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

brought to you by combat antisemitism movement, in partnership with peerk12 & tikvah Celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month in May 2026 with a special college scholarship opportunity for San Diego students spotlighting Jewish contributions to American society In honor of Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM), celebrated in May, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), in partnership with PeerK12, invites all high school juniors and seniors planning to attend a two- or four-year college to explore this history and its lasting impact through a statewide creative scholarship contest. See Full Contest Information contest prompts P R O M P T 1: Jewish Individuals Who Shaped America Choose a Jewish individual featured in the Jewish Heritage of America curriculum as a starting point for deeper research. Using the curriculum to build foundational knowledge, research the life, contributions, and legacy of this individual and create an original biographical essay or poem explaining why their story continues to matter today. You may focus on an individual connected to San Diego or on a Jewish American figure whose national impact reflects the values and themes explored in the curriculum. P R O M P T 2: Jewish Leadership & Partnership in Advancing Social Cause Throughout American history, Jewish Americans have played significant roles in advancing civil rights, religious freedom, and democratic values. These contributions have often been achieved in partnership with other communities. Using the Jewish Heritage of America curriculum as a foundation, research and write an analytical essay examining one or two historical examples where Jewish Americans demonstrated leadership or partnership in efforts to advance civic society, liberty, or progress in the United States. P R O M P T 3: Jewish Ideas and Cultural Contributions to Society Jewish history and culture have contributed enduring ideas, values, and practices that continue to influence societies across the nation. Using the Jewish Heritage of America curriculum as a foundation, research and write an analytical essay examining one Jewish idea, cultural tradition, value, or contribution that has had a lasting impact on American society. Your essay should explain the origins of this contribution, its historical influence, and why it remains a vital part of our shared heritage today. See Full Contest Information

June 26, 2025 Jewish student sues Seattle school district, claims failure to stop antisemitism Jackie Kent A Seattle family is suing Washington state's largest school district, claiming the administration failed to stop or respond to rampant antisemitic harassment that ultimately led a student to leave her high school. Originally Posted In: https://komonews.com/news/local/nathan-hale-high-seattle-public-schools-lawsuit-former-student-jewish-antisemitism-harassment-verbal-assaults < Back SEATTLE — A Seattle family is suing Washington state's largest school district, claiming the administration failed to stop or respond to rampant antisemitic harassment that ultimately led a student to leave her high school. A 15-year-old former student of Nathan Hale High School alleges months of verbal assaults, threats, and physical intimidation throughout the 2023-2024 school year. The reported abuse escalated to a situation in May 2024 when she claims about 20 students tried to assault her at school until a teacher locked her in a classroom for protection, according to the complaint filed in June by the Seattle Litigation Group on behalf of the student and her parents. "The school did not protect her. The family complained multiple times to the school and they took no action," Attorney Emma Aubrey stated. The lawsuit states the harassment started shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Aubrey said the family reported to Principal Dr. William Jackson and Vice Principal Makela Steward-Monroe the incidents of "students drawing swastikas in school bathrooms and locker rooms, cyberbullying via social media, and verbal assaults accusing the student of racism and Islamophobia based solely on her Jewish identity." The family claims Seattle Public Schools failed to investigate those claims, discipline the students involved, and publicly denounce the hate. The family said the district denied a request for the student to transfer schools as a matter of safety. "[I'm] beyond disappointed, helpless, angry," the teen's mother, Jennifer, told KOMO News. "When kids are threatening violence against one another- I don’t know, maybe suspension. But certainly talking about this is a start and I didn’t see this being addressed in the school community." The family is asking the district to pay damages and attorneys' fees. An SPS spokesperson provided the following statement to KOMO News in response to the complaint: "On Tuesday, June 17, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) received a complaint in a lawsuit alleging that a former Nathan Hale High School student experienced antisemitism while enrolled in the district. SPS will review and address these allegations. The district remains dedicated to creating an inclusive and equitable environment for all students, and does not tolerate racism, discrimination, or violence in any form. " Previous Next

December 11, 2023 In San Diego, controversy surrounds an antisemitic imam and his wife JNS Staff Imam Taha Hassane has justified Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, while Lallia Allali [his wife and San Diego Unified School District consultant] posted an image of a Star of David decapitating babies. Originally Posted In: https://www.jns.org/in-san-diego-controversy-surrounds-an-antisemitic-imam-and-his-wife/ < Back (Dec. 11, 2023 / JNS) On Dec. 8, the Palestine, Arab and Muslim Caucus of the California Faculty Association hosted an event—listed with the California State University, San Bernardino logo—titled “Endangered Education: Teaching Palestine in Liberated K-12 Ethnic Studies.” Among the speakers at the event, for which the Council on American-Islamic Relations was listed as a co-sponsor, was Lallia Allali, whom the group listed as a doctoral candidate at the University of San Diego. Last month, Allali quit a University of San Diego position and the community advisory board of The San Diego Union-Tribune after the revelation that he had posted an image on her Facebook account of a Star of David decapitating five babies. A caption read: “The devil is killing.” The Union-Tribune, which referred to it as “a graphic and deplorable antisemitic image,” stated that “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.” “This is a double blood libel, 40 Israeli babies were mass murdered, 30 Israeli children are being held hostage, and many others were murdered in southern Israel,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and global social action director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated at the time. “This blood libel against the Jewish people would bring tears of joy to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,” he added. The university said in a statement that “while individuals have the right to express their views on their personal accounts, they do not reflect the views of USD’s leadership nor any official position of the university.” “In the interest of safety, Allali has decided to step away from teaching the course,” it added. “The safety of our community is the university’s top priority.” Allali is married to Imam Taha Hassane, of the Islamic Center of San Diego, “a mosque best known as the home to two 9/11 hijackers,” The Waashington Free Beacon reported. The San Diego mosque received $150,000 in federal funding on Aug. 15, the paper reported. “When people are occupied, then the resistance is justified,” Hassane said in a sermon on Oct. 20 , justifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack. “We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist. The terrorist is the one who started the occupation, not the one who is defending himself.” Previous Next

November 21, 2025 Lawsuit, letter allege persistent antisemitism at private high school in S.F. Emma Goss A parent who withdrew his daughter from San Francisco University High School after a “documented pattern of antisemitic incidents that created legitimate safety concerns for her well-being” has detailed those problems in a lawsuit filed against the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school sports. Originally Posted In: https://jweekly.com/2025/11/21/lawsuit-letter-allege-antisemitism-at-s-f-private-school/ < Back A parent who withdrew his daughter from San Francisco University High School after a “documented pattern of antisemitic incidents that created legitimate safety concerns for her well-being” has detailed those problems in a lawsuit filed against the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school sports. The lawsuit, filed last month, claims that this was not an isolated case and that a number of Jewish families at the private school submitted “dozens of documented safety incidents” to administrators throughout the previous academic year. Some were reported to the police, according to the lawsuit. The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately respond to J.’s request for information. The concerns were brought to the attention of Tye Gregory, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area, who wrote a letter to the head of school and the board in July, asking for a meeting to discuss ways to improve the campus climate for Jewish families and students. No meeting followed, according to JCRC. “Over the past 18 months, we have received numerous reports from current and former University students, families, and prospective parents describing persistent and troubling incidents of antisemitism at UHS,” Gregory wrote in the July 8 letter, which was shared with J. “Despite repeated efforts by families to engage school leadership, many feel their concerns have not been adequately addressed, leaving Jewish students and their families feeling unheard, unsafe, and marginalized.” According to JCRC, those challenges intensified in the last weeks of the school year and included “repeated inappropriate, antisemitic remarks and actions by faculty,” “marginalization and targeting of Jewish students” and “lack of accountability and sensitivity.” “UHS is facing some of the most serious antisemitism issues reported among independent schools in the Bay Area,” Gregory wrote. JCRC declined an interview with J. Bart Schachter filed the lawsuit against the North Coast Section of the California Interscholastic Federation on behalf of his daughter, a varsity athlete in track and tennis. She has been limited to competing in only half of the fall and spring seasons at her new private school due to rules set by CIF, which regulates sports in public and private high schools statewide. Schachter had requested a “hardship waiver,” which applies to transfer students who have experienced hardships such as discrimination at their former schools. The CIF waiver would have allowed his daughter to compete fully in both seasons, but he alleges it was denied after the UHS interim head of school “refused to validate” the reported antisemitic and safety incidents to the CIF commissioner. He wants the decision reversed. “This retaliation by UHS is impeding both her social integration as well as her shot at college sport,” Schachter said in an email to J. About 500 students attend UHS , a prestigious college-prep school with tuition and fees topping $65,000 . A recent graduate told J. that a large number of the students there are Jewish. While antisemitic incidents in Bay Area public schools have spurred lawsuits and complaints to the state, less is known about the extent of backlash against Jewish students in private schools since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack and ensuing war. In late May, during a UHS event where perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were discussed, Jewish students were mocked when expressing their views, “with no meaningful response from the UHS administration despite complaints,” Schachter alleged in his lawsuit filed in Marin County Superior Court. Nasif Iskander, the UHS interim head of school, declined J.’s request for an interview and declined to answer specific questions via email. Later, in a general statement sent to J., Iskander pushed back on the allegations of persistent antisemitism. “At San Francisco University High School, we want every student of every background to know they are safe, and treated with respect and fairness. We strongly disagree with the allegations the student’s parents have raised about our school in connection with their petition to CIF,” Iskander wrote. “UHS has robust and effective programs and policies to provide students an uplifting learning environment free of antisemitism and other discrimination.” Schachter noted that while UHS is “not currently a party to the Marin lawsuit,” the school could, with “a single sentence,” make things right for his daughter. UHS “can easily enable our daughter to play varsity sports by simply acknowledging to CIF the incidents we reported,” Schachter wrote, “as we have pleaded with them to do for months.” Previous Next

