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

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

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

< Back This is a Title 02 This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Want to view and manage all your collections? Click on the Content Manager button in the Add panel on the left. Here, you can make changes to your content, add new fields, create dynamic pages and more. You can create as many collections as you need. Your collection is already set up for you with fields and content. Add your own, or import content from a CSV file. Add fields for any type of content you want to display, such as rich text, images, videos and more. You can also collect and store information from your site visitors using input elements like custom forms and fields. Be sure to click Sync after making changes in a collection, so visitors can see your newest content on your live site. Preview your site to check that all your elements are displaying content from the right collection fields. Previous Next

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

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How to spot the next anti-Israel political star before it’s too late. < Back The Mamdani Index How to spot the next anti-Israel political star before it’s too late. The victory of New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral primary surprised many observers. He was outspent and lacked the traditional power brokers. He still won. A well-organized and politically extreme movement is beginning to reshape national politics, fostering anti-Israel positions early in the careers of state and local officials. For the pro-Israel community, the mission is urgent and clear: Build nimble and effective state and local pro-Israel networks. And do it now. That work is beginning through a collaboration that pairs Israeli-American Civic Action Network’s (ICAN) state and local monitoring and research with the Jewish Leadership Project’s network of activists. Guided by ICAN’s analysis, this network can focus on emerging threats and begin responding in key communities, laying the groundwork for coordinated and effective action before anti-Israel figures get too entrenched. Mamdani’s record did not appear overnight. We at ICAN first took notice of Mamdani in July 2023, when he introduced the “Not on Our Dime ” Act as a state legislator, targeting pro-Israel nonprofits while promoting rhetoric and alliances that signaled extreme radicalism. Unfortunately, in that pre-Oct. 7 summer, our warnings never had the chance to be acted upon. For several years, our organization has been building a framework for state and local political research to monitor and report on the public affairs activities of elected officials. Mamdani’s candidacy underscores the need for such a system. It operates as a political threat index—focusing on state and local officials - and identifies, tracks and scores anti-Israel positions before they mature into national influence. State and local politics are often a game of musical chairs, where political careers are made. Today’s city council member becomes a state legislator. Today’s state legislator becomes a member of Congress or the mayor of a major city. We can now track these officials, assessing the direction, pace and substance of their political trajectory in real time. The scale is significant, but quantifiable. At the state level, there are 7,383 legislators, and at the local level, a little more than 19,000 city councils, 16,000 school boards and 3,000 county governments. Anti-Israel coalitions understand this math and have targeted these offices for years. Our index distills years of research and analysis into five areas: First, substance: what officials say about Israel, Gaza, the BDS movement and antisemitism in speeches, interviews and written statements. Second, volume: how often anti-Israel messaging appears and whether it spikes around crises. Third, policy: votes, sponsorships and amendments that target Israel or Israeli-American civil society. Fourth, coalitions: links to groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SPJ), as well as participation in related events. Fifth, patterns: how positions escalate over time and how networks reinforce those shifts. This index goes beyond a scorecard. We examine the whole official, including social-media activity and engagement patterns; constituent newsletters and press releases; event attendance; and endorsements, given and received. The aim is to identify leading indicators that voting records alone will hide. Just two weeks after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in Richmond, Calif., after hours of public testimony, Mayor Eduardo Martinez advanced a resolution accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment and urging a ceasefire. Richmond became the first city in the United States to adopt a ceasefire resolution - a symbolic yet influential move that was repeated by dozens of municipalities in the weeks that followed. Earlier this year in Massachusetts, State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven filed H.2984 to direct the state pension fund to divest from companies supplying military equipment to Israel unless those firms pledge to stop. The measure singles out Israel in statute and gives advocates a nationwide test case in a mainstream legislature. In Maryland, State Delegate Gabriel Acevero introduced the “Not on Our Dime ” Act. The bills would expose Maryland-registered nonprofits that support Israel to civil suits and penalties, including loss of charitable status. These are names you’ve likely never heard before, and these three officials are just the beginning. There are many more like them around the country. Officials build an Israel-centered brand, align with national advocacy networks and replicate a familiar package of policies and phrases. By the time the wider public notices, the infrastructure is in place. These are the proof points used to tune the model. Early detection allows engagement where education is still possible and organized opposition where it is not. Previous Next

In nearly every public school in the country, children are given curriculum materials that have no official oversight or approval. < Back How Public Schools Became Ideological Boot Camps In nearly every public school in the country, children are given curriculum materials that have no official oversight or approval. 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

