontribune.com/2021/11/23/san-dieguito-board-passes-resolutions-denouncing-antisemitism-discrimination-4/ < Back 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. Both resolutions were brought forward by Trustee Michael Allman. “Many parents and students in our community feel that we are failing to adequately provide a safe and nurturing environment free from discrimination, harassment, intimidation and bullying,” Allman said. “We owe it to our students and our families to minimize discrimination in all its forms.” President Mo Muir said she wanted to send a clear message that bullying and harassment of any kind is unacceptable and the board as a whole supported that schools should be an environment where all students feel welcomed and loved. The resolution on antisemitism was in response to a letter to the board from 250 students from San Dieguito’s Jewish community, pleading for a resolution against the rise in antisemitism: “We deserve to feel safe on campus,” the student wrote. “We’ve had enough of the swastikas we’ve seen tagged everywhere, enough of the hateful memes and enough of the ugly side comments and texts. We should not be afraid to wear a Jewish star necklace or post about being Jewish on social for fear of being bullied,” read the letter. “After being blindsided by standardized testing during Rosh Hashanah in September, we were reminded how little representation we have.” During public comment, parents said Jewish families are suffering due to a rise in hatred directed at their faith, identity or historical roots. Two parents said they removed children from district or Encinitas schools due to antisemitic acts. There have been reports of students being beaten up for being Jewish at Carmel Valley Middle School and San Dieguito Academy has been vandalized with anti-semitic imagery—just last week a racial slur was graffitied on the campus. (At the meeting, Superintendent Cheryl James Ward said they were able to review camera footage from campus and determined that the offenders were not district students.) Miri Ketayi, an Israeli-American parent, said her Jewish son felt uncomfortable at school during the last conflict between Israel and Hamas in May. The students’ letter referenced how teachers allowed anti-Israel and anti-Zionism rhetoric in the classroom and said they were silenced when they spoke up about it. “We are in pain because of the antisemitism in the community,” said parent Rakefet Benderly, who said her daughter does not wear her Jewish jewelry at school because she is afraid of verbal attacks and said that Holocaust jokes and hatred of Israel is showing up in her classroom. “I can’t believe this is happening again in our Jewish history and it needs to stop.” In addition to testing during Rosh Hashanah, a board meeting was also scheduled this year on Yom Kippur but later canceled—Muir said she wants to ensure those scheduling errors never happen again. The resolution condemning antisemitism passed 4-0 with Trustee Katrina Young abstaining. With her abstention, Young said it was a very nuanced and complex matter. She said she loved the premise of the resolution but did not feel that she had the adequate information and wanted to do it right, to approve a resolution that was “worthy of these kids and their request.” Newly-sworn in Trustee Julie Bronstein and Vice President Melisse Mossy understood Young’s concerns and suggested the inclusion of the words “anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias.” Ward suggested the addition of language used in San Diego Unified’s recently passed resolution, which states that “anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias can descend into antisemitism when they promote demonization and discriminatory double standards.” Allman agreed to the edit but Young still abstained, as she said she needed more information and wanted more student and community voices to be considered for the language. Muir and Allman had strong feelings that the resolution be passed that day. “The students have said ‘we want you to hear us’ and I heard them,” Muir said. “This is important to them.” During the Nov. 18 special meeting, the board also passed the resolution affirming the protection of students against discrimination, harassment, intimidation and bullying. It denounces discrimination, sexism, racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and ableism that not only generate heated rhetoric, but can also result in vandalism, physical assaults and emotional trauma. The resolution has some teeth as it gives the superintendent 90 days to bring back to the board for consideration a new centralized position that will be tasked with carrying out the resolution’s intent. The new district-level position will be responsible for investigating and addressing allegations of discrimination and harassment. Bronstein questioned the original language of the resolution which listed the title of the new position as an “Anti-Discrimination Diversity Equity and Inclusion Officer”. She had hoped the position with that title would be less about investigations and more about bringing people together. She also requested that school principals be consulted on any new position like this. Ward suggested the alternative title of an ombudsman, an independent official that students could go to without fear of retaliation. Ward shared that she went to an ombudsman in college when a professor told her that Black students didn’t deserve better than a C. Ward said this position could be an existing staff member and not necessarily a new hire and part of the ongoing organizational review of the administrative positions in the district office approved last month. Young said she appreciated the focused intention on creating a safe and secure environment for students but wanted the resolution to include systemic inequity. Allman refused to add the word equity as he said it was not the purpose of the resolution. “Let’s call for the vote and vote no,” he said when Young continued to ask for equity to be added. Allman became frustrated that when Muir calls for a vote, he said Young reopens further debate. Bronstein said she didn’t see it as debate but Young explaining her point of view with her vote. “I would like this to be a little more civil,” Young said. “I feel like I got pushed into a corner and I don’t like how I had to vote last time…My heart really breaks with the last vote and it’s breaking with this one.” Young ended up voting in favor of the “imperfect” resolution because she wanted to show that she does care about this topic but said often when she offers an idea or suggestion, the discussion is cut off or others on the board take a hard line and do not offer to compromise. Muir said no one is pressuring her and told Young to just vote the way she wants to. Muir said she heard what Young had to say but she was making the same argument without any progress: “It’s nothing against you, I have to push the meeting forward,” Muir said as the special meeting had already gone an hour over its allotted time. After the two-hour special meeting ended, the board met for another six hours for its regular meeting. Student board representatives took notice of the exchange, mentioning it during the student reports at the regular meeting that followed. “We are very disappointed in the way the board members conducted themselves,” said Olivia Pacheco, the La Costa Canyon representative. “The way the board acted would not be allowed on our campuses.” During her board report, Muir responded to Olivia’s comments on the board’s discussion. “Everybody on this board is passionate about what goes on with our children…we want all kids to succeed,” Muir said. “Sometimes that comes across as not what we’d like but everyone has what’s best for children at heart.” After a summer of activism following the death of George Floyd, groups of SDUHSD students have been protesting since August 2020 demanding that the school board address racial inequities and diversity. Students made it onto a board agenda in January 2021 to talk about their efforts with Diversify our Narrative— encouraging the district to incorporate more texts by BIPOC authors in English and literature courses and to have more classroom discussions on identity bias and race. A board policy on equity was approved in September 2020, including strategies to promote equity in district programs such as adopting curriculum and instructional materials that accurately reflect the diversity among student groups, building a positive school climate, promoting the employment and retention of a diverse staff and ongoing professional learning with the San Diego County Office of Education. Superintendent Ward thanked students for speaking out. Since coming on board last month she has connected with multiple student groups across the district. “We hear all of you. I want you to know that we do hear you,” Ward said, adding they are committed to the DEI work to ensure all “kiddos” feel loved and are able to put their best foot forward at school. “It’s an all-hands on deck effort that we need to have. This is a work in progress, we will continue to grow. Our goal is to continue to get better and better at serving our community.” Previous Next

November 4, 2023 Union-Tribune Community Advisory Board member resigns due to repost on personal Facebook Staff Writer Members volunteer their time and talents, and agree to adhere to guidelines, including a prohibition on hate speech or targeting of other people or communities Originally Posted In: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2023/11/04/union-tribune-community-advisory-board-member-resigns-due-to-repost-on-personal-facebook/ < Back Last weekend, The San Diego Union-Tribune learned that Lallia Allali, one of the emeritus members of our Community Advisory Board and a contributor to our Community Voices Project, had reposted a graphic and deplorable antisemitic image on her personal Facebook page. Several people shared it on X, formerly Twitter, tagging national organizations and calling for her removal from various posts, including those with the Union-Tribune. Once we had the opportunity to confirm that Allali had reposted it, we accepted her resignation and removed her from the list of board members and contributors on our website. We received several related letters and emails from individuals and community leaders, to which we responded. Our Community Advisory Board, created in 2017, is comprised of people from all walks of life with the purpose of creating connections and offering insight to a range of ideas and experiences to help the U-T better serve the region. Similarly, the Community Voices Project, created in 2020, is made up of a mix of voices, including various genders, religions, political affiliations, ages and races, from neighborhoods throughout the county, with the goal of offering thoughtful, thought-provoking and civil discussion. Members volunteer their time and talents, and agree to adhere to guidelines, including a prohibition on hate speech or targeting of other people or communities. Those who violate those standards, as was the case with our emeritus board member, are disqualified from serving. Among the criteria for participation on the advisory board is being committed to advancing civil discourse on critical issues. While we seek out people who will amplify the perspectives in their own communities, the overarching purpose is to bring people together “to tap into the experiences, knowledge and perspectives of our diverse community in order to serve and improve the greater San Diego region.” Our goal through these projects is to promote civility, build understanding and contribute to the betterment of our community. We will continue to pursue this goal. Previous Next