August 29, 2025 Beverly Hills Unified to adopt new flag policy after superintendent overrules Israeli flag display Julie Sharp The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." Originally Posted In: https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/beverly-hills-unified-school-board-to-adopt-new-flag-policy-after-superintendent-overrules-israeli-flag-display/ < Back After the Beverly Hills Unified school board reversed its decision to display Israeli flags on campuses during Jewish American Heritage Month. It adopted a permanent district-wide policy to display only U.S. and California flags. The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." "Given the volume of public attention, international media coverage, and ongoing threats against district staff and students, it is both urgent and prudent for the Board to adopt a clear, permanent policy defining what flags may be flown or displayed on district property," as written in the BHUSD special board meeting agenda. In a written Aug. 28 message to the BHUSD community, Superintendent Dr. Alex Cherniss cited Board Policy 2210 to reverse the board's vote, doing so out of "heightened safety concerns around the displaying of flags on our campuses." He said he decided to take immediate action for the safety and security of the students. At Tuesday's board meeting, the resolution to showcase the Israeli flag passed 3-2, with supporters saying it's needed in a time of rising antisemitism. "This should be a no-brainer for a school district that represents one of the only Jewish-majority communities outside of Israel," said Beverly Hills Vice Mayor John Mirisch during the Aug. 26 meeting. BHUSD Board Member Russell Stewart said at Tuesday's meeting that the resolution was in support of the district's Jewish students and the Jewish community. There was opposition at the board meeting, with some people speaking out against flying the flag of any foreign nation, while others pointed out that other groups of people face hate as well. "Jewish communities have suffered sharp increases in hate crimes, but other groups are not immune to these attacks either," said Gay Abrams, in opposition to the proposal. Previous Next

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

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

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

February 26, 2026 French teacher sues UN school in New York after enduring ‘15 months of hell,’ Jew-hatred Aaron Bandler “Although the school didn’t terminate her, it was essentially constructive termination, because the environment had become so hostile that she was unable to work there,” Lauren Israelovitch, of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS. Originally Posted In: https://www.jns.org/french-teacher-sues-un-school-in-new-york-after-enduring-15-months-of-hell-jew-hatred/ < Back A Jewish woman, who taught at the United Nations International School in New York for about 30 years, is suing the school, alleging that it ignored her reports of experiencing Jew-hatred on campus and responded by subjecting her to a retaliatory investigation. Robert Weingrad told JNS that his wife, Nadine Sébag, 65, experienced “severe depression” as a result of what she experienced at the school and that she has been suffering from back and muscle issues as well as digestive problems, increased blood pressure and anxiety. “UNIS had long known about this,” he said, of his wife’s experience. Weingrad emailed school officials multiple times, including the school’s executive director, Dan Brenner, expressing concern about what his wife had endured, he said. He also attended a meeting with Sébag, Brenner and other school officials in March 2023 after he objected to her being required to attend a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) meeting without knowing the allegations against her, according to a lawsuit that the National Jewish Advocacy Center filed on behalf of Sébag in the New York Supreme Court on Feb. 12. The school eventually told Weingrad to stop contacting Brenner directly, which he obeyed, per the suit. “It was a very frustrating and troubling time for us, and then it remained that way to Nadine until June of 2024, the last time she was at the school,” he told JNS. “She had 15 months of hell at that school.” In 2022, Sébag, who is French and who was tenured at the school, was transferred from its Queens campus, which had closed, to its Manhattan campus, where she shared an office with two French teachers. One, Nehad Soliman, a Muslim who wears a hijab, made repeated “antisemitic and anti-French remarks grounded in long-standing, derogatory stereotypes” while sharing office space with Sébag, including that “Jews are driven by money, that Jews control UNIS and New York and that French people are inherently racist,” according to the lawsuit. On Feb. 13, 2023, Soliman put her cell phone in Sébag’s face and demanded that she respond to an “offensive” cartoon from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo . When Sébag didn’t immediately respond, Soliman went “into an angry tirade regarding France’s restrictions on religious attire in public schools” and accused Sébag of objecting to her hijab, per the suit. Sébag told Soliman that she did not have an issue with the hijab but opposes women being forced “to wear religious attire against their will when men were not subject to comparable requirements,” the suit states. Soliman then filed a complaint against Sébag, accusing her of discrimination. The school subjected Sébag to an investigation that lasted more than a year, according to the suit. ‘Completely fabricated’ Lauren Israelovitch, senior litigation counsel at the National Jewish Advocacy Center, told JNS that “the most shocking aspect was the fact that Ms. Sébag worked at the school for a little over 30 years, and that the person who initially filed the complaint against her ultimately admitted that that complaint was completely fabricated in front of a number of people.” “Nonetheless, UNIS continued the investigation against her,” Israelovitch said. According to the suit, Sébag was required to attend a meeting with school administrators and Soliman in September 2023. At the meeting, Sébag asked Soliman if she had ever commented on her Islamic faith or hijab. “No,” Soliman said. Still, the probe continued. “What the person leading the investigation said was, ‘Well, yes, in her culture, sometimes “No” can mean “Yes,” and so we need to still continue the investigation,’” Israelovitch told JNS. Eeqbal Hassim is described in the lawsuit as “a multicultural educational consultant retained by UNIS from Australia” with a background in Islamic studies, and was tasked with mediating Soliman and Sébag’s dispute. “He doesn’t appear to be qualified to handle employment disputes or have any sort of credentials in employment compliance law or anything of the sort,” Israelovitch said. Another teacher at the school, Isabelle Chu, alleged to Hassim that Soliman had “expressed anger” against Sébag for being Jewish and repeatedly said that anyone who crossed her would “pay accordingly,” according to the suit. When Chu, who is not Jewish, defended Sébag’s Jewish identity, Soliman “physically assaulted” her, the suit states. Chu was among the “multiple teachers” who reported having “personally observed Ms. Soliman engage in threatening and harassing conduct” toward Sébag and others, and “they themselves had experienced similar behavior,” per the suit. Weingrad told JNS that his wife “was afraid of this woman, because this woman made it clear and said to her that ‘if anybody crosses me, I’ll make them pay.’” “My wife’s been teaching for 30 years. She lives in another world. She never heard that from another teacher. It sounded thuggish to her,” he said. He said that Sébag was new to the Manhattan campus and “didn’t want to make waves.” “She had all this going on, and she just sat on it for a while,” Weingrad said. Hassim later acknowledged that Soliman “required immediate evaluation and professional intervention,” but that never took place. Instead, she was given tenure, per the suit. Sébag sent eight complaints to the school between February 2023 and June 2024 about “antisemitic harassment and retaliation she experienced at the hands of Ms. Soliman and UNIS administrators.” All were ignored, according to the suit. ‘Fearful and isolated’ Weingrad told JNS that his wife wrote of “her fear” of Soliman in the complaints, and Sébag “was spiraling, and she was insecure and fearful and isolated.” During the investigation, a superior asked Sébag about her religion, according to Weingrad. “Just very, very crazy stuff,” he said. Due to health issues stemming from the situation, Sébag went on six months of paid leave starting in August 2024. In February 2025, she resigned, according to the suit. Israelovitch told JNS that “although the school didn’t terminate her, it was essentially constructive termination, because the environment had become so hostile that she was unable to work there.” “Ultimately, she was advised by her physician that that environment was just too toxic for her to return,” she said. Weingrad said he doesn’t think his wife would ever be comfortable teaching at the school again and is unsure if she will ever teach again at all. “She wanted to retire at age 67, not 64. That’s always been made plain to UNIS,” he said, adding that her plan was “chiefly interrupted and terminated due to what happened to her.” Weingrad and his wife are “taking it day by day.” “The suit was just filed, we’re sober about it,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.” Israelovitch told JNS that she hopes that “the school will learn from this and treat everybody in the school equally.” “When a Jewish teacher expresses concern or reports an antisemitic incident and complaint, the school should be responding, and in this case, she was completely ignored,” she said. Lupe Todd-Medina, a spokeswoman for the school, told JNS that it “stands firm against these baseless allegations.” “We are confident that this matter will be addressed through the proper legal process and that our institution’s integrity and reputation will be upheld,” Todd-Medina said. The lawsuit alleges that while the private pre-K to grade 12 school describes itself as secular, the UNIS promotes Islamic religious programming and imagery. It further states that the school maintains substantial financial ties to certain U.N. member states, including the Sultanate of Oman and the State of Qatar, and has a governance structure closely linked to them. According to the suit, the permanent representatives of Qatar and Oman serve as honorary trustees of the UNIS Board. The lawsuit states that Qatar pledged around $60 million to the school in 2023 and that Oman, by 2020, provided “cumulative support reportedly exceeding $55 million” to the educational institution. “One could certainly question, if the school is getting millions of dollars from Qatar and Oman, then could it be that it might not be pleasing to those donors if antisemitism is handled the way it ought to be,” Israelovitch told JNS. Previous Next