The site seems to be intentionally trafficking in disinformation related to Jews, Israel, and Zionism < Back Wikipedia’s Jewish Problem The site seems to be intentionally trafficking in disinformation related to Jews, Israel, and Zionism 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

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< Back Previous Next AFT to vote on controversial proposals Proposals including ending US military aid to Israel, protecting pro-Palestinian protesters Carl Campanile Jul 16, 2024 America’s second-largest teacher’s union has drafted a group of resolutions calling for the end of US military aid to Israel — and defending the anti-Israel protests that have rocked campuses across the country. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — which is affiliated with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) that represents most teachers in New York City public schools — will vote on the controversial proposals at its national convention starting in Houston next Monday . One of the resolutions, which calls for a cease-fire between the Jewish State and the terror group Hamas, demands a halt to US military assistance that enables the “violent dispossession” of Palestinians. “American military cannot be used in ways that facilitate the seizure of Palestinian land, the violent dispossession of Palestinian communities and the annexation of occupied Palestinian territory,” the resolution reads. A related eyebrow-raising proposal even goes so far as suggesting the US is “enabling genocide” in Gaza. “[A]s long as Israel continues to block substantive and meaningful aid to Gaza, the AFT calls for the US to halt military aid to Israel,” it says. Another resolution calls for anti-Israel protesters to be protected — even after violent demonstrations have swept college and school campuses since Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish State. “[T]he AFT expresses solidarity with those students, faculty and other academic workers across the United States who have faced repressive and violent crackdown of their protests in the war in Gaza,” the resolution reads. “[T]he AFT demands that campus administrators cease their campaign of threats, suspensions and expulsions against peaceful protesters and cease using law enforcement agencies to disrupt and attack them,” it continues. The proposal also defends the demonstrations as “academic freedom” and “free speech.” A coalition of pro-Israel educators swiftly condemned the resolutions as antisemitic. “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 , an instructional coordinator and 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.” Amy Leserman, chairwoman of the Los Angeles-based Educators Caucus for Israel also denounced the proposals as “blatantly bigoted.” “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,” she said. Even AFT’s maligned president, Randi Weingarten — a Jew who self-identifies herself as a “progressive zionist” and whose spouse is a rabbi — has opposed resolutions supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. She co-wrote an op-ed column in April for USA Today with Karen Marder, the pro-Israel New York teacher who was forced to hide in a locked office as an angry mob tried to push its way into her classroom at Hillside High School in Jamaica in November. Many students became enraged to learn she was photographed at a vigil for the victims killed two days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attac k on Israel. In a statement on Tuesday, Weingarten singled out only one resolution for support — calling for “an end to the war in Gaza and lasting peace, security and self-determination for Israel and Palestine.” Her silence on the anti-Israel resolutions signals that they will likely be defeated. “As we head into our annual convention, here’s a reminder that the AFT is a democracy where locals can submit resolutions. And they do. Plenty of them. Proposals are simply proposals unless they are considered and passed at our delegated, democratic convention,” Weingarten said in a statement on X. One of the resolutions, which calls for a cease-fire between the Jewish State and the terror group Hamas, demands a halt to US military assistance that enables the “violent dispossession” of Palestinians. “I support Resolution #30 that opposes anti-Semitism and hate of any kind, and that reflects our Executive Council resolution unanimously passed in January,” she continued. “I have been clear throughout this difficult time — hate of all kinds is antithetical to the values we promote as a union and as professionals in our schools. We are a movement driven by love, not fear.” Still, pro-Israel educators slammed that resolution as well, for trying to prevent Israel from defending itself after being attacked by Hamas in a declaration of war. Resolution 30 declares that there is “no military solution to this conflict” and blames “far-right” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “prolonging” the war. “Netanyahu has an interest in prolonging the war to escape the public scrutiny of his colossal failure to protest Israel’s citizens and his own pending criminal prosecution,” the resolution reads. “While Israel’s initial case of war — self-defense against the criminal acts of Oct. 7 — was just, the ways in which the Netanyahu government has prosecuted it — its sanctioning of indiscriminate and disproportionate violence, resulting in a massive civilian death toll — has made it unjust.” The coalition of pro-Israel educators labeled the resolution as “offensive.” “It is offensive for a union based in the United States to tell a sovereign nation how to conduct its defense and equate a democratically elected government with Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization designated as such by the US Department of State,” the group said. Read more: https://nypost.com/2024/07/16/us-news/aft-to-vote-on-controversial-proposals-including-ending-us-military-aid-to-israel-protecting-pro-palestinian-protesters/