October 31, 2024 The Kindergarten Intifada Abigail Shrier There is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel. A Free Press investigation. Originally Posted In: https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-the-kinderfada-revolution < Back In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles —met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students. But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion? “A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.” Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.” The crowd burst into approving laughter. Seated at a keffiyeh-draped table, Gochez said, “Some of the things that we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be really intelligent on how we do that. We have to know that we’re under the microscope. We have to know that Zionists and others are going to try to catch us in any way that they can to get us into trouble.” He continued: “If you organize students, it’s at your own risk, but I think it’s something that’s necessary we have to do.” He told the audience of educators that he once caught a “Zionist teacher” looking through his files. Gochez warned the crowd to be wary of “admin trying to be all chummy with you. You got to be very careful with that, even sometimes our own students.” John Adams Middle School teacher and panelist William Shattuc agreed, a keffiyeh around his neck. “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.” What are the “tools of censorship” employed by Zionists? Apparently, they include accusing teachers who rail against Israel in the classroom of antisemitism. "They try to say antisemitism, which is really ridiculous, right ?” said Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles. Cardona recently received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching . “What they do is they conflate. Part of that is by putting the star on their flag ,” Cardona said, referring to the Jewish Star of David. “Religion has nothing to do with it.” But, she insists, that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide?’ And if anybody were to say, ‘Okay, sure,’ that’s really not ethnic studies.” (Gochez, Shattuc, and Cardona did not return requests for comment.) It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union. If only. Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons. Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.” Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it. Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula. In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel . Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC ), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA ; creators of the Teach Palestine Project ), Teaching While Muslim , Jewish Voice for Peace , Unión del Barrio , and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel. Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes. Anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight. It is pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception. (“We just happen to be at the same place at the same time.”) Anti-Israel radicals willingly stake their jobs for their cause. “So how do we do all this without getting fired?” Gochez asked his assembled audience of public school teachers. “That’s the million-dollar question. And I don’t know how in the hell we have not been fired yet because I know for sure they have tried, but we have to organize. That’s the bottom line. If they come after one of us, the district has to know that it will be a bigger headache for them to try to touch one of us than it would be to just leave us alone.” All for the sake of indoctrinating other people’s children. Jewish Students Fend for Themselves Last year, Ella Hassner was a senior at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. In the weeks and months after October 7, she says, her school erupted with anti-Israel propaganda. To combat the anti-Israel posters that appeared in classrooms and hallways, the school’s Jewish club received approval from the principal to put up posters of the hostages. Within thirty minutes, the posters were torn down, Ella, who has U.S.-Israeli citizenship and is now 18 years old, told me. Another Jewish student I spoke to, “Benny,” confirmed this, adding that he and his friends had witnessed one teacher tearing the posters down. Teachers regularly pushed the idea to students—in class and on social media, where they were followed by their students—that “Zionists” were committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. A large majority of American Jews, 85 percent , support the State of Israel. Zionism refers to the movement that established a modern Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Given the quantity of anti-Israel propaganda flooding American K–12 schools, it’s perhaps unsurprising that children would turn against their Jewish classmates. This past year saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in K–12 schools. Students verbally attacked Jewish classmates in terms that echoed the very charges laid by their teachers against the State of Israel. “Baby killer” and “Violent Zionist” became popular epithets. Two girls in Ella’s class began to harass her, she told me. A subsequent school district investigation report, obtained by The Free Press , confirms her account. The girls said to her: “Your people are terrorists.” The girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger brother. Ella filed a “bullying report” with the school in February. Although the principal had personally witnessed some of the behavior, he and the associate superintendent consulted the school district’s legal counsel and decided “that the complaint would not be investigated by the district,” according to the investigation report. In February, the school hosted the annual district-wide vocal talent show. Several students sang songs celebrating their ethnic heritage. Ella and a female friend sang their approved song, “Someone Like You” by Adele, and then added another: a Hebrew pop anthem, “Yesh Bi Ahava,” which translates to “There’s Love Inside Me.” They announced the song was “dedicated to their families in Israel.” Ella says the associate superintendent pulled the duo aside after the performance and said the staff and other students were greatly upset and offended by the Hebrew song and the dedication. According to the district investigation report, the associate superintendent also informed the girls that “she would be following up with the principal the following week to discuss the matter.” The investigation found that the district did not take disciplinary action against Ella. (In response to request for comment, a spokeswoman from the district stated that the district could not discuss specific cases. She also wrote that staff was “made aware of several allegations of antisemitism. We took each complaint seriously and responded with great care to make sure our community of students, staff and families felt safe.”) In March of 2024, Ella stood at a town hall with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and recounted many of these incidents to get them on record. (Khanna said there should be “zero tolerance” for what Ella described and offered to help if the district did not respond to her complaints.) Ella ended her town hall speech with the advice that she gives her younger siblings: If anyone mistreats them for being Jewish, “they should come to me, not to the school.” Conversations with seventeen Jewish parents whose children attend public school in Northern California suggest that that is an understandable reaction. Since October 7 of last year, hundreds of incidents involving the harassment of Jewish K–12 students have been reported to Act Now K12, a grassroots effort to catalog and combat antisemitism in Northern California schools. Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley, Viviane Safrin of San Francisco, and Maya Bronicki of Santa Clara County—all mothers of Jewish children in public schools—helped spearhead the effort to track the escalating antisemitism tearing through school districts in Northern California. Bronicki says two hundred incidents were reported last school year in Santa Clara County alone. Jewish families reported incidents like this one: An Israeli American girl walked into her first period French class at Cupertino High School to find that many of the other students and the teacher were wearing a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, on the occasion of the Middle Eastern club’s pro-Palestine day. The club handed out a map of Israel labeled only as “Palestine.” In another incident, a 12-year-old middle school student at a charter school in San Jose arrived visibly upset on the first school day following the October 7 Hamas massacre. According to a complaint against the school district later filed by her parents in federal district court, the girl had close family members in Israel whose whereabouts were unknown. The girl asked her world history teacher if she could go to the bathroom to collect herself. The history classroom “was decorated with maps of the modern Middle East in which Israel was erased.” The history teacher knew the girl was Israeli American because she had identified herself as such at the start of the year during an icebreaker exercise. He told her she could not go “until she read aloud to the entire class a passage he had selected to the effect that in the past, Palestinians and Jews had gotten along,” according to the complaint. “The requirement to publicly espouse a position that was at odds with present reality was overwhelmingly oppressive and humiliating.” She read the passage aloud, as directed. The next day at lunch, two female classmates wearing hijabs approached her, according to the complaint, “and demanded ‘What do your people think about the conflict?’ ” When the girl tried to answer, they screamed, “You’re lying—Jews are terrorists.” One demanded: “Do you know that your family in Israel is living on stolen land?” A few days later, two boys chased her around the school yelling, “We want you to die.” Kids began to refer to her as “Jew.” They would say, “Hi, Jew” or “Hey Jew.” If she protested, they said they thought it was funny. The rest of the kids isolated and ignored her when they weren’t whispering about her, the complaint alleges. She lost all but one friend. Her parents met several times with school faculty; according to the complaint, they did nothing to ensure her safety or improve the girl’s situation. A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters. Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” T he text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH !!!!” I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy. I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel !” and “Israel sucks! ” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class . When Dana told her mother what had happened, her mother drove back to the school and asked the teacher, who admitted that the classroom exchange had occurred. Dana’s mother asked the teacher what “Israel and Palestine” had to do with the sixth-grade curriculum. The teacher claimed she couldn’t teach ancient civilizations without talking about the Palestinians. Dana’s mother knew the lesson offered neither historical nor archaeological evidence to tie the modern Palestinian national identity back to antiquity. But teachers today often consume and regurgitate anachronistic propaganda uncritically. I spoke to a San Francisco middle schooler, “Zoe,” who told me her ethnic studies teacher so relentlessly preached anti-Israel sentiment, and the school was so engulfed in anti-Israel propaganda, that it changed how students treated her. Zoe told me one classmate came up to her and said: “A Zionist is someone who wants Palestinians dead .” Zoe replied, “That is actually not what it means at all. ” Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley is a midwife who has three Jewish children. Her son “Danny,” who was a student at Berkeley High School, told her that after October 7, a teacher used the school’s printing press to make “Free Palestine” T-shirts that were then distributed to students. One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.) Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.” One mother reported to grassroots organizers that her seven-year-old daughter came home from elementary school in Marin County last year and asked: “Mommy, if someone asks me if I’m Jewish, do I have to tell them?” Learning to Hate Israel Los Angeles Unified School District is failing its students . In the 2023–24 school year, fewer than half the students met reading proficiency standards, and less than 33 percent were proficient in math. But instead of a laser focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel. It’s hard to imagine what U.S. arms sales to Israel has to do with the district’s core educational goals, but recently, the L.A. teachers union voted in opposition to it. They spend considerable union time and resources on organizing opposition to Israel. In the union’s recent Motions Report from October 10 of this year, half the measures put to a vote related to Israel. One motion, which passed unanimously, endorsed a discussion about “how to organize your workplace to support the Palestine Liberation Movement” and against “the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” The First Amendment protects teachers’ political advocacy in union meetings. But public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political viewpoints in the classroom. “When it comes to K–12 education, the precedents are pretty clear that the school district or legislature or the principal or whoever the political process leaves in charge can set the curriculum and can require the teachers to go along with it,” Eugene Volokh, First Amendment scholar and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, told me. But while the school board or legislature sets the agenda for what must be taught in schools, it can also choose not to police teachers who skirt those rules or even brazenly violate them. Curriculum decisions, Volokh said, are “subject to the political process and not the legal process ,” generally speaking. If the school district doesn’t object to teacher speech—or in fact encourages it—parents’ only recourse is through the political process: voting out state legislators or school board members. Dillon Hosier, Chief Executive Officer of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, explained that for generations, the Jewish community has poured its resources into nonprofits, which are not legally permitted to lobby. “Our opponents,” he said, referring to organizations like Council on American-Islamic Relations, “are putting people in public office and getting bills passed.” That strategy has paid off. School boards and state legislators are reluctant to confront the growing problem in their schools. In Brooklyn, teachers led third graders at PS 705 in Prospect Heights in a chorus of “The Wheels on the Tank,” which encouraged them to despise Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, according to the New York Post : “The wheels on the tanks go round and round, all through the town. The people in the town they hold their ground, and never back down .” The rhyme continued: “Free Palestine till the wheels on the tanks fall off .” The book was illustrated with Palestinian kids hurling rocks at Israeli tanks. In Portland, pre-K lesson plans included the story of Handala, a fictional Palestinian cartoon character who symbolizes the resistance. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people, ” it continues, according to a piece in City Journal . At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it .) The Black Lives Matter Week of Action is a standard program at thousands of schools across the country. It now routinely shifts from a focus on white racism against black Americans to the “other brown people” allegedly subjected to apartheid in the West Bank at the hands of the “white” settler colonialist Israelis, according to several grassroots organizers I spoke to who track radicalism in America’s public schools. (A majority of Israeli Jews are from non-white, non-European heritage.) Three years ago, Nicole Neily founded Parents Defending Education , a nonprofit that exposes radicalism in schools, largely in response to the race and gender ideologies she saw coursing through public schools. This year, when her organization reached out to school districts to inquire whether they planned to include the war in Gaza in their BLM Week of Action instruction, the president of a school board in Rochester, New York, wrote back to confirm that they did. The school board president added, “I would ask that you study the history of the Jewish nation and their involvement in slavery–financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas and the Carribbeans,” referring to a spurious canard associated with Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan. Last spring, millions of Americans watched in disbelief as university students, particularly at our most elite schools, vandalized buildings, set up illegal encampments, and cheered for Hamas. But there was far less attention paid to the parallel dramas unfolding at K–12 schools across the country. Aware of their ability to shape young minds, teachers encouraged schoolchildren to join “Walkouts” for Palestine, don keffiyehs, chant the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and tell their Jewish classmates, “It is excellent what Hamas did to Israel,” according to a complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Education by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Jewish students. “We had been tracking a lot of antisemitic incidents in school even prior to October 7. Obviously, in the wake of October 7, we saw things explode,” Neily told me. “This had sort of been simmering below the surface for a long time. You look at everything that happened on college campuses, and it’s not that kids turn 18, go to college campus, and think, ‘I’m going to underage drink and hate the Jews.’ So much of this was baked into the curriculum before.” Neily, who is Catholic, has now become a national leader in the grassroots effort to expose antisemitism in schools. Her team regularly submits hundreds of FOIA requests, wrangling with schools that hide behind copyright law to avoid disclosing materials taught to American school children. And what she has found is that radical anti-Israel NGOs are training teachers and supplying materials used in thousands of American classrooms.“This stuff is really going viral, coast to coast,” Neily said. Federal law gives parents the right to inspect their children’s educational materials. But schools routinely decline to turn over lessons on the grounds of copyright law. “So long as a parent isn’t asking for the material to duplicate it and sell it, there is no copyright violation in providing that material to parents,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus told me. Marcus is the legal director at The Deborah Project , which protects the civil rights of Jews in education. She added, “It is a bullshit excuse that takes advantage of parents who aren’t lawyers.” Online textbooks are easily supplemented with material from Al Jazeera or other radical sources. Smartboards allow teachers to display fraudulent histories of Israel and outright propaganda. This video , shown to tenth to twelfth graders in the Sequoia Union school district in Northern California as part of the mandatory ethnic studies curriculum, was produced by the virulently anti-Israel Turkish News site, TRT World . It ignores 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel and instead frames Jewish connection to Israel as illegitimate or what is often called “settler colonialism.” The video omits mention of Jews’ historic connection to the West Bank—called Judea and Samaria in the Hebrew Bible—and ignores the fact that the State of Israel accepted several peace proposals throughout its 76-year history that would have created a Palestinian state. It also omits that the Second Intifada and its 138 Palestinian suicide bombings of primarily civilian Israeli targets was the impetus for Israel erecting a security barrier. An Undercover, Front-Row Seat Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values , first noticed an uptick in antisemitic K–12 materials in 2018, when she was getting her PhD in education. “What I saw was what seemed to be a very well-coordinated effort between activist teachers, activist organizations, and administrators that were trying to do a lot of kowtowing to progressive social ideology through programming and bringing that programming into their schools ,” she said. “ There is just this insidious idea that it is okay to hate Jews or attack Jews if they feel any connection to the Jewish homeland—to Israel; if there’s any expression of Jewish pride, especially when that pride is Zionism ,” she said. “I think that antisemitism, like the Jew hatred, isn’t the end goal. I think it’s the symptom of a bigger anti-Western illiberalism that has taken over a lot of our institutions ,” Shufutinsky told me. Curious to learn more about the goals of these anti-Israel educators, Shufutinsky began hanging out in their virtual meetings. As a grad student at the University of San Francisco, she spent almost two years, she says, “undercover” in chat rooms where educators were developing a new curriculum: “Liberated Ethnic Studies.” This would eventually become the mandatory California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In discussions about the need for ethnic studies, educators were uniquely fixated on promoting an anti-Israel agenda. “The whole goal for pushing ethnic studies, making it a requirement, was so that they could teach Palestine, ” she said. When in 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a requirement that schools make completion of ethnic studies a condition of graduation, he effectively made antisemitism a formal feature of California schooling. The original curriculum, “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” was so outrageously antisemitic , it was officially abandoned. In The Free Press , Shufutinsky called it “a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools.” But even the successor course—implemented by many of the same educators who had proposed the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum in California—has provided a vehicle for anti-Israel indoctrination of American schoolchildren. Shufutinsky told me that the reformed curriculum teaches that “ Israel is something that it isn’t. That it’s the ultimate evil. That it is apartheid. That it is a settler colonial state that deserves to be dismantled. That Zionism is racism .” Elina Kaplan, a former manager in Northern California’s tech sector and self-described “lifelong Democrat,” was quick to recognize the problems posed by ethnic studies in the classroom. A childhood spent as a Jew in the former Soviet Union taught her to recognize state-sponsored antisemitic propaganda. She formed a nonprofit to organize against the inclusion of politicized ethnic studies in California schools and maintains an archive of the antisemitic materials promulgated in American classrooms. While her organization helped defeat the worst excesses of the original curriculum, the broader effort to keep antisemitism out of the schools failed. Since 2021, she has seen the antisemitism once confined to ethnic studies sprout in virtually every subject. Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed .’ ” That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us? ” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change. At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets. “Tammy” is a Jewish substitute teacher in Oakland who asked not to be identified. She said in the past year, she’s been astonished by the sheer volume of anti-Israel messaging to school kids across Oakland. She says only the Jewish families object. Where there are no Jewish students, the material goes entirely unopposed. “We’re raising a generation of antisemites,” she told me. “I have a necklace that says my name in Hebrew. And I wear it every day and I don’t take it off. It’s pretty small,” Tammy told me. One day last year, when she was substitute teaching in middle school, a boy saw her necklace and said, “Oh, I’m Jewish too.” The boy went and got his backpack and pulled from it a necklace with a Star of David pendant. She remembers thinking, “Why is it in your backpack? Why aren’t you wearing it?” Previous Next