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

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

November 8, 2025 States are pushing for more scrutiny of antisemitism in schools Carolyn Thompson & Michael Casey Tensions over the Israel-Hamas war have spilled into schools around the U.S., with advocates reporting a rise in antisemitic harassment since the 2023 surprise attack on Israel. While some argue school leaders have failed to take the threat seriously, others warn criticism of Israel and the military campaign in Gaza are interpreted too often as hate speech. Originally Posted In: https://apnews.com/article/school-antisemitism-education-free-speech-83ec7b892f8fba16db1d75619a0a5073 < Back In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas two years ago, high school teacher Josh Hirsch posted comments on social media in support of Israel. It was unrealistic for Hamas to expect a ceasefire, he wrote, as long as they were holding hostages. Soon afterward, a former student called for his firing. A note taped outside the door of his Adams County, Colorado, classroom contained his wife’s name and their home address. And a sticker that appeared on his chair read: “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” The reaction startled Hirsch, the only Jewish teacher in his school building. For the first time in his 14-year career, he considered quitting. He stayed and joined an educators’ advocacy network created by the Anti-Defamation League , a way he saw to make schools more inclusive of diverse viewpoints. “I’ve been a teacher and tried to keep my focus on being the best teacher I could,” he said. Tensions over the Israel-Hamas war have spilled into schools around the U.S., with advocates reporting a rise in antisemitic harassment since the 2023 surprise attack on Israel. While some argue school leaders have failed to take the threat seriously, others warn criticism of Israel and the military campaign in Gaza are interpreted too often as hate speech. The Trump administration has not punished school systems the way it has hit colleges accused of tolerating antisemitism, but schools are still facing pressure to respond more aggressively. Several states have pressed for new vigilance, including legislation that critics say would stifle free speech. Both conservative and liberal states apply more scrutiny Lawmakers in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee have passed measures to increase school accountability for complaints of antisemitism, and a law signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, will provide training to identify and prevent antisemitism in schools. In Arizona, the Democratic governor vetoed a bill on how to deal with reports of antisemitism in schools, calling it an attack on educators. Many of the measures, including one signed by Oklahoma’s Republican governor, call for adoption of a definition of antisemitism that casts certain criticism of Israel as hate speech. “These bills make it clear that Oklahoma stands with our Jewish communities and will not tolerate hatred disguised as political discourse,” said Kristen Thompson, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who authored the legislation. Dozens of states have adopted the definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is also recognized by the U.S. State Department. It lists 11 examples of antisemitic conduct, such as applying “double standards” to Israel or comparing the country’s policies to Nazism. While supporters of this definition of antisemitism say it is necessary to combat evolving forms of Jewish hate, civil liberties groups warn it suppresses pro-Palestinian speech. Trump administration approach contrasts with attacks on colleges The Trump administration has leveraged antisemitism investigations in its efforts to reshape higher education, suspending billions of dollars in federal funding to Harvard, Columbia and other universities over allegations they tolerated hate speech, especially during protests over the Israel-Hamas war . The White House has not gotten as involved at the K-12 level. At congressional hearings, House Republicans have taken some large school systems to task over their handling of antisemitism, but the administration largely has left it to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to address complaints. In one of the cases under investigation, a complaint described students at the Berkeley Unified School District in California asking Jewish classmates what “their number is,” referring to numbers tattooed on Jews during the Holocaust. It also said teachers made antisemitic comments and led walkouts that praised Hamas. The district did not respond to a request for comment. In another California case, the family of a 14-year-old girl filed a federal lawsuit last year alleging she had to leave University Preparatory Academy, a charter school in San Jose, in 2023 because of antisemitic bullying. After the Hamas attack, she said students called her names, including “terrorist.” The California Department of Education and the school said they could not comment on pending litigation. Nationwide, the ADL recorded 860 antisemitic incidents in non-Jewish schools last year, ranging from name-calling and swastikas etched on lockers to antisemitic materials being taught in classrooms. The number was down from over 1,100 recorded in 2023, but well above numbers in prior years, according to the ADL. A Massachusetts teachers union pushes back A Massachusetts state commission formed last year to combat antisemitism found it was a “pervasive and escalating problem” in schools. At one meeting, a commission co-chair, Democratic state Rep. Simon Cataldo, said the Massachusetts Teachers Association was sharing antisemitic resources with teachers, including a kindergarten workbook that describes Zionists as “bullies” and an image of a Star of David made of dollar bills. The union said those were singled out among hundreds of images in art and posters about Palestinians, and links to those materials were removed. The union said it has engaged in efforts to confront increases in both antisemitism and Islamophobia and accused the commission of “offensive political theater.” “Those who manipulate antisemitism to achieve political objectives — such as undermining labor unions and public educators — are following the lead of the Trump administration,” the union said in a statement. Margaret Litvin, an associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University, said the commission was “deliberately conflating criticism of Israel with prejudice against Jews and bias against Jews.” That approach will be used to justify “heavy-handed” interference by the state in school district affairs, said Litvin, co-founder of the Boston-area Concerned Jewish Faculty and Staff group. Controversy reaches the biggest teachers union The tension reached the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, which this summer weighed a proposal to drop ADL classroom materials that educators use to teach about the Holocaust and bias. Backers said the ADL had an outsize influence on school curricula and policy, with an underlying pro-Israel viewpoint. Delegates at the union’s representative assembly narrowly voted to approve the proposal, but they were overruled by the NEA board of directors. Union President Becky Pringle said the proposal “would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals.” In the aftermath, the ADL invited K-12 educators to join a new network called BEACON: Building Educator Allies for Change, Openness, and Networks, which it said is intended to help educators learn from each other how to address and combat antisemitism and other forms of hate. Hirsch, the teacher in Colorado, was among hundreds who expressed interest. Some of the blowback he faced stemmed from his online commentary about local activist organizations. After donating money to Black Lives Matter groups and supporting them with a sign in his yard, he expressed feelings of betrayal to see the groups expressing support for Palestinians and not Israel. He said he was surprised by the reaction to the posts in his predominantly Hispanic school community. A former debate coach, he aims through his work with the ADL network to help students share their opinions in constructive ways. “If we’re giving them the opportunity to hate and we’re giving them the opportunity to make enemies of someone, it really is counterproductive to what we’re trying to do as a society,” he said. Previous Next