< Back Previous Next San Dieguito board talks next steps in addressing Hitler photo at Carmel Valley school District will hold community forums, staff training around antisemitism and create a new superintendent committee Karen Billing Oct 18, 2022 The Jewish community in the San Dieguito Union High School District is speaking up after a picture of Hitler was posted in a seventh-grade social studies classroom at Carmel Valley Middle School, alongside world leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. Members of Partners for Equality and Educational Responsibility (PEER K12) rallied outside of the board’s meeting on Oct. 13 demanding meaningful action against antisemitism: “We want action, not words,” said parent Tamar Caspi, echoing the message on many of their protest signs. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2022/10/17/san-dieguito-board-talks-next-steps-in-addressing-hitler-photo-at-carmel-valley-school/

< Back Previous Next Union-Tribune Community Advisory Board member resigns due to repost on personal Facebook 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 Staff Nov 4, 2023 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. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2023/11/04/union-tribune-community-advisory-board-member-resigns-due-to-repost-on-personal-facebook/

< Back Previous Next Hitler 'had strong leadership qualities' says teacher, photo placed with MLK, JFK Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's photo was placed on a board next to inspirational leaders such as Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. Michael Starr Oct 3, 2022 Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's portrait was placed alongside inspirational historical leaders in a San Diego school history class last week, and when a student complained the teacher explained that Hitler had committed bad deeds but was a great leader, NGO Partners for Equality and Educational Responsibility in Kindergarten thru 12th grade (PEER K-12) told The Jerusalem Post . At the Carmel Valley Middle School, as part of a lesson for 7th graders, Hitler was included on a board that displayed the likes of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, US president John F Kennedy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. According to PEER K-12, a 12-year-old student communicated to their teacher that it was inappropriate to display a photo of Hitler alongside such positive role models. Read more: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-718888

< Back Previous Next The Ethnic Studies Battlegrounds: Political Ideology, Teacher Unions, and a Divided Jewish Community 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. Nicole Bernstein Mar 9, 2025 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. (ADL), 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 P eerK12 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.

If you’ve ever wondered why young Americans are embracing increasingly extreme views on race, power, identity, Israel, and Jews, this webinar connects the dots with clarity, historical depth, and urgency. < Back CAM REVIEW | Ethnic Studies: The Dangerous Ideology Quietly Shaping US Classrooms If you’ve ever wondered why young Americans are embracing increasingly extreme views on race, power, identity, Israel, and Jews, this webinar connects the dots with clarity, historical depth, and urgency. Why are Jewish students facing unprecedented levels of antisemitism — from grade school on up to the university level and beyond? The answer may not lie only in biased news reporting on global events or inflammatory social media discourse, but also deep within the American education system itself. A 2023 survey conducted by Harvard CAPS/Harris revealed that 79% of Americans aged 18–24 believed all white people were oppressors and all people of color oppressed. That same poll found 67% in this age group saw Jews as oppressors, 60% felt the Hamas October 7th attack was was justified, and 73% trusted Hamas to accurately report casualty figures in Gaza. These aren’t isolated beliefs — they form a coherent worldview shaped not by spontaneous cultural trends, but by a deliberate ideological framework increasingly embedded in classroom curricula. In an eye-opening webinar last week, titled “The Ethnic Studies Origin Story: Uncovering the History Behind The Most Controversial Discipline ” and hosted by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) , Nicole Bernstein, co-founder of PeerK12 , traced the roots of this phenomenon back to its source: the rise of Ethnic Studies. Far from being a neutral academic discipline, Ethnic Studies was born from radical activism. It emerged alongside anti-colonial uprisings, Third World Liberation fronts, and revolutionary Marxist frameworks — movements that sought not only to critique Western society, but to dismantle and rebuild it entirely. Bernstein explained how these ideas, once confined to fringe university departments, have entered the K–12 classroom through decades of institutional advocacy, policy lobbying, and grassroots organizing. Today, these same ideologies form the backbone of state-mandated Ethnic Studies curricula across the country, often under the radar of parents, school boards, and even teachers. Concepts like “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” and “dismantling systems of power” are now presented to children as academic truths — not political theories. But as Bernstein made clear, their intellectual DNA is anything but neutral. The result is an educational movement that does more than teach history — it reframes the American story itself through a rigid ideological lens, silencing alternative viewpoints and replacing inquiry with indoctrination. If you’ve ever wondered why young Americans are embracing increasingly extreme views on race, power, identity, Israel, and Jews, this webinar connects the dots with clarity, historical depth, and urgency. Bernstein doesn’t just inform — she exposes the origin story of an educational revolution that is reshaping how the next generation thinks. Whether you’re a parent, educator, policymaker, or concerned citizen, this is the key to understanding how we got here — and why we can’t afford to stay silent any longer. Watch the full recording of the webinar — and find out what’s really being taught in American schools. Previous Next