October 27, 2025 San Dieguito District sets plan for healing in motion following antisemitic act on SDA campus Karen Billing Lucia Gordon, the mother of the student victim of the antisemitism incident, was critical of the district’s response. Gordon said when the incident was brought to light last month, no one ever reached out to her son or family. Originally Posted In: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/10/27/district-sets-plan-for-healing-in-motion-following-antisemitic-act-on-sda-campus/ < Back San Dieguito Academy High School has undergone numerous changes since the district learned about an incident this spring in which eight students formed a human swastika on the school field for a Jewish student to see while flying in a plane overhead. As outlined in the San Dieguito Union High School District board’s Oct. 16 meeting, the district has developed a community supportive plan to strengthen respect and belonging in the wake of the antisemitic act. The plan included partnering with the National Conflict Resolution Center and American Jewish Committee to host staff listening circles, a guest speaker, a parent engagement night and ongoing professional development for staff and students. At the meeting, SDA student board representative Jonah Lupien addressed some of the “growing pains” on campus, which have included an administrative staff shakeup, letting go of a principal and two assistant principals and new interim leadership, a student walkout, and a forum on hate speech. Jonah also organized an event in which 600 students formed a giant heart on the school field, an image in direct contrast to the swastika, sending a message that hate will not be tolerated. Board President Jodie Williams said it was an uplifting act in a moment of darkness. “We are in the midst of a lot of difficult issues,” remarked Superintendent Anne Staffieri. “2025 has been and continues to be a challenging year for so many. I am truly very, very sorry for what is happening and for any students or families who are feeling that they are harmed. We hear you and we want to hear you more fully to understand where that harm is coming from so that we can best adjust, educate and improve our culture. I think this is a continuous improvement that we cannot ignore and we really cannot choose to do anything but place it as a top priority.” As an example of some of her recent advocacy, she referenced San Dieguito students being impacted by immigration and the uptick of ICE activity. Staffieri was one of 24 San Diego school districts and the County Office of Education to send a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Education to ask for extended safe spaces on or around campuses. “We fully recognize the important role of the Department of Homeland Security in enforcing immigration laws and securing our borders,” stated the letter, also signed by local superintendents in Cardiff, Encinitas, Del Mar and Solana Beach. “However, we believe that these responsibilities can and must be carried out in ways that do not compromise the safety or learning of children. Ensuring that every child has the opportunity to learn in an environment where they can dream big, learn fully, and know that they are safe, is a responsibility we all share.” During public comment, the board heard about a lot of hurt being felt in their school community, including concerns that the plan doesn’t adequately address every group facing hate and marginalization, which includes Hispanic, Arab, Muslim, Black and LGBTQ students. One parent shared how the incident at SDA was not an isolated one - when her daughter was called the n-word on campus in January, she said her complaints were dismissed by SDA staff and the students who inflicted the harm were never held accountable. Other parents expressed concerns about the district’s guest speaker, who has publicly questioned the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As part of the community supportive plan, Sara Brown, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee’s San Diego office, led four staff training sessions about the historical significance of the swastika and the recent usage of it as a symbol for neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Hamas terrorists. “The incident that precipitated this training was completely unacceptable and it is always my preference to work proactively with educators and administrators ahead of an incident rather than in response to one,” said Brown, who only agreed to do the training as she believed it was not a “one and done” performative effort but an ongoing commitment to create change. “The delay in reporting has had a lasting, negative impact. Mistakes were made but I do appreciate the response of the district leadership once they were made aware of this incident. They have modeled accountability, taking immediate action to address the situation and investigate where necessary.” Two years ago, the district entered a multi-year partnership with the National Conflict Resolution Center in hopes of building a more supportive and inclusive learning environment and improving district communication and culture. The One San Dieguito initiative was formed in response to a heightened level of hate-based incidents at the time, including a swastika graffitied in a Torrey Pines High School bathroom, and leadership changes precipitated by the former superintendent’s controversial comments about Asian students. Staffieri said the district is being vulnerable and is having a lot of tough conversations. She said the community plan is about creating safer campuses for every student, not just Jewish students. Lucia Gordon , the mother of the student victim of the antisemitism incident, was critical of the district’s response. Gordon said when the incident was brought to light last month, no one ever reached out to her son or family and the only people who took action were the children, like Jonah. “We trusted this school, this district, to help us teach the same lessons we try to live by: to be kind, to be brave, to speak up when something is wrong, to protect others even when it’s hard. But the wrong came from the very place that should’ve modeled what’s right,” Gordon said. “We watched our child, who once felt proud of who he is, begin to doubt himself, to wonder if being Jewish made him the very problem the school would rather not have to deal with. We watched him ask us to let it go, to stop seeking justice because he no longer believed in the adults to do what’s right.” She asked for a public apology not only for the district’s procedural failure but for its failure of “failure of empathy, courage and integrity.” While the presentation to the board that day was centered on an antisemitic act, board President Williams said the district’s intolerance for hate goes across the board. Trustee Michael Allman said that the worst thing they can do is sweep incidents like this under the rug. He had hoped that protocols were in place to investigate and respond to any incident with expertise and empathy when the district hired a community outreach director last year to serve as an ombudsperson, “an impartial dispute resolution practitioner.” Trustee Rimga Viskanta said she has heard for years that when incidents occur, there isn’t a quick response and when hurt or harm happens, it’s left to the victims to report: “We are trying to shift this culture rapidly.” In her comments, Viskanta said she was deeply sorry for what happened at SDA and acknowledged that the district still has a lot of work to do. Previous Next

September 19, 2025 SDA family says antisemitism incident handled improperly Leo Place The San Dieguito Union High School District is addressing an incident from the end of the previous school year in which students allegedly made the shape of a swastika on a field at San Dieguito Academy, with reports that the school’s principal has been placed on administrative leave. Originally Posted In: https://thecoastnews.com/sda-family-says-antisemitism-incident-went-unaddressed-by-district/ < Back ENCINITAS — The San Dieguito Union High School District is addressing an incident from the end of the previous school year in which students allegedly made the shape of a swastika on a field at San Dieguito Academy, with reports that the school’s principal has been placed on administrative leave. In a Sept. 18 statement , SDUHSD Superintendent Anne Staffieri said that in May, a group of students used their bodies to create the formation of a swastika. The image was seen and captured by a Jewish student while flying a plane overhead at the time. While the student’s family reported the incident to school administrators that same day, district leaders said it was not brought to their attention until months later. “Unfortunately, the incident was not brought to the attention of the San Dieguito Union High School District administrators until late last month. I share this point not to deflect responsibility but to clarify that there was a clear and unacceptable breakdown in communication between the school and the District,” Staffieri said. Larry Gordon, the father of the student who captured the image, spoke about the incident at the district board of trustees’ Sept. 11 meeting. He stated that the district’s overall delay in addressing the situation was a breach of duty and urged the district to take responsibility. “On May 30, my son was the direct target of an antisemitic hate crime,” Gordon said. “But the greater hate crime is what followed — silence and delay. No timely report to law enforcement, no prompt investigation, no discipline, no safety plan. By failing to act, this district turned a student act of hate into an institutional act of racism.” Gordon also said the district asked his son to “sit on a panel about how to be nice to each other” before they had publicly acknowledged the incident. The district sent a message to San Dieguito Academy families about the situation last week, followed by a public statement to the community on Thursday. The boy’s family enlisted the help of PeerK12 , an advocacy group for Jewish civil rights in education run by the Israeli-American Civic Education Institute. The organization issued a statement regarding the incident, stating that as of Thursday, San Dieguito Academy Principal Cara Dolnik has been placed on leave pending the outcome of an investigation. District spokesperson Edwin Mendoza said Dolnik remains the principal of the school, but declined to comment on whether she had been placed on administrative leave. The incident allegedly took place on the last day of the school year. According to PeerK12, the 10th-grade student flying overhead thought he was going to be taking a picture of students making a formation of a smiley face, but instead saw the swastika. “Administrators were notified immediately by the family – but declined to report the incident, saying it would be ‘handled next year.’ And then for nearly three months, nothing happened,” PeerK12 said. The organization stated that once they were contacted by the student’s family, they immediately reached out to Trustee Michael Allman, who claimed he was not aware of the incident and escalated it to district leadership immediately. District administrators then contacted the family and initiated an internal investigation. The family has also filed a uniform complaint with the district. San Dieguito Academy, and the wider San Dieguito Union High School District, has contended with multiple hateful incidents targeting Jewish people and other marginalized groups over the years that have sparked community outrage. In 2021 and 2022, San Dieguito Academy was hit with racist and homophobic graffiti on two separate occasions just months apart. In 2019, law enforcement also investigated graffiti of swastikas and homophobic language in school bathrooms. Graffiti of swastikas was also found at La Costa Canyon High School and Torrey Pines High School in 2021. The school district adopted a resolution addressing antisemitism in 2021 to show support for families. Some families said that while the district has made progress in addressing and dealing with hate crimes, they still have a lot of work to do. “The human swastika incident at SDA is only one example. Reports of racial slurs continue, and I question what the district is doing to meaningfully address them. Covering them up only deepens the harm,” parent Janice Holowka said at the Sept. 11 board meeting. Editor’s note: This story and the headline was updated to clarify that San Dieguito Union High School District administrators were not made aware of the incident at San Dieguito Academy until months after it happened due to a lack of communication from the school, and responded to the incident once they were made aware of it. Previous Next