February 26, 2026 EXCLUSIVE: The First Antisemitism Lawsuit Against a U.S. State Maya Sulkin & Frannie Block The filing claims Jewish children across California are bullied by peers, targeted by teachers, and taught curricula that portrays them as oppressors - with the state failing to intervene. Originally Posted In: https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-the-first-antisemitism < Back A coalition of Jewish parents and civil rights organizations have filed the first antisemitism lawsuit against a U.S. state, accusing the California government of failing to protect Jewish students from a surge of antisemitic harassment, violence, and propaganda in the state’s public schools. The filing accuses the state of offering only “toothless remedies” to the scourge of antisemitism through a “glacial and opaque administrative process.” The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs on behalf of several Jewish families. Defendants include a number of state agencies, among them the California Department of Education. The lawsuit comes more than two years after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, which the Brandeis Center alleges triggered an unprecedented wave of antisemitic incidents in California’s schools that has never been adequately addressed. In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, antisemitic incidents reached their highest-ever recorded levels in the United States, with violent assaults on Jewish people increasing 21 percent compared to the previous year. California is one of the few states with a constitutional provision explicitly guaranteeing an equitable and free education, according to Marci Lerner Miller, the director of legal investigations with the Brandeis Center. The lawsuit explicitly cites this provision in arguing that pervasive antisemitism in California’s public schools has “deprived [Jewish students] of equal access to educational benefits and opportunities.” In the last year there have been many lawsuits filed against universities, accusing them of failing to combat antisemitism and prompting the federal government to freeze billions of dollars in college funding. But now, concern is being raised that antisemitism originates earlier, before students even set foot on a college campus. Elementary school students in Brooklyn, for example, have been taught about the Middle East using a map that entirely excluded the state of Israel , as part of a classroom program funded by the Qatari government. In Queens, a high school teacher had to flee from a mob after her students discovered she attended a protest in support of Israel. In California, under the guise of “ethnic studies ,” high school teachers are telling students that “Zionists,” or anyone associated with the state of Israel, are “oppressors” and settler colonialists. In one particularly shocking instance, students at a high school in Silicon Valley were asked to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change as part of a physics assignment. This worrying trend in schools is what caused the Brandeis Center to act. The complaint details incidents across more than a dozen California school districts, citing instances of student-on-student harassment and violence, teacher-led antisemitism and biased curricula, and the systematic segregation of Jewish students who complain about antisemitic instances in their respective schools. Now, concern is being raised that antisemitism originates before students even set foot on a college campus. “The parents who are in the complaint, they’ve done everything right. They’ve gone through the proper steps. They filed these complaints with the district. Some of them have appealed the decisions. They’ve waited months, years in some cases, and some have never gotten decisions,” Miller said. “They’ve gone through the process that they’ve always assumed would protect their children, and it hasn’t done that.” One of the plaintiffs in the case, Melissa Alexander, said her 12-year-old son now “refuses to speak about his Jewish heritage and wear his Jewish star anymore at school” due to the way he was treated by one of his teachers. The suit claims the teacher, whose public social media accounts were allegedly “filled with virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel content,” allegedly targeted the student with fabricated misconduct allegations because he wore Israel-related T-shirts and a Star of David necklace to school. The complaint also alleges that the teacher accused him of being too loud in class, telling the 12-year-old that he had done something “egregious and dangerous.” When Alexander asked what her son had done, the teacher allegedly told her “it did not matter.” Alexander’s son received “Unsatisfactory” grades in the class, and was told that he might not be able “to matriculate to eighth grade.” “None of [the child’s] other teachers raised concerns about his behavior, and aside from the class with this teacher, [he] was a straight-A student,” the claim alleges. The school never took action against the teacher, according to the complaint. “Watching my son navigate these challenges has broken my heart,” Alexander said. In another striking example, a third-grade girl at Kester Elementary School in Los Angeles—identified in the complaint as Student B—planned to perform in the school talent show in 2024, singing a song by an Israeli Eurovision contestant and carrying a poster that included the Israeli flag. Before she could take to the stage, a teaching assistant allegedly stopped the 9-year-old and told her that “Israel is a racist apartheid state, and by supporting Israel, you are being racist.” The lawsuit claims she was barred from performing with her poster. The family has since moved her to a different school. One of the plaintiffs in the case, Melissa Alexander, said her son now “refuses to speak about his Jewish heritage and wear his Jewish star anymore at school.” Two more plaintiffs in the case, Dawn and Michael Rosenthal, allege that in 2024, their son, B.R., transferred to Daniel Pearl Magnet High School—named for the Jewish journalist murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002—specifically to escape antisemitism at his previous school, Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies. At Sherman Oaks, his peers allegedly called him “shitcan Jew ,” and taunted him with “Heil Hitler ” salutes. As a solution, administrators allegedly suggested he eat lunch alone in a segregated space rather than with his classmates. In November 2022, during a physical education class, a group of students chased him around the track yelling “Let’s get the Jew, ” tripped him, and beat him until he lost consciousness. The school did not suspend a single attacker. Some were placed back in B.R.’s classes, according to the complaint. Daniel Pearl Magnet was supposed to be a fresh start. Instead, the complaint alleges, it became another incubator of antisemitism. B.R.’s honors chemistry teacher repeatedly displayed a “Free Palestine” poster and refused a principal’s request to remove it. On October 7, 2025 - the two-year anniversary of the Hamas massacre - the teacher allegedly wrote on the whiteboard: “Oy vey, it’s free,” with an arrow pointing to “FREE PALESTINE.” When the Rosenthals complained, the school offered to pull B.R. from the class entirely and enroll him in a solo online course through a credit-recovery platform, costing him both in-person instruction and his honors designation. The teacher was ultimately removed, but not for any of this - he was arrested on felony charges after stapling a student’s arm. Beyond individual incidents of harassment, the complaint also devotes substantial attention to what it describes as the infiltration of “antisemitic propaganda” into the classroom. It focuses particularly on an unauthorized curriculum created by members of the Oakland Education Association , which was used in a December 2023 teach-in that reached students across grade levels, including kindergartners. The curriculum’s materials included a read-aloud of the children’s alphabet book P Is for Palestin e, in which “I is for Intifada,” and is defined in the book as “rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grown-up.” The complaint notes that the word intifada refers to two periods of sustained violence in which more than a thousand Israeli civilians - including children - were killed in suicide bombings of buses and cafés carried out by Palestinian terrorist organizations. A worksheet included in the same curriculum asked elementary school children to draw “the Zionist leaders of Israel receiv[ing] money and support.” Another worksheet referred to “Zionist bullies ” who are “always scaring” and “arresting” Palestinian children. Despite widespread public reporting about the teach-in at the time, and the Oakland Unified School District’s own statement that it was unauthorized, the complaint states that no teachers who participated were ever disciplined. One parent who raised the alarm about this curriculum, Ivy Chesser, alleges in the suit that when she raised concerns to the administration, she was “ignored, dismissed, or offered only paltry solutions that reflect a tolerance for antisemitism. ” “I chose to be a part of this lawsuit,” Chesser said, “because I am afraid for the future my children will face after generations are allowed to be indoctrinated with antisemitism and anti-Americanism in our classrooms.” “The California education system is teaching the state’s children that Jewish Americans and Israelis are racists, white supremacists, oppressors, and baby-killers who should be shunned,” said Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center and a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. “The result is not surprising: Jewish children and children perceived as Jewish are bullied and excluded by their peers and harassed by their teachers, who silence, mock, and even segregate them if they speak out.” The lawsuit is seeking widespread changes to how the state of California prevents and addresses antisemitism, including “by investigating and addressing past acts of misconduct, taking proactive measures to stop future discrimination, and forbidding California’s schools from being commandeered as centers of antisemitic indoctrination.” “We’re hoping to give Jewish students the same opportunities as every other student in California to a free and equal public education, which is their guaranteed constitutional right,” said Miller. “Unfortunately, we have to do this through the lawsuit, because all of the other methods the parents and we tried have not been enough to accomplish that.” Previous Next