Critics say unions taking part are undermining their members by taking an overtly partisan stance. < Back Randi Weingarten’s ‘No Kings’ push shows teachers union is prioritizing activism over education Critics say unions taking part are undermining their members by taking an overtly partisan stance. Over 1,500 rallies will be held against Donald Trump across the USA tomorrow as part of what organizers have dubbed “No Kings Day.” Critics say unions taking part are undermining their members by taking an overtly partisan stance. The American Federation of Teachers, American Postal Workers Union, and Communications Workers of America are all listed as partners of No Kings Day. AFT president Randi Weingarten is set to speak at the Philadelphia No Kings Rally. School choice activist Corey DeAngelis told The Post Weingarten’s involvement reveals “that teachers unions are more invested in political activism than in prioritizing education. Their actions expose them as little more than an arm of the Democratic Party, pushing a radical agenda that puts taxpayers on the hook for funding the K-12 education of illegal immigrants,” DeAngelis said. Weingarten spearheaded a No Kings town hall on Tuesday , declaring the event is “about strong public schools, supporting working families, and our fundamental freedoms.” The Zoom call also featured Democrat Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Al Sharpton. “The people are the most important decision makers in the country. Not a king, not a dictator,” Weingarten said during the call . She is set to speak at the Philadelphia event, and the AFT has an entire webpage of volunteer opportunities populated with No Kings Day events . Weingarten has also promoted the event to her more than 100,000 followers on X. “Where was this outrage from Randi Weingarten when her local affiliates fought to keep schools closed for years during the COVID era?” DeAngelis asked. “Imagine if Randi Weingarten fought half as hard to improve public education. Maybe then more than a quarter of American kids would be proficient in math.” The protests are billed as a counter to the Army’s 250th anniversary military parade in DC, as well as the president’s 79th birthday, which falls on the same day. The rallies are expected to disrupt hundreds of cities in all fifty states, and have been backed by activist organizations like Black Lives Matter and the ACLU. The day’s military parade will travel down the National Mall in Washington DC and will reportedly include uniforms, arms, and vehicles from every major American war, starting with the Revolutionary War, then moving on to display more recent Abrams tanks and P-51 Mustangs. No Kings Day organizers have dubbed the parade “a made-for-TV display of dominance,” while their own events on Saturday are “a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to the increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption of the Trump administration” – somehow omitting the president was overwhelmingly democratically elected just seven months ago. Jamie Bauer, a representative of No Kings, told The Post that they have indication that their crowd could exceed 75,000 in New York City alone. Other “flagship” rallies are planned in Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Charlotte, and Atlanta. No Kings is orchestrated by the 50501 Movement (short for 50 protests, 50 states, one movement), a grassroots anti-Trump group that reportedly formed on Reddit . They first held a No Kings rally on February 5th, then another on President’s Day, and a third in March. No Kings pledged not to hold a rally in DC, after President Trump warned that protesters at the military parade would face “very heavy force.” “Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together,” the group declared on their website . But Trump, for one, doesn’t agree with the characterization of him. “I don’t feel like a king, I have to go through hell to get stuff approved,” he said on Thursday . “We’re not a king at all, thank you very much.” Previous Next