September 19, 2025 Swastika incident at SDA goes unreported; principal placed on leave Steve Puterski Eight students allegedly formed a human swastika at San Dieguito Academy in May. The principal is now on leave amid accusations of delayed reporting and policy violations. Originally Posted In: https://ncpipeline.substack.com/p/students-form-swastika-at-sda < Back Note: School, district and board officials were asked to respond by noon today. Due to unforeseen factors, the deadline was pushed up. Any statements from those officials, should they comment, will be included as an update and in a follow-up story. Two board members declined to comment, and one of them referred questions to the superintendent. ENCINITAS — The principal at San Dieguito Academy has been placed on paid administrative leave after allegedly failing to report an alleged antisemitic act immediately after the incident was caught on camera in May. Cara Dolnik was recently placed on paid administrative leave by the district pending the results of the investigation, according to sources and PeerK12 , a local non-profit fighting against antisemitism and extreme agendas in schools. According to a letter from the district to parents, Robert Shockney will be working in the school’s administration. He is currently the district’s coordinator of College Readiness and Testing. Eight students, all freshmen, were reportedly caught on an aerial photograph forming a human swastika on one of the school’s athletic fields on May 30, an act the family, who are Jewish, and its representatives, are calling a hate crime. The alleged victim told his parents, who informed school administrators, who then allegedly told the parents “people were already on vacation” and the school would deal with it during the 2025-26 school year, sources said. “That image was aimed at him, a Jewish child,” the victim’s father, Larry, told the SDUHSD Board of Education this week. “But the greater hate crime is what followed. Silence and delay. No timely reports to law enforcement. By failing to act, this district turned a student act of hate into an institutional act of racism.” The San Dieguito Union High School District administration and Board of Education were not immediately informed, as required by law and district policy. The district and board members learned of the alleged incident in late August after being informed by Trustee Mike Allman, according to a statement from PeerK12 , which is representing the family. The parents of the eight freshmen students, meanwhile, were also not immediately informed and did not know of the alleged incident until this school year, sources added. “Our school community is shocked and appalled by a hateful situation that took place on the San Dieguito Academy’s campus at the end of last school year,” Superintendent Anne Staffieri said in a letter to the parents on Thursday. “Once I became aware of the image, we took action to work with the families of the students involved and immediately launched an investigation, which is still ongoing.” On May 30, a freshman student was taking a flying lesson out of Palomar-McClellan Airport and was passing over SDA to take a picture of their P.E. class, sources said. The student cleared the activity with the P.E. teacher, who organized for students to position themselves in a human smiley face, according to a source. Previous Next

May 4, 2026 Brandeis Center files Title VII complaint against the National Education Association Haley Cohen The leading Jewish legal group alleges that the country’s largest teachers’ union has repeatedly discriminated against its Jewish members Originally Posted In: https://jewishinsider.com/2026/05/brandeis-center-national-education-association-title-vii-complaint/ < Back A leading Jewish legal group has filed a bias complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the National Education Association, alleging the country’s largest teachers’ union violated civil rights law by discriminating against its Jewish members, Jewish Insider has learned. The complaint, filed Monday by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, highlights several incidents in which the NEA - which represents over 3 million educators - allegedly breached Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects employees, resulting in the spread of antisemitism in K-12 public schools. “Students are arriving to college much of the time already having antisemitic views,” Marci Miller, Brandeis Center’s director of legal investigations, told JI. “We needed to look at the K-12 space to see where this was originating, and we saw that a lot of the false narratives and antisemitic tropes were originating from local teachers’ unions - and in a lot of cases it came from the top, the NEA, which is the umbrella union.” Last summer, the NEA’s Representative Assembly passed a resolution to boycott the Anti-Defamation League’s Holocaust education materials after union delegates complained the ADL’s definition of antisemitism was too strong. While NEA’s board of directors unanimously voted to reject the measure that would’ve ceased relations with the ADL, Jewish educators and parents continue to remain uneasy about rising antisemitism within the union. The 297-page complaint highlights several concerns in the NEA’s 2025 handbook , a 434-page report outlining the organization’s “visionary goals” and “strategic objectives.” Among these examples is official handbook language for International Holocaust Remembrance Day that removed Jews as the primary targeted victims of the Holocaust, reframing the genocide as a generalized tragedy, the Brandeis Center said. The handbook stated that the “NEA shall promote the celebration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 annually on its website and through other appropriate media to recognize the more than 12 million victims of the Holocaust from different faiths, ethnicities, races, political beliefs, genders, and gender identification, abilities/disabilities, and other targeted characteristics. ” Although the language was later revised following public backlash, the NEA did not issue an apology for the erasure of Jewish history from its handbook materials and provided no corrective guidance to members or affiliates. On Oct. 8, 2025, one day after the two-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, the NEA sent a mass email to its membership celebrating Indigenous lands and distributing a “Native Land Digital” map that erased Israel entirely, labeling the territory solely as Palestine and linking to materials associated with organizations that have expressed support for Hamas’ attacks. After public backlash, the NEA removed the resource and issued a statement that the external resource did not meet its standards, but it did not advise members to stop using the materials or issue an apology to Jewish members. According to the complaint, Jewish members reported facing harassment at the NEA’s 2025 Representative Assembly, a convening of the organization’s top leaders from around the country - the same group that voted to censure the ADL. Allegations included Jewish delegates being physically surrounded and shouted at by anti-Israel advocates; delegates laughing after a Jewish delegate referred to the murder of an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor in the Boulder, Colo., antisemitic firebombing attack; and delegates physically intimidating and disrupting the Jewish Affairs Caucus when the executive chair tried to speak. The complaint also alleges that the NEA engages in systematic discrimination by utilizing discriminatory racial quotas and preferences, a practice that harms Jewish members who are excluded from preferred racial groups, denying them equal access to opportunities and full participation in union governance. “NEA is not taking enough steps to make Jewish teachers, Jewish members feel comfortable in the NEA,” said Miller. “They may have taken some minimal steps but haven’t really responded to complaints from members.” The complaint comes as NEA is under investigation by the House Committee on Education and Workforce, as well as the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, following allegations that its policies and materials have fostered an environment conducive to antisemitism in K-12 schools. Previous Next

June 13, 2024 How Public Schools Became Ideological Boot Camps Robert Pondiscio In nearly every public school in the country, children are given curriculum materials that have no official oversight or approval. Originally Posted In: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-public-schools-became-ideological-boot-camps < Back A pair of teachers at New Jersey’s Fort Lee High School recently taught students that Hamas is a peaceful “resistance movement” and Israel is committing genocide. Teachers at California’s Berkeley Unified School District are “indoctrinating students with antisemitic tropes and biased, one-sided anti-Israel propaganda disguised as education,” according to a complaint by the Anti-Defamation League. Meanwhile, students recently chanted “from the river to the sea” at college campus “tentifadas” —but when pressed could identify neither. Why does this keep happening? And how can public schools at once be hotbeds of radicalism and “woke” indoctrination, yet produce students who are so poorly informed about the radical causes they ostensibly espouse? The answer has a lot to do with one of American education’s dirty little secrets: on any given school day in nearly every public school in the country, curriculum materials are put in front of children that have no official oversight or approval. It’s true that schools might have a state- or district-adopted curriculum, but that doesn’t mean it’s getting taught. Nearly no category of public employee has the degree of autonomy of the average public school teacher—even the least experienced ones. Teachers routinely create or cobble together their own lesson plans on the widely accepted theory that they know better than textbook publishers what books kids will enjoy reading and which topics might spark lively class discussions. Not your child’s school or teacher? Wanna bet? A 2017 RAND Corporation survey found that 99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary schools use “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. The numbers are virtually the same in math. But putting teachers in charge of creating their own lesson plans or scouring the internet for curriculum materials creates an irresistible opportunity for every imaginable interest group that perceives—not incorrectly—that overworked teachers and a captive young audience equal a rich target for selling products and pushing ideologies. This ungoverned mess is how the majority of high-profile curriculum controversies happen. Earlier this year, The Free Press ’s Francesca Block broke news that PS 321 in Brooklyn, New York, sent kids home with an “activity book” promoting the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, including “queer affirming,” “transgender affirming,” and “restorative justice.” The book was not authorized for classroom use either by the NYC Department of Education or Brooklyn’s Community School District 15. It appears to have begun its journey into students’ backpacks at the massive “Share My Lesson” website run by the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union. The site claims 2.2 million members—more than half of all U.S. public school teachers—and hosts “more than 420,000 resources” that have been “downloaded more than 16 million times.” Lee & Low Books, the publisher of What We Believe, the BLM activity book, is a Share My Lesson “partner ” and includes the book in its “anti-racist reading list for grades 3–5.” Other Share My Lesson partners include Amnesty International, the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), GLSEN , and the Southern Poverty Law Center—all producing free lesson plans and materials for classroom use. The advocacy group Parents Defending Education has documented over a thousand incidents of schools teaching lessons on race, gender, or other hot-button issues that parents deemed inappropriate or upsetting. They are seldom traceable to formally adopted school curriculum. But there are 75 different lesson plans and resources for conducting “privilege walks ” and more than 100 lessons and resources on “preferred pronouns” at Teachers Pay Teachers, another lesson sharing megasite . Prior to legislative efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, there were only three school districts in the country known to have expressly authorized teachers to use the New York Times 1619 Project in lesson plans: Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to produce 1619 Project classroom materials , claimed to have “connected curricula based on the work of [Nikole] Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms”—another illustration of the yawning chasm between curriculum that is officially adopted and what actually gets taught. Teachers putting controversial material in front of children, either naively or to pursue an agenda, isn’t even the worst of it. When they hunt for materials to engage students, teachers shoot low. A 2019 study published by the Fordham Institute rated most of the materials on Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.” A similar report from The New Teacher Project found that students “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject.” Disadvantaged students were the hardest hit. Choose-your-own-adventure lesson planning inevitably results in gaps and repetition when there’s no coherent blueprint for what students should learn, or when those plans are disregarded by schools and teachers. Which river? Which sea? It was never covered. All of this should be sobering to parents and policymakers who think “curriculum transparency” is the solution to classroom controversies. Knowing the curriculum or programs a school district has “adopted” is a cracked lens. Absent regulations specifically requiring teachers to post all lesson plans and materials online on a daily basis, including material they create or find on the internet, it’s nearly impossible to say with any certainty what occurs inside the black box of the public school classroom. Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of How the Other Half Learns . Follow him on Twitter at @rpondiscio . Previous Next

July 19, 2024 Anti-Israel resolutions on docket for US teachers union JNS News Desk The American Federation of Teachers will vote on proposals that fuel “discrimination and hatred against Jews,” critics say. Originally Posted In: https://www.jns.org/anti-israel-resolutions-on-docket-for-teachers-union/ < Back 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. Amy Leserman, chair of the Educators Caucus for Israel, said that “it is astounding that AFT leadership has allowed this, and so many other, blatantly bigoted resolutions to move forward, when they are clearly motivated by values contrary to the purpose of the AFT.” Previous Next