May 5, 2025 CAM REVIEW | Ethnic Studies: The Dangerous Ideology Quietly Shaping US Classrooms Combat Antisemitism Movement 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. Originally Posted In: https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/ethnic-studies-the-dangerous-ideology-quietly-shaping-us-classrooms/ < Back 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

April 4, 2024 When anti-Israel radicals win local elections Dillon Hosier We must mobilize to counter an insidious movement that threatens democracy itself. Originally Posted In: https://www.jns.org/when-anti-israel-radicals-win-local-elections/ < Back In the shadow of Oct. 7 and the subsequent discord on campuses and in the streets, an alarming question has emerged: What happens when activists from anti-Israel groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) move on from student government to real government? This is no longer a hypothetical scenario. It happened in the last local election in West Hollywood, Calif., which has historically been strongly pro-Israel. The ascent of Chelsea Lee Byers—an SJP activist and chapter founder—to the office of vice mayor should be a wake-up call. It highlights the need for proactive political engagement as antisemitism spreads into local, state and federal government. Byers’s ability to successfully conceal her extremist agenda behind her innocent-seeming nonprofit organization Beautiful Trouble is a warning sign of a significant threat to the Jewish and pro-Israel communities, as well as the integrity of local government. Her story is a cautionary tale. You would never guess that Byers is the voice of a violently antisemitic and anti-Israel movement. At first glance, she appears no different from any first-time local elected official. This is not a coincidence. Byers rose from radical activism to real political power in the course of a decade. In 2012, she tweeted, “I am the President of Northern Arizona University’s SJP—let’s make this day of action huge!” In 2022, she ran in her first election. Mere weeks after Oct. 7, she was sworn in as vice mayor. Throughout her activism, Byers engaged in regular anti-Israel defamation. She called for boycotts, an end to foreign aid and war crimes trials of Israeli officials. In 2011, she protested an appearance by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In what was likely a deliberate lie, she falsely accused the hosting organization of sexual assault. In fact, she simply had to be physically removed from the event due to her deplorable behavior. In 2018, Byers led a protest at the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles at which the crowd chanted the genocidal slogans “Intifada, intifada, long live the intifada. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” What may be most dangerous about Byers, however, is the insidious nature of her tactics. In 2021, when it was clear she was going to run for public office, she tried to erase her digital footprint and hide her anti-Israel incitement. This strategic rebranding was only the beginning. Byers uses her nonprofit organization Beautiful Trouble to conceal her commitment to virulent anti-Israel ideologies. Though it claims to advocate for social justice, Beautiful Trouble regularly crosses the line into outright anti-Israel hate and incitement. Its social media platforms and public rhetoric are rife with demonization, distortions and racist stereotypes against the Jewish state. Multiple sources prove Byers’s involvement with Beautiful Trouble. Indeed, her official biography on the City of West Hollywood’s website identifies her as a “core team member” of the organization. Before the 2022 election, Beautiful Trouble’s website directed donations to Byers’s home address, showing her direct financial association with the organization. A more complete bio at Women’s Voices Now states, “Chelsea is part of the Beautiful Trouble collective, where she facilitates resources development and content creation for an online toolbox that supports organizers and activists around the globe.” Byers’s idea of activism is insidious and deceptive. Beautiful Trouble, for example, advises : “Don’t dress like a protester. … Dress like a Republican so you can talk like an anarchist.” This manipulation of public perception enables more overt expressions of Byers’s agenda. As an example of the latter, Beautiful Trouble’s website features a quote that attempts to rationalize Hamas’s terrorism: ”Hamas explains itself. It is a demonstration in both senses of the word: a protest and an exposition of the reasons for that protest.” This clearly attempts to legitimize a U.S.-designated terrorist group and downplays its atrocities. It further advances the agenda of demonizing Israel and Jews with the rhetoric of social activism. Byers was elected vice mayor by a slim margin of 54 votes. But she did not abandon her divisive anti-Israel agenda. She simply changed tactics. From her election victory to Oct. 6, she maintained a low profile with little overt activism. This changed dramatically following the horrific atrocities of Oct. 7. In the wake of the atrocities, Byers has more or less openly supported the monstrous pro-Hamas “protest” movement that has taken to America’s campuses and streets. For example, she posted, “Keep showing up in the streets to #shutitdown4palestine.” A sitting vice-mayor clearly should not be inciting mob events. It is not just reckless but a blatant dereliction of her official duties. Then there is Beautiful Trouble’s “Get Up, Rise Up Direct Action Fund. ” This initiative is a cornerstone of the organization’s anti-Israel efforts. It funds “creative, provocative actions” ostensibly to advocate a ceasefire in Gaza, which is little more than an attempt to rescue Hamas from destruction. Byers’s involvement in this effort raises serious questions. In particular, about the potential funneling of public resources—whether funds, permits or official endorsements—towards initiatives aligned with Beautiful Trouble. This would constitute a very disturbing conflict of interest. In a recent post on Instagram, Beautiful Trouble shared an image that manipulated a well-known fast-food brand’s logo with the words “Genocide You Can Taste” and “Since 1948”— the year of Israel’s establishment. Beneath the altered logo is the defamatory phrase “IS-RA-HELL.” Byers’s decision to platform such content in the context of rising antisemitism is profoundly disturbing given her office. It irresponsibly fuels antisemitism, compromising the safety and security of the Jewish and Israeli communities in West Hollywood she has sworn to serve. The rise of Chelsea Lee Byers should serve as a stark warning to the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. It raises the question of whether, as a radical anti-Israel activist who continues to support a radical anti-Israel organization, she can truly represent all the citizens of West Hollywood. Byers’s journey also exemplifies how radical campus environments are serving as incubators for the next generation of anti-Israel and antisemitic political leaders. These leaders will leverage their disreputable skills and tactics to win elections, starting with local city councils and school boards. Extremism and antisemitism are threats to democracy itself. Complacency is not an option. We must mobilize at the local level to counter this insidious movement. It is our collective responsibility to ensure that our governments at all levels are not hijacked by those who threaten not just Jews and Israelis, but all Americans. Dillon Hosier is CEO of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network. Previous Next