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As President Trump renews his pledge to combat unpatriotic education, survey evidence suggests that controversial teachings are alive and well. < Back Poll of High Schoolers Shows Many Are Taught That America Is ‘Inherently Racist’ As President Trump renews his pledge to combat unpatriotic education, survey evidence suggests that controversial teachings are alive and well. As Donald Trump’s return to the White House threatens to reignite public debates about how schools teach subjects like civics and American history, newly released polling shows that many students are exposed to critical messages about the country and its government on a near-daily basis. Published on Wednesday by the journal Education Next , the survey of 850 high schoolers reports that 36 percent say their teachers either “often” or “almost daily” argue that America is a fundamentally racist nation. No less striking, roughly the same proportion of respondents said they frequently heard claims that African Americans are victims of discrimination by racist police officers and an unjust economic system, while whites contribute the most to racism in society. At the same time, large numbers of adolescents also absorb comparatively positive views about the United States, with 56 percent saying their teachers regularly discussed the progress made toward racial equality since the 1970s. The data offer a somewhat rare student perspective on a question that has roiled education politics for much of the last five years: whether the tenets of critical race theory, a contentious and little-understood academic field that scrutinizes the relationships between race and power, have trickled from university campuses down to K–12 classrooms. In both his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, President Trump warned that students were subjected to ubiquitous anti-American bias in their lessons and pledged to root out CRT from public school curricula. University of Missouri professor Brian Kisida, the lead author of the polling analysis, said that the student responses made clear that teachings opposed by Trump and his allies had taken root in many schools as “the function of a certain progressive politics.” “I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” Kisida said. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.” While they burned especially hot between the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, controversies over instruction on race, gender, and sexuality have quieted in recent months, subsumed by the larger disputes that helped power Trump’s reelection. But in his inauguration address Monday, the president signalled that he has not given up his aim of cleansing education of unpatriotic themes, announcing that he would take aim at “an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.” The commitment echoed his earlier promises to defund schools that teach CRT. Whether Washington has the authority to meaningfully alter K–12 teaching remains in doubt; curricular choices ultimately rest at the local level, though experts have observed that a GOP-led Department of Education could penalize school districts for teaching material deemed racially discriminatory. Further uncertainty clouds the true prevalence of indoctrination in American school systems. Even if significant minorities of students say they encounter progressive concepts throughout their time in high school, the authors of the report note that they are far from universal. Gary Ritter, Kisida’s co-author and dean of the Saint Louis University School of Education, said he was surprised by the occurrence of apparently ideological programming in high schools, but that he also believed teacher bias was not overwhelming or uniformly left-coded. “I expected there to be roughly zero of this, and there’s obviously more than zero of it going on,” Ritter said. “Still, I don’t think it’s a problem.” ‘It doesn’t feel one-sided’ In an interview alongside Kisida, Ritter said he had been relieved by high schoolers’ responses to explicit questions about partisan animus and self-censorship. Specifically, 77 percent of survey respondents said that they were either never or rarely made to feel uncomfortable about disagreeing with their teachers’ stated views. Over half of students, by contrast, said their teachers typically encouraged them to share different opinions. While 18 percent said their teachers had spoken negatively about Republicans, slightly more said that they’d heard Democrats disparaged. What’s more, he added, educators appear to deliver affirming statements about race in America with some frequency. Forty-two percent of students said their teachers cited the United States as “a global leader” in securing equal rights for its citizens, exactly the same proportion as said they’d heard their teachers express support for the Black Lives Matter movement. “I wanted to know if these statements were made as much as people said, and if they were one-sided,” said Ritter. “We’re hearing various claims, and it doesn’t feel one-sided.” Some of the messaging tested in the poll veers more toward advocacy than simple observation. Along with the sizable number of teachers who praised Black Lives Matter, considerable numbers argued “often” or “almost daily” that African Americans should receive an advantage in the hiring process (22 percent) or college admissions (21 percent), students reported. Nearly one-in-five respondents said their teachers made frequent calls for reparations to be made for slavery. But it is a challenge to interpret the exact nature of classroom references to concepts such as institutional racism or white privilege. Majorities of students said they had heard teachers voice two phrases often held in tension with one another: “Black lives matter” (64 percent) and “All lives matter” (53 percent). Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was necessary to understand whether teachers were inviting open-minded discussion of such ideas or delivering an unsubtle form of propaganda. The wording of one poll question simply asked participants if their teachers had used one of a list of phrases — including “anti-racist ,” “systemic oppression ,” “decolonization ,” and “the 1619 Project ” — without specifying whether they were described approvingly, or even properly defined. “Some of the kids saying that they heard the phrase ‘inherently racist country’ will have heard it in the context of a discussion, and some heard it as part of something resembling indoctrination,” Zimmerman said. “The question is the relative proportion of those.” Thaw in the culture war? Though the second Trump administration is only getting underway — the president’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has yet to undergo a confirmation hearing — Republicans have loudly announced that they plan to attack what they view as unchecked political interference in K–12 learning. When preparing his third run for the presidency, Trump himself vowed to strip federal funding from any school teaching critical race theory or “gender ideology,” a promise renewed in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy document. Meanwhile, during Trump’s four years out of office, GOP lawmakers across 18 states passed laws restricting the teaching of what they often call “divisive concepts.” Similar bills have been filed and debated in 25 other legislatures. Still, the uproar over equity efforts and identity politics in schools had appeared to be settling over the last year. The prominent parent advocacy group Moms for Liberty, which has energetically challenged library books and curricular materials it considers divisive, faltered in its efforts to win school board seats throughout 2023, and the pace of new anti-CRT legislation slowed considerably compared with the early days of the Biden administration. More evidence for the apparent thaw came in an analysis released last week by the libertarian Cato Institute. According to policy researcher Neal McCluskey’s ongoing tracker of culture war disputes in school districts, 2024 saw the fewest such conflicts since 2020, when COVID-related school closures set off a wave of parental dissatisfaction. The gradual end of online learning, along with the spectacle of the 2024 campaign, may have diverted outrage away from local clashes, McCluskey argued. Trump’s second term will likely bring a resumption of hostilities. Earlier polling has indicated a broad acceptance of instruction on the facts of slavery and discrimination throughout American history, but also widespread skepticism of teaching strategies such as separating students into different identity groups to talk about racial matters. In Education Next‘s poll, 14 percent of students — more than one in eight — said they had been separated along racial lines for discussions of racism. Kisida noted that good instruction must “walk a tightrope” between candor about the shortcomings of American society and an equally comprehensive accounting of the strides that have been made to overcome them. “There’s a general idea that parents want their kids to learn a sense of pride and patriotism about the United States,” he said. “So there has to be a good balance where we’re able to talk about all of the struggles, but also talk about the successes.” Dealt a harrowing blow by their loss of Congress and the presidency last November, Democrats may opt to formulate a new line of argument on cultural dust-ups in schools. At the urging of progressives and academics, the party spent much of the Biden administration attempting to counter GOP claims of political influence over schools. Zimmerman said schools should encourage discussion of thorny issues among older students, while cautioning that educators needed to recognize the line between teaching and preaching. “It’s false to say that all teachers are telling kids to hate America and that America is racist. But it’s also false to say that none of those ideas have penetrated our schools.” Previous Next