March 10, 2025 The Ethnic Studies Battlegrounds: Political Ideology, Teacher Unions, and a Divided Jewish Community Nicole Bernstein Subversion and “othering” have proven to be disturbingly effective, contributing to an increasingly fractured Jewish community. This division has made it difficult for us to unite and recognize the external threats we face. Originally Posted In: < Back Education is no longer just about reading, writing, and arithmetic; ideological battles now shape classrooms across the United States. One such battle centers on ethnic studies—originally intended to highlight marginalized voices and foster historical understanding. However, ethnic studies was hijacked right from its inception by political operatives aiming to reshape our nation’s core values. The surge in antisemitism, particularly in K-12 and college settings, underscores the success of these divisive strategies. Subversion and “othering” have proven to be disturbingly effective, contributing to an increasingly fractured Jewish community. This division has made it difficult for us to unite and recognize the external threats we face. The Ethnic Studies Origin Story: Hero or Villain? Ethnic studies began in the late 1960s at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, with the goal of offering diverse perspectives and reconciling historical truths, though it quickly became a Trojan Horse for radical, anti-American ideology—eroding our nation’s Judeo-Christian, pro-democracy foundations in favor of collectivism, violent revolution, and Marxist totalitarianism. Rather than foster unity, it divides students into categories of oppressors and oppressed, fuels resentment, legitimizes Jew-hatred (including anti-Zionism), and glorifies violent social upheaval. The Data Behind the Concerns Jewish organizations initially dismissed concerns about systemic antisemitism in education, attributing incidents to isolated cases. However, a December 2023 Harvard-Harris Poll revealed disturbing trends: a 900% increase in reported antisemitic incidents in the U.S., with 30% of young Americans under 24 believing Jews caused the Holocaust, 60% believing Hamas was justified in its October 7 attacks on Israel, and 67% viewing Jews as oppressors. These statistics point to a broader educational shift that prioritizes political activism over academic rigor. California’s Ethnic Studies Mandate Controversy Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2025 budget excluded funding for the ethnic studies mandate (AB101), preventing its enforcement as a graduation requirement. While seemingly a victory for opponents, the battle is far from over. Ethnic studies advocates are entrenched among faculty and administrators while school board meeting confrontations confirm a determination to teach ethnic studies regardless of state funding. Moreover, external funding from activist groups and foreign entities shields these programs from financial constraints, allowing them to spread unchecked. Teachers’ Unions: America’s Most Powerful Monopoly Teachers’ unions control nearly every aspect of public education. According to Americans for Fair Treatment, unions allocate twice as much funding to political campaigns as they do to services for members. Teachers’ unions, which dominate oversight mechanisms at the local, county, state, and national levels remain deeply invested in advancing ethnic studies, strategically infiltrating school boards over the past fifty years, and redirecting their focus from teacher advocacy to political activism. At the 2019 National Educators Association (NEA) conference, for example, they rejected a proposal to prioritize “centering student learning” in favor of a resolution mandating Critical Race Theory (CRT) in K-12 schools. Activist educators have embedded themselves in school systems, promoting antisemitic rhetoric and radical political views. Groups like the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Coalition equate Israel with apartheid and promote figures like Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Leila Khaled, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis, while the Marxist-Leninist group Union del Barrio, which calls for the decolonization of Southwestern USA, is influencing school board elections. When Ideologies Become Reality PeerK12 has exposed many incidents which illustrate the extent of the issue locally. The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Equity & Belonging Department has repeatedly distributed anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda as resources to thousands of teachers; they later retracted and apologized but the damage is done. SDUSD was also forced to remove their District English Learner Advisory Committee Chair for sharing violent anti-Israel imagery. Unfortunately, she also served on the district’s Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, and currently does teacher training for the Liberated Ethnic Studies Consortium. In San Dieguito Union High School District, a middle school teacher proudly displayed a picture of Adolf Hitler as an example of “great leadership skills.” She vehemently refused to remove the photo but was finally forced to after PeerK12’s mobilization efforts. That incident also resulted in the district creating the Superintendent’s Jewish Parent Committee. In Poway Unified School District, a PTA president and DEI VP was removed, and that DEI committee was dismantled, after we exposed her promotion of extreme antisemitic rhetoric while leading diversity efforts across the K-12 district. Another district enacted new policies for “Multicultural Day” after we exposed anti-Israel paraphernalia being distributed under the guise of a Palestinian heritage display. A history teacher at High Tech High International publicly undermined a Jewish student’s presentation on Israel’s 1948 War, replacing it with a pro-“Nakba” narrative while exempting other students from such scrutiny. After many meetings the teacher was forced to publicly apologize for the incident in front of the entire class. At Francis Parker School, a history class provided heavily anti-Israel biased materials with inflated casualty stats. PeerK12 was allowed to audit the history department curriculum, resulting in removal of biased materials and the restoration of factual lesson plans. Groups like ours are fighting back through monitoring curricula for biased content, advocating in school board meetings and parent coalitions, using legal action including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to challenge antisemitic discrimination, and engaging with school board candidates to restore educational integrity. A Fight for the Future of Education The ethnic studies battle extends beyond education—it represents a battle for the ideological future of America’s youth. It is also a crucial issue for the American Jewish community, which faces the risk of further division or, alternatively, the opportunity for unity in the fight against this radicalization. Teachers’ unions and activists have spent decades embedding their agenda in public schools. We must act to undo this damage by reclaiming school boards, holding unions accountable, and advocating for objective, non-politicized curricula. Until this is achieved, education will remain a battleground for the ideological hearts and minds of Americans. Previous Next

January 23, 2026 Opinion: Don’t buy blatant deceptions of San Diego Unified’s teachers union Todd Maddison SDUSD’s total cost of certificated pay and benefits in the current school year is expected to be $806 million. Agreeing to SDEA’s demands would add $64.5 million to that cost. There is not enough money to fund existing programs without cuts, and approving those raises would require even larger cuts. Originally Posted In: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/01/23/opinion-dont-buy-blatant-deceptions-of-san-diego-unifieds-teachers-union/?share=outisiutisrr1bispcbn&fbclid=IwY2xjawPnZjRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe0EjFdrs5oEh-CpGH6_EBokfO9fwkwsB3l9umQTpJzZpU1m07e7uw0aqfC5Q_aem_aX_XCOC09WMRnUjOJ8dtng < Back Teachers unions around the state are attempting to negotiate for higher compensation, many coordinated by the California Teachers Association as part of its “We Can’t Wait ” initiative. At the same time, school districts around the state are in dire financial condition, with four on the verge of requiring state and county intervention and 20 more being watched closely for signs they will not be able to pay their bills. San Diego Unified’s union, the San Diego Education Association (SDEA) is one of those asking for higher pay and benefits. SDUSD is not on the list of financially endangered districts, but is heading that way. Projections in the district’s 2025-26 first interim financial report predict it will need to use money from its reserves to avoid insolvency. According to these projections, SDUSD will need to pull $29.7 million from reserves this year to pay its bills, and make cuts of $47.7 million in 2026-27 and another $113.1 million in 2027-28. With 90% of the district’s budget going to employee compensation, there is no way to make such cuts without impacting programs and services that help educate kids. Meanwhile, the SDEA is proposing a new contract that would raise its members’ pay and benefits by 8% . In 2024, full-time certificated employees in the district made a median total compensation of $156,482 , according to public pay records obtained from the district and published by Transparent California . An 8% raise would increase this to about $169,000. SDUSD’s total cost of certificated pay and benefits in the current school year is expected to be $806 million . Agreeing to SDEA’s demands would add $64.5 million to that cost. There is not enough money to fund existing programs without cuts, and approving those raises would require even larger cuts. The SDEA has now scheduled a strike for Feb. 26. Union officials say this is related to violations of their contract on special education staffing. SDEA Union President Kyle Weinberg is quoted as saying they want the district to “prioritize staffing that directly supports students.” Improving services for special education is certainly a worthy goal, but is that really the union’s priority? Its words are contradicted by the actual numbers, which clearly prioritize higher pay and benefits for adults. And those numbers define the money needed to educate kids. The SDEA bargaining updates page claims if this raise is not approved teachers will get “no raise this year.” That ignores the fact that the salary schedule — still in place — gives most educators a raise every year. This makes both statements blatant deceptions. These are not disagreements over facts, because both the cost of their demands and the normal raises in their salary schedule are black-and-white numbers. Isn’t deceiving the community and parents to take money away from funding for the education of their kids and giving it to yourself particularly bad? To paraphrase the SDEA’s December bargaining update , it’s pretty clear their negotiating positions actually “reflect priorities that are deeply out of touch.” Out of touch with what parents want for their kids, and out of touch with what kids need from their school. State testing shows barely 56% of SDUSD’s kids are proficient in English, and slightly over 45% are meeting standards in math. Improving special education should be done, but perhaps instead of forcing the district to make even deeper cuts in education to improve the bank accounts of well-compensated adults, the San Diego Unified board should consider improving funding for programs and services that actually improve education for kids. The common talking point in these negotiations is that teachers deserve “fair pay.” Teachers are essential and work hard. Whether $156,000 is “fair” for this is in the eye of the beholder, but damaging the education of kids by striking for more money for adults is certainly not fair to them. Maddison, an Oceanside resident, is a founder of both the San Diego Schools and Parent Association advocacy groups as well as the director of research at Transparent California . Previous Next

April 21, 2026 PeerK12 Statement on Politicized Classroom Video at Torrey Pines High School in the San Dieguito Union High School District PeerK12 Staff District-Approved “Men’s Mental Health” Video Created a Politically Charged, Hostile Environment for Jewish Students Originally Posted In: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXZVTbrDqo5/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== < Back PeerK12 has received multiple reports from students and families regarding a school-sponsored “Men’s Mental Health” video shown in San Dieguito Union High School District classrooms on April 20, 2026. While the topic of mental health is both appropriate and important, the setting in which the message was delivered was not neutral. The teacher appeared seated directly beneath a Palestinian flag, introducing a highly controversial political symbol into a District-approved and classroom-based activity. The timing further compounded the impact. The video was shown on Yom Hazikaron - Israel’s Memorial Day, a solemn day for Jewish and Israeli communities. For affected students, the combination of political symbolism and this specific date created an environment that was perceived as emotionally triggering and inappropriate. Students who reported the incident to PeerK12 expressed fear of retaliation and did not feel comfortable raising concerns - fears that are objectively reasonable given the District’s prior actions. This reflects a broader and ongoing concern among families regarding inconsistent standards and a lack of viewpoint neutrality in District classrooms. PeerK12 is calling on the District to take the following actions: Provide a clear explanation - during the April 23, 2026 Board Meeting (Agenda Item 8C: Mental Health Awareness Month Proclamation ) - of how this video and its setting were reviewed and approved Establish and enforce clear expectations prohibiting political symbolism or personal political expression by staff during school-sponsored activities Ensure classroom neutrality by publicly supporting and implementing the CORE-ACTION “Keep Politics Out of Classrooms” campaign Reestablish a Jewish Parent Advisory Group with regular engagement to ensure meaningful collaboration between families, educators, and District leadership Classrooms must remain environments focused on education - not political signaling. All students deserve to feel respected, supported, and free from ideological pressure. ---------------------------------------------- UPDATE During the April 23, 2026 school board meeting, Superintendent Anne Staffieri responded to the incident during her Superintendent's Report ( view recording here ). PeerK12 is incredibly disappointed to see the Superintendent first admit that the video in question was in fact reviewed and approved by multiple people who each failed to activate the District's own Board Policies on Controversial Issues and Political Neutrality with regards to the video; and then, following that admission of guilt, she proceeded to victim blame the Jewish community - presumably for standing up for our violated Jewish civil rights. The irony that Jewish mental health (for men or otherwise) is NOT a priority that this Superintendent is interested in protecting. We condemn her entire public statement: ".... As I mentioned - and we know - no one can control what others may post on social media. But I can assure our school community, and all of you as Trustees in our incredible district, that we will always strive to provide you with verified, factual information. Multiple social media posts are being shared broadly which inaccurately depict Torrey Pines, and are causing great concern and questions among community members, so I am going to address this and share context and the truth. One post involves a video that shows a portion of a Tour de France flag and a Palestinian flag in the background and it is being perceived as a political statement, with absolutely no context. I can see where some people could interpret it as such. However, I can assure you it was neither political nor intentional. I personally dove into the situation to get the full information, and here are the facts. Student leaders in the Peer Assistance Listeners, or PALs program, recently asked a teacher if they could record a short video statement in support of men’s mental health, being that May is Mental Health Awareness month. Being a terrific supporter of student engagement and student wellbeing, the teacher, who is also an AP Social Science teacher, agreed. He sat down at a student desk in his classroom and agreed to participate in a student-created video. In the background of the video, shot in portrait mode (the one that goes up and down, which as many of you know creates a very narrow view of the setting), you can see portions of a Tour de France flag and portions of a Palestinian flag. What you don’t see is the full perimeter of the AP Social Science classroom, which is adorned with dozens of flags from around the world including three US flags and an Israeli flag. The image in the video was interpreted by some as a political statement. It was not. The video was previewed by several groups, including students, teachers, and the administration. Because everyone was focused on the content and the delivery of the message and is accustomed to the classroom setting where these flags are always present, the flags in the background were not identified for removal. That said, the image was hurtful and deeply concerning to some members of our community, and so to those impacted and to everyone, I want to stress that this is an important lesson in content production , with a keen sensitivity to others. We have requested that the video be removed in order to avoid any further misunderstanding and concern. As Superintendent I don’t typically dive into the specifics of social media narratives in a public forum. However, I do think it is important as not only social media posts result in misinformation and hateful commentary, they can also provoke threats of violence. Earlier this month there was as “swatting” incident, where threats were made against a staff member drawing the attention and protection of the San Diego Police department. Authorities quickly determined the threat was not credible, and at no time was the safety of the campus compromised. However, it did result in a disruption to the learning environment of the entire campus. I personally was on that campus the entire time of that event, and we engaged law enforcement and closed campus for a time. The point is, statements taken out of context with the intent to provoke the community against a school, or against a staff member, can have very real and potentially dangerous consequences. For these reasons, it is very important that as a school community that we do not fall victim to online false narratives, and we encourage anyone to seek confirmation of allegations before engaging with the content. I don’t want to leave you with an impression that we will not act on information that demands responsible attention. We always will work on the side of truth, facts, and what is best for our student and staff wellbeing. We continue to place a paramount priority on student and staff safety on all our campuses. I want to personally acknowledge the dedication and professionalism of our staff, who continue to show unwavering commitment to supporting students despite these unsettling experiences. We appreciate their focus, care and resilience in the face of challenging and often unfair public narratives. Information and opinions that have been broadly shared without context or facts have caused deep concerns and demanded resources that should be focused on more positive work with our students. And there is so much great work taking place across the district. Every day, talented, passionate, professional educators and support staff create amazing learning environments for our students. Our families expect exceptional education, and those people, our staff, work tirelessly to deliver nothing less than extraordinary teaching and learning. Our district, I've heard it several times tonight, is ranked in the top 20 of all the publicschool districts in the nation. There's over 13,000 public school districts in the whole country and we're ranked in the top 20. All of our schools, all of them, have been recognized as California's distinguished schools. I'm very honored tomorrow to join with leaders and staff celebrating recent recognition from four of our school sites as they receive the 2026 California Distinguished School recognition. Let's talk about that in social media. Really, thank you for your patience as I read through this message, but we can all do better, and as we move through these final weeks in the school year, our focus is going to remain on supporting students and one another with care, with purpose, and with intention. " ------- And here is Trustee Michael Allman's public comment on this incident - we'd like to thank Trustee Allman for his moral clairty on this issue: "I want to make a few comments on the recent issue regarding the Palestinian flag so we can be clear where I stand and I think the district as well. One is the importance of keeping politics out of our classroom. We have a board policy on controversial topics. It's not about what any individual believes, it's about maintaining a classroom environment where every student can feel safe and focused on learning, and not on political conflict. I think it's also useful for members of our public to understand that there's two important legal principles that are relevant here that they might not really understand, or will be surprised when they hear about it. First is that our teachers don't have First Amendment rights in the classroom when they're performing their jobs. The courts have been very consistent about this, that a teacher on the job is an employee who's executing the district's curriculum. They're not there with their own private free speech. And second is that we as a public institution can’t engage in viewpoint discrimination. As a public institution, our choice is binary. We either prohibit all political statements and symbols in the classroom, or we permit all of them. And if we allow the Palestinian flag, we better be prepared to allow every political symbol from any viewpoint, and we've seen how quickly that can become divisive and it's harmful ultimately to students. Another point I want to make is that the district adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition of Antisemitism. It's the most widely accepted standard used by governments and institutions worldwide, and that definition draws what I think is a very important distinction - the distinction between being critical of the policies of the Israeli government. That's legitimate political discourse. But if you argue that Israel should not exist as a state, that's antisemitism - the denial of people's rights to their own self-determination. So in our current environment where the Palestinian flag is frequently displayed alongside explicit calls for Israel's elimination by leaders of the PLO and Hamas who adopted this flag, we cannot ignore the message that that sends to our Jewish students and families in our community. Our antisemitism policy, our controversial topics policy, and basic viewpoint neutrality all point to the same conclusion. As Steve, the National Conflict Resolution Center gentleman said earlier tonight, prevention is the key. I'm a big believer in that. If we want to prevent conflict and hurt feelings and community division, we need to draw a clear and consistent line before these incidents occur. Let's keep controversial political topics out of the classroom, consistently, without exception. It's not suppression of anybody's individual's viewpoints. They can believe whatever they want, but it's a responsibility of us to be stewards of a public institution." Previous Next