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

December 8, 2025 Reading the political tea leaves and acting against dangerous candidates Dillon Hosier & Charles Jacobs You don’t need permission to protect your community. You need documentation, coordination and the willingness to act before Election Day. Originally Posted In: https://www.jns.org/reading-the-political-tea-leaves-and-acting-against-dangerous-candidates/ < Back We have spent years documenting the systematic infiltration of anti-Israel activists into state and local government. We’ve published an analysis of the pipeline that moves candidates from campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine to city councils and state legislatures. We’ve built the Mamdani Index to track and score officials nationwide. We have warned that while traditional pro-Israel organizations focus on Congress, a parallel political infrastructure is being constructed beneath them—one school board, one city council, one state legislature seat at a time. This article is the field guide. Whether you’ve noticed something concerning about a candidate in your community, identified a troubling score on the Mamdani Index or simply want to understand what warning signs to watch for, this guide explains how to recognize these candidates, what tactics they use, and, most importantly, what you can do to stop them before Election Day. Perhaps you’ve already raised concerns with local Jewish organizations, and they’ve told you not to worry, that you’re overreacting, that the candidate has moderated, that engaging would be divisive. Do not listen to them. These organizations do not have the experience or expertise to operate in advocacy, plus they are organized as 501(c)(3) organizations that are prohibited from engaging in electioneering. That exact pattern, concerned community members raising alarms, establishment organizations dismissing them and problematic candidates winning as a result, has repeated across the country. In 2022, it happened in West Hollywood, Calif., with Chelsea Byers. In 2025, it happened in New York City with Zohran Mamdani. In both cases, the warning signs were visible. In both cases, the candidates won. If you’re reading this because you suspect a Mamdani-type candidate is emerging in your community, trust your instincts. These candidates deny, minimize and reframe. Organizing boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns becomes “advocating for human rights.” Leading anti-Israel protests become “standing up for free speech.” The language shifts; the record remains. Do not accept reframing at face value. If a candidate claims they were merely supporting “free speech” or “human rights,” ask them directly: Do you support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state? Have you ever participated in chants calling for Israel’s elimination? What is your position on BDS? Document their answers. Many of these candidates are genuinely likable. They present extreme positions calmly and reasonably. They use humor to deflect criticism. They emphasize identity markers like LGBTQ+ status, immigrant background and youth that make attacks feel uncomfortable. Mamdani’s campaign included a rap video and regular displays of wit. When confronted about “Globalize the intifada,” he didn’t become defensive; he softly reframed it while appearing reasonable, making his critics seem shrill by comparison. Do not let personal charm distract from documented positions. Evaluate candidates on their organizational affiliations and public statements, not their campaign persona. These candidates build broad progressive coalitions that lend legitimacy without scrutinizing their Israel-related positions since those positions are most often unrelated. Union endorsements, environmental groups, LGBTQ+ organizations and housing advocates lend credibility while steering attention toward domestic issues. Mamdani’s mayoral campaign benefited from DSA infrastructure, Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour’s fundraising and even international support from Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the British Labour Party, despite his documented antisemitism controversies. The coalition provides cover, but the toxic ideology remains. ‘This is a losing trade’ Perhaps the most effective shield is endorsement or defense from Jewish organizations themselves. Mamdani-type candidates actively cultivate relationships with progressive Jewish groups and individual Jewish leaders who can vouch for them when concerns arise. When Chelsea Byers faced scrutiny during her 2022 West Hollywood campaign, a letter signed by leaders from Democrats for Israel chapters, Progressive Zionists of California, the California Young Democrats Jewish Caucus and other Jewish organizations declared that she “is not antisemitic” and that “her views have evolved.” The letter urged voters to focus on local issues, arguing that “this race should be about West Hollywood, not the West Bank.” This is the playbook. Jewish organizational cover allows candidates to dismiss criticism as bad-faith attacks while pointing to Jewish endorsers as evidence of their moderation. The signatories may be well-meaning, but their intervention provides exactly the legitimacy these candidates need to neutralize opposition. When evaluating such endorsements, consider whether the endorsers actually reviewed the candidate’s full record or simply accepted their current self-presentation. Ask whether they have the political experience and ongoing leverage to hold the candidate accountable after the election, or whether they are primarily focused on social services, interfaith work or other communal priorities that leave them poorly equipped to vet political candidates. Jewish cover is the most valuable currency a Mamdani-type candidate can acquire. Once obtained, it becomes extremely difficult to raise concerns without appearing to attack the Jewish community itself. Here is the difficult truth: Legacy Jewish organizations will often tell you not to engage. They will insist that the concern is exaggerated. They will warn that raising the issue publicly will be divisive or counterproductive. They will counsel patience and quiet diplomacy. This approach has failed repeatedly. In 2022, when community members raised concerns about Byers in West Hollywood, several establishment figures insisted she was harmless. Some attacked those who raised alarms as divisive. The result: Byers won by 54 votes. Understanding why these organizations fail requires recognizing what they are and what they are not. Most local Jewish community infrastructure, such as Federations, Jewish Community Relations Councils and regional offices of the Anti-Defamation League, exists primarily to provide social services, facilitate interfaith dialogue and respond to incidents of Jew-hatred after they occur. They’re not built for political engagement. They lack the expertise, appetite, and, often, legal structure to intervene in electoral campaigns. When a Mamdani-type candidate emerges, these organizations default to their institutional comfort zone: convening conversations, issuing measured statements and hoping the problem resolves itself. Direct political confrontation is outside their operational DNA. Many mainstream Jewish organizations are led by professionals and board members who identify strongly with progressive movements. They see Jewish communal priorities, social justice, immigrant rights and LGBTQ+ inclusion as naturally aligned with the broader progressive coalition. This creates a structural blind spot. When a candidate emerges from progressive networks with troubling positions related to Israel, organizational leaders may view criticism as an attack on the coalition, rather than a defense of Jewish interests. They may choose to prioritize maintaining relationships with progressive allies over confronting a candidate who threatens the Jewish community specifically. The result is rationalization: the candidate’s views are “evolving,” the concerns are “exaggerated,” and engaging would be “divisive.” These organizations choose coalition comfort over communal protection. Some Jewish organizations believe that building relationships with problematic candidates will moderate their behavior once in office. They offer endorsements or refrain from criticism in exchange for promised “dialogue” or “access.” This is a losing trade. Mamdani-type candidates benefit from Jewish organizational cover during the campaign—the one moment when they are vulnerable—and face no accountability for policy development and implementation afterward. ‘Do not be silent’ Before raising public concerns, build a comprehensive record. Archive social-media posts, especially anything that may be deleted as a campaign approaches. Collect student newspaper articles, organizational newsletters and event announcements from the candidate’s campus years. Obtain disclosure forms via public records requests and cross-reference them against public statements. Screenshot LinkedIn profiles, organizational bios and conference speaker listings. Record public statements at candidate forums and community events. Documentation transforms suspicion into evidence. Without it, concerns are easily dismissed. The window for effective intervention is narrow. By the time concerns reach mainstream awareness, early voting may have begun. Raise issues publicly as soon as a candidate announces, not during the final weeks of a campaign. If a candidate lies about their history, say so with evidence. If they deny affiliations that appear on disclosure forms, publish the discrepancy. If institutions provide cover, name them and explain why their assurances should not be trusted. Silence creates the false impression that there is nothing to be concerned about. Do not be silent. Mamdani-type candidates do not rise alone. They benefit from endorsements, appointments and political cover provided by other officials. These enablers must face consequences for their role in advancing anti-Israel candidates. When a sitting official endorses a Mamdani-type candidate, they are lending their credibility to legitimize that candidate’s record. Track these endorsements. Make clear that endorsing candidates with anti-Israel, antisemitic backgrounds will be remembered and will affect future support, donations and endorsements in their own races. Silence is also a choice. When a Mamdani-type candidate emerges and elected officials who should know better refuse to speak up, they are prioritizing their own political comfort over their community’s well-being. Document which officials remained silent when it mattered. Their silence should be a factor in future electoral support. Some officials will acknowledge a candidate’s troubling background but urge voters to overlook it, arguing that the candidate has “evolved,” that the concerns are “overblown,” or that other issues are more important. This minimization is as damaging as outright endorsement. It provides cover while maintaining plausible deniability. The goal is to create a political cost for enabling Mamdani-type candidates. If officials know that endorsing, appointing, excusing, or staying silent about anti-Israel candidates will affect their own standing with pro-Israel voters and donors, they will calculate differently. Accountability must extend beyond the candidates themselves to the network that elevates them. If you are reading this article, you likely already suspect that something is wrong. A candidate in your community has a troubling background. You’ve raised concerns and been told to stand down. You’re uncertain whether to trust your instincts or defer to organizations with more experience and resources. Trust your instincts. The tactics documented here are not theoretical. They have succeeded in communities across the country. They succeed because concerned individuals are talked out of acting by institutions that prioritize comfort over confrontation. You do not need permission from legacy organizations to protect your community. You need documentation, coordination and the willingness to act before Election Day, not after. The warning signs are visible. The tactics are documented. The counter-strategies are clear. The next election is mere months away. The question is whether our communities will be ready. Previous Next