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. < Back San Dieguito District sets plan for healing in motion following antisemitic act on SDA campus 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. 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

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webinar recording webinar recording webinar recording webinar recording ethnic studies origin story Join us for an in depth look at how ethnic studies came into being and why it is so dangerous for America. why this webinar matters to you IDEOLOGICAL ROOTS & THE MUTATIONS OF AN OLD VIRUS How "third world revolutionary Marxism" have come to dominate our American educational institutions. THE ULTIMATE (REAL) GOAL OF ETHNIC STUDIES Spoiler Alert: it's NOT to help our students learn to appreciate different ethnic cultures that make up the mosaic of America . . . HOW IT AFFECTS YOU (EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE KIDS IN K-12) The "re-education" of American youth has been one of the most successful subversive efforts ever attempted in the USA .

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We protect Jewish Civil Right in K-12 environments. Join us now to fight back against violent and biased ideologies in curriculum and classrooms. ready to role up your sleeves & take action? Let's do this. Submit an Incident report Few things are as critical as documenting every single incident to ensure Jewish Civil Rights are being upheld and protected in K-12. Help us help you - submit your incident report. Report an Incident PETITIONS & Action Alerts Petitions and action alerts carry more weight then you might think - when communities unite to communicate as one to decision makers, you'd be surprised what can be accomplished. Verified Petitions TRAININgs, EVENTs & webinars Get educated on the issues we are tackling and find out how you can lend your talents to our movement and help remove Jew-hatred from our K-12 schools permenantly. Request a Session ISSUES AT SCHOOL? WE CAN HELP. We've been helping parents, students, teachers, etc. deal with incidents in schools since 2021 - we've seen (and fixed) it all. You are not alone - we're here to help you. Request a Meeting JOIN our trusted partners COALITION To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. Denounce the NEA campaign My name is Alexa Young Local District Union Representatives of the NEA Voted to Silence Jewish Voices in K-12. Now It’s Up to All of Us to Stop It From Showing Up in Our Local Schools. Join our National Action Campaign & Push Back on the Teacher Union's Anti-American Bigotry, Discrimination & Abuse of Civil Rights. join the fight