June 24, 2025 Ramona Unified postpones high school ethnic studies course for 2025-26 Julie Gallant Ramona Unified School District high school students will continue to be offered the traditional English II course only while plans to pilot an “English 2/English 2 Honors: Ethnic Perspectives in Literature” course are put on hold. Originally Posted In: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/06/24/ramona-unified-postpones-high-school-ethnic-studies-course-for-2025-26/ < Back A proposed ethnic studies literature course for high school students in the Ramona Unified School District is being postponed because funding has not been provided for its implementation. Starting with the 2025-26 school year, all districts in the state were required to offer the course following a state framework that provides an opportunity for students to learn about the histories, cultures, struggles and contributions of historically marginalized groups in America. But the district’s Education Services Department announced last month that ethnic studies is not currently a required course because funding was unavailable. The current state budget doesn’t include funding — estimated at $276 million — that would trigger the ethnic studies graduation requirement, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the state Department of Finance. He attributed it to “limited available ongoing resources.” Beginning this fall, Ramona Unified students entering ninth grade would have been the first class required to pass a one-semester class at some point during their high school years. Daryn Drum, president of the school board, said the state provided funds to the district to develop the curriculum but not to implement the course. “RUSD staff chose to develop a curriculum that is specific to Ramona and this community instead of just adopting a curriculum that was developed elsewhere,” Drum said in a June 20 email. “Our staff did an admirable job in the creation of the curriculum and they are to be commended. “This is the first time that RUSD staff has taken on a task like this and they put in many long hours to produce a thought-provoking experience for our students.” Drum said if and when the legal requirement to offer and/or require an ethnic studies course is confirmed, Ramona Unified will take steps to implement the course. To be ready, staff will continue refining the course’s instructional units, he said. Trustees had discussed plans to pilot the new ethnic studies curriculum by trying it out in classrooms this fall. It was scheduled to be reviewed for approval by trustees in May 2026, according to a staff report. After discussions, the board in January 2024 approved a course titled, “English 2/English 2 Honors: Ethnic Perspectives in Literature.” Several staff members were involved in writing the curriculum for the course, including Julia Shotwell, Nicole Del Castillo and Laura Nelson. Trustee Maya Phillips said she believes the district is taking the correct action to reverse its decision to require high school students to participate in ethnic studies during the next school year. “The course had been presented as a pilot program, but in practice, it would have made participation mandatory,” Phillips said in a June 15 email. “The district has also acknowledged what I have been stating since February … in the absence of state funding, there is no requirement to offer the course.” Phillips, who has stated her opposition to the ethnic studies curriculum in the past, said she believes it violates federal law. “In my view, the Ramona Unified School District’s ethnic studies units are deeply rooted in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ideology and promote racially discriminatory frameworks,” Phillips said in the email. “DEI frameworks have been directly addressed and prohibited under President Trump’s executive orders.” Phillips said she is concerned that if the district was to continue with the curriculum it could jeopardize the district’s eligibility for federal funding. At the April 22 school board meeting, trustees discussed the value of an education on topics such as race, heritage and culture and debated the merits of teaching high schoolers about social activism. At the time of the discussion, Ramona Unified’s course was still being crafted. Trustee Rodger Dohm said it may be healthy for students to talk about their heritage, backgrounds and perceived injustices. “For some, it’s going to be a relief to talk about it and an opportunity for healing,” said Dohm, who favors students celebrating ethnicities and culture through their traditional food and clothing. “It’s important we do talk about it. People can come together and unite as one and become one Ramona family. “The curriculum should not be saying, ‘I am a victim,’” he added. “It should be the other way around. It should say, ‘Here’s our heritage. How can I persevere through the challenges I have.’” Trustee Dan Summers said he was “uncomfortable” with material that encouraged students to act on social justice. Summers said he also thought the content negatively portrayed America, particularly regarding its description of slavery and treatment of Native Americans. “I don’t think we should encourage people of this age group to become social activists,” said Summers, who is also chair of the American Liberty Forum of Ramona. Until an official appropriation is made and the requirement is triggered, the district will continue to offer its traditional English II course only, according to the May 20 memo. The decision was made “to ensure that teachers and students are not placed in a position of division or uncertainty around a course offering that is not yet mandated,” it states. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE Previous Next

December 8, 2025 Students form human swastika on Calif. high school football field - call for ‘annihilation of Jews’ in Hitler-themed Instagram post Joe Burn Eight San Jose high school students formed a human swastika on their school’s football field in a horrifying display of antisemitism that has sent shockwaves through the Silicon Valley community. Originally Posted In: https://nypost.com/2025/12/08/us-news/human-swastika-formed-by-students-at-bay-area-branham-high-school/ < Back Eight San Jose high school students formed a human swastika on their school’s football field in a horrifying display of antisemitism that has sent shockwaves through the Silicon Valley community. The disturbing scene was photographed and shared in a since-deleted Wednesday social media post that featured an antisemitic 1939 quote from Adolf Hitler. “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” read what appeared to be an Instagram caption. Branham High School announced Friday that an investigation has been launched, as first reported in the J. The Jewish News of Northern California. The eight students have been identified, but their names will not be revealed due to federal law. “Our message to the community is clear: This was a disturbing and unacceptable act of antisemitism. Actions that target, demean, or threaten Jewish students have no place on our campuses,” school principal Beth Silbergeld said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times. Silbergeld, who is Jewish, refers to herself as “Educator, conscious eater, mama, urban hippie, sneakerhead, NJ to CA,” according to her Instagram. Maya Bronicki with the Bay Area Jewish Coalition (BAJC) told NBC Bay Area that a fellow student at Branham High School came across the shocking photo and alerted his parents and other families. BAJC spokesperson Tali Klima condemned the human swastika display in a blistering statement. “To have children echoing Hitler’s words is frankly just shocking and heartbreaking, and the entire community has been rocked by this,” Klima said in a statement, according to The Guardian. “This bold and premeditated display has really shaken everyone.” State Sen. Scott Wiener, who shared a photo of the human swastika on Facebook, applauded the school’s swift response but raised concerns over the incident. “We need to ask ourselves why these students believed it was ok to do this — not just the swastika but linking it to extermination of Jews due to ‘international financial Jews,'” the Democrat wrote . “Antisemitism is pervasive & growing. It’s leading to harassment & violence against Jews. Yet, there’s an orchestrated campaign to deny its existence. We see this in the lies spread in opposition to the Jewish community’s work this year to pass state legislation on school antisemitism,” he added. Wiener’s post, however, elicited a wave of troubling responses in support of the eight students, including one that read: “This gives me faith in the next generation.” Another Facebook user wrote, “The youth are healing.” The hateful act has been reported to San Jose Police Department, and the district also stated it will work with Anti-Defamation League, the Bay Area Jewish Coalition and the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area. The human swastika episode marks at least the second time this year that Branham High School made headlines in connection to antisemitism allegations. Back in April, the California Department of Education (CDE) ruled that an ethnic studies course discriminated against Jewish students, according to The Times of Israel. The formal complaint was lodged by the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, and accused teachers of presenting biased information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 12th-grade ethnic literature course. According to the state DOE ruling, a teacher showed students a pro-Palestinian news explainer “The Israel-Palestine conflict: a brief, simple history,” but not a pro-Israel perspective. “In order for the information to be unbiased, there would have needed to be a video that reflected a pro-Israel perspective. This would have encouraged students to create authentic answers regarding the questions provided in the lesson,” the CDE report said. Previous Next