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

October 27, 2021 SWC Commends Jewish Community Parents Staff Writer Proposed Resolution Passed by San Diego Unified School District to include Anti-Semitism in its Ethnic Studies Curriculum Originally Posted In: https://wiesenthal.org/news/wc-commends-jewish-community < Back The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauds the San Diego Unified School District’s unanimous approval of a resolution which updates itsethnic studies curriculum to include anti-Semitism. The resolution, which was passed during a board meeting on Tuesday night, urged that anti-Semitism be included in all ethnic studies educationin its efforts to educate students about equity and inclusiveness. The decision comes on the heels of a recent rise in anti-Semitism and multiple incidents on campuses across San Diego. “We applaud this important victory that took place in San Diego but has national implications. All of the credit for thisbreakthrough resolution goes to local Jewish parents who drew a line against demonizing Israel and the inevitable bullying of Jewish students and teachers in San Diego schools who love Israel andare proud of their heritage. We hope that the example set by the community-based activists in San Diego will inspire Jewish parents and decent peopleeverywhere to oppose and if necessary, overturn efforts to import the Middle East conflict into the classrooms and halls of our nation’s public schools,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, SimonWiesenthal Center Associate Dean and Global Social Action Director. Rabbi Cooper added that it will make its educational resources available to the school district through its renowned Museum of Tolerance. For further information, please email Michele Alkin, Director of Global Communications at malkin@wiesenthal.com or Shawn Rodgers atsrodgers@wiesenthal.com , join the Center on Facebook, or follow @simonwiesenthal for news updates sent directly to your Twitter feed. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an international Jewish human rights organization numbering over 400.000 members. Itholds consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the Council of Europe, the OAS and the Latin American Parliament (PARLATINO). Previous Next

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

October 26, 2025 The ADL’s Medicine Is Causing the Disease Joel Finkelstein Frames that divide the world into the oppressors and the oppressed create 15 times more antisemites while reinforcing sectarian division and hate on both the left and the right. The cure is a return to the universalist values on which America was founded. Originally Posted In: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/adl-medicine-causing-disease < Back Oct. 7 is behind us, but the moral wreckage it revealed is not. On campuses and in newsrooms, moral clarity has dissolved into factional reflex. The speed of that collapse has exposed something long in the making: a society trained to sort every question through the logic of identity and power. In recent years, Americans have been told that justice lives in the arithmetic of oppression. We built institutions around that belief. It promised fairness but produced suspicion. When real moral tests arrived, those suspicions split the country into tribes instead of citizens. What began as a language meant to protect the vulnerable hollowed out the Democratic Party itself, wrenching Jews from a coalition that once defined liberal America. The same moral logic now corrodes the right, where a counterfeit version of patriotism exalts grievance politics and sectarian resentment. Across both extremes, identity has replaced citizenship. The Anti-Defamation League has become the most visible symbol in the Jewish world of that shift. In schools across the United States, students are now taught to “challenge bias” and “explore identity” through the Anti-Defamation League’s No Place for Hate curriculum. The program asks children to examine their “unconscious prejudice,” map their place in “systems of oppression,” and reflect on how “intersecting oppressions” shape their worldview. Middle schoolers complete assignments such as the “Identity Iceberg,” which invites them to reveal the parts of themselves that lie “below the surface.” What was once a movement to fight antisemitism has evolved into an educational framework built on the language of DEI. Its central lesson is not moral conviction but self-classification within hierarchies of power. In two national studies, participants exposed to the ADL’s anti-oppression messaging grew more defensive and in fact expressed more antisemitism than they had prior to being “educated.” Those results mark more than the failure of one organization. They signal the exhaustion of an era. The frameworks that claimed to cure bias are now being proven by data to deepen it. If we want to rebuild moral coherence, we need a new paradigm rooted not in grievance but in shared human values, the same ideals that helped shape the American experiment and long sustained Jewish moral life in this country. For more than a decade, schools and corporations have adopted what they call the anti-oppressive framework, the belief that morality lives in the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. The goal of this approach was ostensibly to eliminate bias. The result has been rising suspicion and hostility and the fracturing of the once-robust American middle into warring sectarian tribes. Our research tested how the framework of oppressed and oppressors works in practice to reduce bias. Partnering with Rutgers Social Perception Lab, in a study titled “Instructing Animosity,” we exposed thousands of participants to training materials drawn from anti-racist, anti-Islamophobia, and anti-casteist curricula. Across all three domains, the pattern was the same. People who read those texts became more likely to believe that racism or prejudice had occurred when there was no evidence of it. Perceptions of microaggressions in neutral situations rose by roughly 30%, and willingness to punish others for imagined offenses increased sharply. The interventions reproduced the same psychological profile found in people who score high on measures of authoritarianism: suspicion, intolerance, and punitive impulse. The effect was not tied to any group or cause; it was tied to the frame itself. When we applied the same method to the ADL’s antisemitism curriculum, the results were even clearer. Participants who read ADL materials reported much higher irritation and stronger feelings of being attacked than those who read neutral or values-based text. Their written responses contained 15 times more antisemitic statements than those in the control conditions. Both studies revealed the same underlying process: Exposure to anti-oppressive rhetoric increased defensiveness and moral reactivity. However, the direction and expression of hostility differed greatly between the anti-racism and the antisemitism studies. While exposure to anti-racist materials led subjects to reproduce the moral and political orientation of the materials themselves - condemning racism, even when it wasn’t there - exposure to the ADL’s materials produced the exact opposite effect, rendering subjects 15 times more hostile to Jews than they had been before. Why do materials structured in the same way produce such radically opposite effects when the “oppressed” group is Jewish? One plausible interpretation of their differences draws on Jonathan Haidt’s moral-foundations theory. Anti-oppressive interventions may cue a coalitional mode of moral reasoning, shifting the question from What is good? to Who are the good people? . In this frame, moral emotion is directed toward identity rather than principle, and the language of justice becomes a search for the righteous and the condemned. In anti-racism contexts, where the narrative clearly identifies an oppressor and where public sanction reinforces that boundary, hostility finds a sanctioned outlet. Condemnation of the “bad group” is socially rewarded and even expected, while reproducing “racism” results in social sanction and even the possibility of being targeted with violence. However, in the case of antisemitism, that same moral circuitry operates in a very different social and political context. Jewish life, historically organized around education and civic participation rather than mob politics, lacks a stable coalition capable of enforcing moral standing through collective power. No one is actually afraid of being punished by Jews—or being physically confronted by them. The mob logic never coheres into protection but instead amplifies vulnerability. Each round of moral accusation deepens the perception of instability and, paradoxically, blames Jews for the precarity itself. These hypotheses remain tentative but suggest that where moral sanction is unstable, anti-oppressive frames do not resolve into coherent moral conflict; they multiply it, producing a self-reinforcing cycle of reactivity and blame. The same moral logic that governs DEI programs has filtered into national institutions and street movements. It teaches people to read conflict as oppression, disagreement as violence, and identity as destiny. Once that logic takes hold, it spreads suspicion through every social bond, whether on the left or on the right. The ADL did not create this framework, but it amplified it. While hostility toward Jews and other groups escalated, its own programs continued to describe “whiteness” as privilege and to problematize mainstream organizations like Turning Point USA with accusations of extremism. This year, the FBI ended its partnership with the ADL, stating that it would not work with political fronts posing as watchdogs. That decision confirmed what the data already suggest. The old paradigm has exhausted itself. The public no longer trusts it, and the evidence shows why. The data show the medicine is worse than the disease. The same science that exposes the damage done to American Jews and the wider society by the ADL’s bias education programs also points toward a remedy: a moral vocabulary rooted in the universal ideals that once anchored both Jewish and American life. The founders of this country made a discovery so simple and so radical that it still startles the modern mind. They declared that human beings are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights. It was a moral revolution that broke every hierarchy of power and taught that dignity does not come from ancestry or position but from the soul itself. From that truth flows not only moral right but also moral responsibility, the duty to see that same dignity in others. We tested what happens when people are reminded of that principle. In our experiment, participants read a short essay titled “Universal Human Values. ” It spoke of fairness, honesty, conscience, and the shared duty to act with integrity. It argued that goodness does not come from fear or ideology but from conviction. Compared with those who read anti-oppressive or DEI-based texts, participants exposed to this values-based message showed no rise in defensiveness, antisemitism, or toxicity. They rated the message as 20% more meaningful, 19% less exaggerated, and 17% less biased. They were also 12% less likely to describe Jews as racist. The difference was visible in their words. “It reminded me that compassion is a shared duty as well as a personal decision,” one participant wrote. Others described feeling hopeful and inspired to act with integrity. The same science that revealed how anti-oppressive messaging breeds resentment now shows that shared moral language restores connection. The evidence points to one conclusion: Moral education must return to universal American values. That means rebuilding the institutions that teach it. The same voices that sold identity politics cannot credibly offer its cure. It is not believable that Black Lives Matter can now deliver moral coherence, or that the ADL is the best candidate to undo the divisions it helped create. Their frameworks were built around hierarchy and guilt. They cannot now lead a movement based on equality and responsibility. The challenge ahead requires constructing new institutions rooted in both data and moral truth, institutions that see the human being before the category. America’s original moral discovery still waits for completion. It begins with the same conviction that founded the nation and animated its prophets: that we are created equal and are therefore accountable to one another. ---- Joel Finkelstein is the co-founder and chief science officer of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which innovates methods in social cyber sciences to better meet threats in the information age. He is a graduate of Princeton University, where his doctoral work focused on the Psychology and Neuroscience of addiction and social behavior. He currently directs the Network Contagion Lab, at the Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience at Rutgers University. Previous Next