Browse PeerK12’s documentary video collection - an insightful library of full-length documentaries exposing antisemitism, radical indoctrination, and bias in K–12 schools. Watch factual accounts, investigations, and expert interviews to stay informed and support fair, safe educational environments. RECOMMENDED DOCUMENTARIES Watch KILLING AMERICA CAN OUR SCHOOLS BE SAVED? Explore the impact of racial equity on public education & the resulting rise in hate & antisemitism in K-12. A FILM BY ELI STEELE WATCH THE FORGOTTEN REFUGEES MIZRAHI JEWS REMEMBER THEIR LIVES IN ARAB COUNTRIES, THEIR EXPULSION & THEIR COMING TO ISRAEL. A FILM BY AVI GOLDWASSER WATCH THE LOTTERY THE STORY BEHIND THE SUCCESS ACADEMY, A NYC CHARTER SCHOOL GROUP THAT IS BRINGING INNER CITY GRADUATION RATES TO NEW HEIGHTS. A FILM BY MADELINE SACKLER WATCH AMERICAN MISEDUCATION HOW DID OUR UNIVERSITIES BECOME HOTBEDS OF HATE? A FILM BY THE FREE PRESS WATCH COLUMBIA UNBECOMING INTIMIDATION & HARASSMENT OF JEWISH STUDENTS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IS NOTHING NEW... A FILM BY AMERICANS FOR PEACE & TOLERANCE WATCH the u.s. & the holocaust WHAT DID AMERICANS REALLY KNOW ABOUT WHAT WAS HAPPENING TO EUROPEAN JEWS DURING WORLD WAR II? A KEN BURNS FILM additional RESOURCES 01. Video Collections 02. Articles 03. Podcasts 04. ETHNIC STUDIES LEARNING HUB

May 12, 2025 Parents claim ideological bias in Mesa College course at La Jolla High School Noah Lyons The group focuses particularly on what it considers one-sided discussion of the Israel-Hamas war. Mesa College contends the content is 'protected by academic freedom.' Originally Posted In: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/05/12/parents-claim-ideological-bias-in-mesa-college-course-at-la-jolla-high-school/ < Back A group of parents at La Jolla High School is criticizing a college preparation course at the school over what the parents perceive as ideological imbalance and “political indoctrination.” School leaders say the San Diego Mesa College professor who teaches the course is within her rights. The course, “Introduction to Political Science,” analyzes civic and global affairs, among other topics, and is part of an “ongoing commitment to provide college- and career-ready opportunities to our students in preparation for their future,” according to James Canning, spokesman for the San Diego Unified School District. However, parents Wyatt Collin, Karen Hobbs and David Herrera sent an email to the La Jolla Light detailing their discontent with the course, saying they were writing on behalf of 20 families, most of whom requested anonymity. They said they also complained to La Jolla High and Mesa College, to no avail. La Jolla High Principal Chuck Podhorsky declined to comment to the Light and referred questions to Canning. Mesa College said in a statement to the Light that “ we have concluded the content of the course is protected by academic freedom and does not violate the law or SDCCD [San Diego Community College District] policies. Our findings are framed by legal standards and precedent and do not diminish the personal experiences of any member of our community .” The parents’ concerns center on parts of the course related to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian organization that governs the Gaza Strip. Specifically, they pointed to class readings “A Deadly Apathy ” by David Shulman and “Infinite License: The World After Gaza ” by Omer Bartov, as well as a video-recorded panel discussion titled “Teach-In on Israel/Palestine ,” as evidence of ideological bias and replacing analysis with activism. They claim the course, taught by professor Yvonne Gastelum, is “defined by ideological messaging, racial essentialism and an astonishing lack of intellectual balance,” with assignments that lack context, counterpoint or critical examination. “Infinite License,” an essay written for The New York Review of Books, states that “the memory of the Holocaust has, pervasively, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.” Later in the essay, Bartov — a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and the author of “Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis” — characterizes Israel’s actions in the war as repeating historical patterns of genocide. “Teaching political science without offering multiple perspectives is malpractice,” according to the parents’ email. “Teaching it with a singular narrative that casts one group as heroes and another as monsters isn’t higher education — it’s dogma.” The parents also contended the class “veered into lectures on the ‘levels of Whiteness’ among Jewish populations, dividing students into racial categories based on ancestry, tone or cultural heritage. These are not ‘teachable moments.’ They’re racially charged distractions with no academic merit and no place in a high school classroom.” Sharon Amsalem, a parent at La Jolla High, said her son is enrolled in the course and was assigned to read “Infinite License” but felt uncomfortable with the subject matter. After getting up and leaving class, he was offered an alternate assignment, Amsalem said. “I was really mad,” she said. “I right away called the school and talked to one of the advisers there. She told me they could not do anything … because it’s from Mesa College and it’s not part of La Jolla High School.” “It’s really, really giving one side of the situation,” she added. “And yes, Israel is doing bad things; they’re [all] doing bad things. … I’m not saying who’s wrong and who’s right. But if you give the situation, give the whole picture.” Amsalem said her son never felt “targeted” by the professor and that he remains in the class. Jose Oldak’s child is not enrolled in the course, but he has joined other La Jolla High families in opposition to it. He learned of other parents’ concerns after joining an online group formed by Jewish families at La Jolla High in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023. Oldak said he moved his son to La Jolla High in hopes of avoiding classwork that he believed was intended to “get the students to take sides.” “For me, it’s really important that this kind of thing does not become a constant in every single California school,” Oldak said. “There seems to be a group of ideologically minded people that instead of teaching children, they just want to indoctrinate them. “If it was presenting two sides of the same issue, OK, fine. There is a broader exposure to ideas. There is an exploration. But in this case, this is not what’s happening.” Oldak said he contacted La Jolla High and Mesa College and received “dismissive” responses from both. Canning told the Light that students in the class, along with their families, were aware of the course they signed up for. “We passed along the concerns we received from families to the college and we encouraged the families/students to directly speak with the professor of the class,” Canning said. The parents blasted that suggestion, saying “Mesa and La Jolla High washed their hands of the matter and left the burden on teenagers to challenge a college professor who grades them.” Gastelum could not be reached for comment for this story. The American Federation of Teachers’ collective bargaining agreement with the San Diego Community College District states in Section 12.1.6 that “academic freedom and freedom of expression afford the faculty the right to speak freely, pursue research and write without unreasonable restrictions or prejudices.” Mesa College stated that it and other higher-education institutions are “vital spaces for academic inquiry and exploration of events occurring throughout the world.” “Those events, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, are often deeply personal and bring a variety of perspectives which may be conflicting,” according to the college’s statement. “We continue to work to expand our cultural humility and awareness to better create environments where all members of our community may engage in academic discussions on complex and sometimes divisive topics with mutual respect and a sense of belonging.” This isn’t the first time that controversy over the Gaza conflict has reached La Jolla. UC San Diego was the site of one of the largest demonstrations in campus history on March 6, 2024, when about 2,500 pro-Palestinian protesters marched across campus demanding an end to the war and pushing the university to drop its relationships with businesses perceived as hostile toward Palestinians. The unrest came to a head two months later when police raided a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus after UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla declared that the encampment “violated campus policy and the law and grew to pose an unacceptable risk to the safety of the campus community.” Some 65 students were arrested, most on suspicion of unlawful assembly. Previous Next

May 29, 2026 California School District Settles Major Antisemitism Lawsuit with Victims Who Alleged Rampant Abuse Dion J. Pierre Litigation related to antisemitic incidents in California K-12 schools surged following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which triggered a barrage of antisemitic hate crimes throughout the US and the world. Originally Posted In: https://www.algemeiner.com/2026/05/29/california-school-district-settles-major-antisemitism-lawsuit-victims-who-alleged-rampant-abuse/ < Back The Sequoia Union High School District in the Bay Area region of California has settled a lawsuit which accused its officials, faculty, and staff of racially abusing Jewish students over a period of years which began after an explosion of hatred set off by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. Announced on Wednesday by The Deborah Project, the terms of the resolution are completely public, with the parties agreeing to a payment of $325,000 as well as a slew of reforms to address the issues which prompted the claim. Filed in November 2024, the lawsuit charged that in one example a Jewish female sophomore endured mistreatment at the hands of a world history teacher who wore shirts promoting anti-Zionism, flooded the classroom with misleading propaganda, and penalized students who refused to answer biased test questions with the politically correct response. In other examples cited in the suit, anti-Zionists graffitied swastikas on campus, administrators refused to meet with parents reporting antisemitism complaints, and students and teachers alike traded Holocaust jokes and antisemitic slurs. Teachers even allegedly uttered jokes about concentration camp prisoners being baked in pizza ovens and Jews being stuffed in ashtrays. So unrelenting was the daily barrage of abuse that several of the plaintiffs stopped wearing Stars of David to avoid being detected as a Jew, according to the suit. “Jewish students in the Sequoia Union High School District were not only attacked by students and faculty members for their Jewish and Zionist identities, but when they sought protection from the school district, their complaints were ignored, intentionally misunderstood, or maligned,” Lori Lowenthal, attorney and legal director of The Deborah Project, said in a statement to The Algemeiner . “Amongst the many major changes in the settlement we achieved was the obligation to ensure that what is taught in the classroom does not include indoctrination against the Jewish state, such as the denial of Israel’s right to self-defense and self-determination.” On Friday, one of the victims’ parents told The Algemeiner that reforms called for by the settlement — including mandatory training sessions on antisemitism for teachers and staff, an enhance reporting system for discrimination complaints, and removing antisemitic content from classrooms — are overdue but may spare future Jewish youth his own daughter’s experience in the Sequoia Union High School District, which was defined by bullying and browbeating by her instructors. “You know, I’m really excited because in the beginning this was always about accountability, and what we really wanted was a change in the process for protecting kids from racial abuse. The minute I put my complaint in, they did whatever they wanted to do. None of it was OK,” said Sam Kasle. “I hope we’ve made Sequoia Union a better place for years to come.” Following the settlement’s announcement, Sequoia Union High School District superintendent Crystal Leach committed the district to combatting antisemitism while declining to discuss the substance of the lawsuit’s allegations. “The district takes all reports of discrimination seriously and recognizes the pain and distress they can reflect. It acknowledges that Jewish and Israeli-American students, families, and staff members have reported experiencing harm caused by discrimination, including antisemitism within our school community,” Leach said. “These concerns have been heard by the district, and it understands the importance of addressing these concerns thoughtfully and promptly. No student should feel unsafe, unwelcome, or targeted because of their faith, heritage, or identity.” Meanwhile, Tali Klima of the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, which helped promote the victims’ stories, said the local Jewish community followed the case “closely” and “feels vindicated that there is finally recognition of a systemic antisemitism problem.” She added, “We hope that nearby districts take note.” Litigation related to antisemitic incidents in California K-12 schools surged following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, which triggered a barrage of antisemitic hate crimes throughout the US and the world. The list of outrages includes a student group chanting “Kill the Jews” during an anti-Israel protest and partisan activists smuggling far-left, anti-Zionist content into classrooms without clearing the content with parents and other stakeholders. Elsewhere in California, K-12 antisemitism has caused severe psychological trauma to Jewish students as young as eight years old and fostered a hostile learning environment, according to multiple complaints previously reported by The Algemeiner . In the Berkeley United School District (BUSD), teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes about Israel , weaponizing disciplines such as art and history to convince unsuspecting minors that Israel is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing a genocide of Palestinians. While this took place, high level BUSD officials were accused of ignoring complaints about discrimination and tacitly approving hateful conduct even as it spread throughout the student body. At Berkeley High School, for example, a history teacher forced students to explain why Israel is an apartheid state and screened an anti-Zionist documentary, according to a lawsuit filed last year by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The teacher allegedly squelched dissent, telling a Jewish student who raised concerns about the content of her lessons that only anti-Zionist narratives matter in her classroom and that any other which argues that Israel isn’t an apartheid state is “laughable.” Elsewhere in the school, an art teacher, whose name is redacted from the complaint for matters of privacy, displayed anti-Israel artworks in his classroom, one of which showed a fist punching through a Star of David. In another lawsuit filed just weeks ago, Eden Horowitz, a female Jewish student from Alameda County, alleged that the San Leandro Unified School District (SLUSD) stood down while students and instructors at the Social Justice Academy of San Leandro High School tormented her for nearly three years. One teacher, Erica Viray Santos, led the movement against her, the complaint charged. In class, Santos made a show of accusing Israel of “genocide” and proclaimed that she would not teach key units on the Holocaust. Allegedly, Santos also publicly paraded her contempt for Horowitz, denouncing her in arguments with the school’s principal that she initiated within earshot of the class. Meanwhile, her classmates began calling her a “Zionist” and a “racist.” Previous Next

August 29, 2025 Beverly Hills Unified to adopt new flag policy after superintendent overrules Israeli flag display Julie Sharp 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." Originally Posted In: https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/beverly-hills-unified-school-board-to-adopt-new-flag-policy-after-superintendent-overrules-israeli-flag-display/ < Back 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

January 27, 2026 Ethnic studies course will continue to be an option for freshman English in San Dieguito Karen Billing As pilot classes continue, the San Dieguito Union High School District board voted this month to continue offering ethnic studies as an optional ninth grade English course for students in the coming school year. Originally Posted In: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2026/01/27/ethnic-studies-course-will-continue-to-be-an-option-for-freshman-english-in-san-dieguito/?fbclid=IwY2xjawPnazRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeaHU0iw9rEEGt-Kf5098Xr4eZ_i6f7B1mIJsL08iAmt3_eyL2XNKVihxnkzg_aem_TooB-02dZwf33l7-8Bxh9w < Back The ethnic studies course, while no longer a state graduation requirement, is an opportunity for students to gain cultural understanding and learn about the struggles and contributions to American society of historically marginalized groups. At the Jan. 22 meeting, the board voted 4-1 in favor with Trustee Phan Anderson opposed. Her preference was that ethnic studies be an elective course rather than integrated into ninth grade English. Per Assembly Bill 101 which passed in 2021, ethnic studies was supposed to be a graduation requirement for all California students in the class of 2030, those who would be entering high school in fall 2026. In response, San Dieguito started preparing and over a period of six months in 2024 underwent a robust curriculum development process that included surveys and community and board workshops on each of the course’s four units: identity, history and movement, social movements and equity and systems: progress and barriers. At times, the process was controversial as there were a lot of differing opinions about the content. In early 2025, after Governor Gavin Newsom’s budget did not include any funding for the course, it became no longer a graduation requirement. The district pivoted and opted instead to pilot the course starting this school year, including it in ninth grade English or Honors English. San Dieguito’s Director of Teaching Learning and Education Brieahna Weatherford said getting to this point has been incredibly challenging, the culmination of two years of work. The ethnic studies pilot is being offered at all four high schools, with about 245 students enrolled and eight teachers teaching the course. San Dieguito Academy has the highest number of participants with three classes and 99 out of about 385 freshmen opting in. Teacher Ruth Magnusen shared that she believed her pilot class at SDA had a powerful impact on students’ sense of self and feeling of belonging. In the class, they talked about their personal families’ histories and traditions, analyzed and wrote about literature, researched social movements and took field trips to visit the Centro Cultural De La Raza, The Museum of Us and other House of Pacific Relations International Cottages at Balboa Park. Weatherford said in visiting ethnic studies classrooms she saw students discussing culture, community and personal identity, connecting with poetry and through novels like “Black Boy” and “The House on Mango Street,” about a young Latina growing up in Chicago. Feedback from students has been positive—students said they had an opportunity to hear from a wide range of voices and perspectives while improving their reading and note-taking skills. Students said they felt the course was a way to promote understanding and possibly prevent microaggressions and the subtle racist and discriminatory jokes heard on campus against marginalized groups. Over the last few years the district has struggled with racist and antisemitic incidents, most recently at SDA. Student and teacher input continues to shape the course and Weatherford said there is always room for improvement, such as adding additional novels that represent the Asian Pacific Islander and Native American experience, and more professional learning for teachers. One student’s suggestion was to focus an equal amount of time on both history and current world events. That night the board heard from 21 speakers in support of offering the class, many of them students advocating for a more diverse and inclusive curriculum for their peers. Dylan Black, a SDA freshman who took the pilot course this year, said the class allowed students to learn more about each other and also become better debaters and thinkers. “A lot is going on in the world right now, it’s a complicated time,” Dylan said “Regardless of what you may believe about ethnic studies, I hope we can all agree that if diverse voices aren’t being heard in America, they may not be heard in other places either. Let’s use this privilege that we have…People can be less afraid of each other, the world can be more connected. We can make a better place for future generations.” Mari Kradjian, a junior at Torrey Pines and president of the TPHS Armenian Club, spoke about how she often felt invisible at school and would jump at any chance to talk about her family’s story and Armenian heritage. She believed ethnic studies is one way for every student to feel seen. “Ethnic studies tells stories that are usually left out of textbooks, stories that allow for connection to other cultures,” Mari said. “Ethnic students does not tell students what to think, it teaches us how to think. Learning multiple perspectives helps us understand the world and its people…and make way for a foundation for forming ideas and thoughts. That’s not controversial, that’s education.” With her dissenting vote, Anderson was dismissive about the popularity of the class, noting that by the numbers provided, only 10 to 11% of freshmen were opting to take it: “If it was such a great class, we would see more kids interested in it.” She believed the course should be an elective and that ninth-grade English should just focus on reading, writing and nothing else. She said the district’s goal should be getting all high schools up to Canyon Crest Academy’s level on Advanced Placement test scores. In her vote of support, Vice President Rimga Viskanta offered that she sees the value of ethnic studies in developing critical thinkers and expanding course materials to include multiple perspectives. “I always support a course of study that broadens students’ understanding over one that narrows it,” Viskanta said. Previous Next

April 30, 2024 PeerK-12 Official Statement Expressing Strong Objections at the Politicization of San Diego Unified School District’s Jewish American Heritage Month Proclamation PeerK12 It is deeply concerning that the school district has chosen to politicize Jewish American Heritage Month, just as they did Arab American Heritage Month with the inclusion of Edward Said and Doris Bittar, by endorsing figures who polarize and detract from the celebration of a rich and diverse heritage. Originally Posted In: < Back We express our profound disappointment and disapproval regarding the inclusion of individuals like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others in the proclamation for San Diego Unified School District's Jewish American Heritage Month, as posted in the agenda for Tuesday, April 30th school board meeting . These individuals are known for their divisive and politically motivated stances that are starkly anti-American and anti-Israel. Their controversial views are Marxist and are not representative of the Jewish community and undermine the purpose of this observance. It is deeply concerning that the school district has chosen to politicize Jewish American Heritage Month, just as they did Arab American Heritage Month with the inclusion of Edward Said and Doris Bittar, by endorsing figures who polarize and detract from the celebration of a rich and diverse heritage. These decisions are not only a significant oversight but also a severe misjudgment that politicizes and tarnishes the intent of such commemorations. By doing so, the district has regrettably used both heritage months as political pawns, which is unacceptable and deserving of strong condemnation. This proclamation is the antithesis of the Resolution Condemning Antisemitism that SDUSD adopted on October 26, 2021 in both spirit and content as it is not "inclusive and reflective of best practices and the full diversity of the Jewish people and Israeli-Americans." PeerK-12 is committed to values that foster unity, respect, and understanding across all communities - therefore, we demand immediate correction and oversight to ensure that such missteps are not repeated. We urge the school district to uphold the spirit of this heritage month by celebrating figures who unify rather than divide, reflecting the true values of our community and country. Materials, appropriate figures, videos, curricula, and additional resources for Jewish American Heritage Month can be found here: https://jewsinschool.org/jewish-heritage-month and here: https://jewishamericanheritage.org/for-educators . * * * PeerK12 For all media inquiries, please contact info@peerk12.org Previous Next

Since 2021, PeerK12 has been on the front lines protecting K–12 education from Jew-hatred and extremist agendas. With expertise in ethnic studies, school district politics, and Jewish Civil Rights advocacy —we are unapologetic in our work to expose and remove antisemitism in elementary, middle, and high schools at the root. for & Partners Equality Educational Responsibility in k-12 Founded in 2021, PeerK12 is a grassroots movement operating on the front lines inside school districts by defending Jewish civil rights, fighting extremist agendas, and protecting merit-based education in America’s K-12 institutions. 01. We hold school districts accountable, educate voters and candidates, advocate for policy reform, and build powerful coalitions with like-minded allies. 02. Our expertise includes handling and resolving antisemitic incidents in K-12, ethnic studies , school district politics, and Jewish Civil Rights advocacy. 03. We fight for integrity, merit-based equality, and truth in every classroom, and we won’t back down until every student’s civil rights are protected. empowering voices We don’t just raise awareness; we deliver results. We're parents ourselves - so we know what it's like to try and navigate the K-12 system and the frustrations of having your concerns trivialized or even ignored. The system is complicated, confusing, and cumbersome. Purposefully so. But we're here to help. Our case-by-case, customized advocacy strategies empower parents, students, teachers, and communities to identify and address Jew-hatred and injustice in K-12 schools with urgency, precision, and lasting results. By working directly with impacted parents, affected students and teachers, and concerned community leaders we help shape or reshape the policies and laws that ensure long term protection against anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, and anti-American bias and hate. DRIVING CHANGE Unapologetically fighting for our Jewish Civil Rights in K-12. We are the bridge that connects K-12 policy makers, administrators, and elected officials with their constituents. Our activities range from passing resolutions at school boards and building relationships with candidates and incumbents, to responding to antisemitic incidents in schools, and organizing workshops that train parents and students on how to advocate for the protection of their Jewish civil rights in the K-12 ecosystem. Everything we do provides immediate support for the victims while at the same time delivering positive and long lasting change by preventing or eliminating future recurrences. Through targeted advocacy, coalition building, and hands-on mobilization activities, we create impactful solutions. ACCOUNTABILITY While some stay silent, we step up & demand accountability. When Jew-hatred and intolerance go unchallenged, PeerK12 steps in as a proactive and relentless force for accountability and change. Some may find our proactive approach aggressive - we call it bold, proud, and unapologetic - because we believe that standing up for your own civil rights is always the right approach. Mobilizing communities, engaging policymakers, and ensuring that no student or family ever feels alone is our commitment in the fight for the protection of Jewish Civil Rights in K-12 environments. advocacy & mobilization Our grassroots reach has enabled us to help parents, students, and teachers across the country. We’ve been on the front lines since 2021, helping parents nationwide navigate every challenge in their school districts. Whatever you’re facing, we’ve seen it—and we know exactly what works (and what doesn't) . L et us fast-track you past the trial-and-error frustrations straight to our proven strategies that get results. You don’t have to go at it alone—we’re in this together. Join our Movement

May 11, 2026 Investigation launched into Florida's Bay County School District for alleged antisemitic discrimination J.T. Lynch The U.S. Department of Education has opened an investigation into alleged antisemitic discrimination in the Bay County, Florida, School District. Originally Posted In: https://www.wjhg.com/2026/05/11/bay-county-florida-school-district-under-investigation-alleged-antisemitic-discrimination/ < Back BAY COUNTY, Fla. “The school has taken action aggressively to the students as well as to the employee. We’re also in partnership with the state in terms with what’s going to take place with the future of the particular faculty member involved,” said BDS Superintendent Mark McQueen. “So I think we’ve done exactly the right thing, I think we’re in full compliance with the law, and we’ve done everything that anyone would reasonably expected regards to the investigation and the appropriate actions taken subsequently.” According to the Anti-Defamation League , the allegations involve an 11th-grade student who was subjected to “antisemitic bullying, harassment and discrimination on a regular basis while enrolled at the A. Crawford Mosley High School in the Florida panhandle, part of a sustained and recurring pattern that had continued against the boy since elementary and middle school through 2025.” The U.S. Department of Education has opened an investigation into alleged antisemitic discrimination in the Bay County, Florida, School District. The Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) said it is opening a complaint to investigate claims the district failed to respond to what it called particularly egregious antisemitic harassment of students. According to the U.S. Department of Education, OCR will determine whether the District violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VI) by allowing or failing to meaningfully respond to antisemitic harassment. In press release from the U.S. Department of Education the claim is described below: “The District was allegedly aware of antisemitic bullying, including repeated stereotypical comments, conspiracy theories about Jews, and swastikas being drawn in textbooks and on various locations across school campuses. In one instance, a group of students performed Nazi salutes, mockingly wore yarmulkes, and showed highly offensive antisemitic imagery during an in-class presentation. The District allegedly failed to take reasonable and effective responsive action to stop the harassment and prevent its recurrence.” Previous Next