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

November 10, 2025 The Elephant on Bruin Walk: UCLA Can’t Curb Campus Antisemitism While Ignoring Faculty-Led Anti-Zionism Tammi Rossman-Benjamin At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism. Originally Posted In: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/384866/the-elephant-on-bruin-walk-ucla-cant-curb-campus-antisemitism-while-ignoring-faculty-led-anti-zionism/ < Back On Thursday, UCLA’s Consortium for Palestine Studies will host a lecture entitled “Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination” given by Rutgers professor Noura Erakat, an outspoken anti-Zionist who compares Zionism to Nazism and white supremacy . The event is co-sponsored by a wide roster of UCLA academic units, most led by faculty who have publicly endorsed the academic boycott of Israel — a campaign that seeks to delegitimize Israel and turn the country and its supporters into pariahs within academic life. Last month, on the two-year anniversary of the October 7th attack, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter co-hosted an on-campus rally celebrating Hamas’ massacre as “the people of Palestine righteously engaged in decolonial struggle” and demanded that the university “END [its] academic and financial complicity,” explicitly tying protest goals to academic-boycott demands. These are not isolated incidents. At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism. At least 115 faculty have publicly endorsed academic BDS, many while holding administrative roles. Dozens of departments and programs issued statements praising or defending last year’s illegal encampment and endorsing protester demands — including academic boycott and divestment — under official banners that signal institutional approval. From late 2023 through spring 2025, more than 20 Israel/Palestine events co-sponsored by numerous academic departments featured only BDS-supporting speakers; none offered a balancing view. Making matters worse, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, formed shortly after the October 2023 Hamas massacre for the express purpose of advancing academic BDS’s anti-normalization goals on campus, has organized teach-ins and events like the recent rally celebrating the Hamas massacre, and pursued legal efforts that marginalize Zionist students and deny Jewish identity. Even more troubling, FJP’s anti-Zionist mobilization is now being formalized through the faculty-initiated Consortium for Palestine Studies, founded in fall 2024 by five FJP-affiliated supporters of academic BDS. Branded as “at UCLA” but not approved by the Academic Senate, the Consortium uses UCLA’s name and infrastructure to legitimize anti-Zionist research and teaching and to co-sponsor events, including the upcoming “Zionism is Racism” lecture, effectively institutionalizing anti-Zionism without academic oversight. As these faculty- and department-led anti-normalization campaigns rapidly expanded, antisemitism surged: from July 2023 through June 2025, incidents at UCLA targeting Jewish members of the campus community for harm — including assaults, vandalism, and bullying – rose by nearly 3,000% compared with the prior two years. In the same period, rhetoric glorifying violence against Israel or Jews, and calling for or justifying the elimination of the Jewish state, increased by nearly 1,000%. This surge in antisemitic incidents is what triggered federal scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice pursued a civil‑rights probe of UCLA, found the university in violation of federal law and transmitted to the UC Regents a proposed Resolution Agreement that was publicly released last week. While that proposal carries sweeping requirements and major financial exposure, it does not address the real institutional driver of the problem: faculty and academic units using official university channels to delegitimize Zionism and advance academic‑boycott anti‑normalization campaigns that incite antisemitic harassment and curtail Jewish and Zionist students’ participation in campus life. This is not a question of academic freedom; it is about institutional conduct and professional standards. When departments and faculty initiatives use UCLA’s name and platforms to label Zionism as racism or to praise Hamas’s October 7 attack as “righteous,” they weaponize academic authority, delegitimize a core part of many Jewish students’ identity, and incite hostility and harm towards them on campus. The message to Jewish and Zionist students is unmistakable: you are unwelcome and unsafe. If UCLA is serious about addressing campus antisemitism, it must bar faculty from using official titles and university resources for political advocacy and activism. It must end departmental partnerships with faculty advocacy groups that promote discriminatory boycotts and bar those groups from receiving university funds or using university facilities. And it must restructure or discipline departments that have materially contributed to a hostile environment for students. Even under DOJ’s sweeping proposal, UCLA can satisfy new requirements and still miss the heart of the problem if it refuses to acknowledge and address how faculty and departments use the university’s name and platforms for political ends. Jewish and Zionist students deserve to learn without fear. If UCLA declines to act, campus antisemitism will continue, and no fines or compliance plans will fix it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tammi Rossman-Benjamin serves as executive director of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit antisemitism watchdog, and was a University of California faculty member for twenty years. Previous Next

February 8, 2026 'Israelis steal kidneys': Teacher gets fired in California after sharing antisemitic video Lara Sukster Mosheyof “There’s no chance we would allow such a person to enter classrooms,” a local Israeli told N12. Originally Posted In: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-885891?fbclid=IwZnRzaAP1t_dleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEepWru < Back A teacher was fired in San Diego, California, after uploading an antisemitic video saying that “Israelis steal kidneys, livers, and eyes,” N12 reported on Saturday. A former member of the San Diego Unified School District in California , the teacher, identified as Nasreen Atassi, was removed from the staff after the Jewish community pressured the authorities. “There’s no chance we would allow such a person to enter classrooms,” a local Israeli told N12. According to StopAntisemitism, Atassi was a special education teacher. In the shared video, the teacher claimed that Israel “stole the protests, like they always steal from people – including body parts such as kidneys, livers, and eyes.” The declaration came as a reference to American Jews ' support for demonstrations by Iranians in the US. Jewish community responsible for official complaint In a declaration to N12, Dr. Halevi Feldman, a board member representing House of Israel – Balboa Park, shared the information that the House's community has a person responsible for collecting data regarding antisemitism cases. This source, who prefers to remain anonymous, documents the antisemitic acts and "passes them on to the relevant authorities.” Feldman noted that the community's actions were mostly responsible for getting Atassi punished. By sharing the case online, responding to posts, tagging the authorities, and sending complaints to the body employing the former teacher, the complaint against the antisemitic video ended in the firing decision. Atassi was removed from the education body less than a day from the time the video was shared online, said Feldman, explaining that "additional steps were taken behind the scenes" for it to happen. He added that the House of Israel community was not surprised to encounter the video, “We’re no longer shocked when we see things like this, but we absolutely do not intend to give up or remain silent, and certainly not to allow such a person to be part of San Diego’s education system.” Previous Next

November 23, 2025 The Ideological Erosion of College Readiness Tamar Caspi & Sharon Ceresnie Sorkin California’s Ethnic Studies mandate, which took hold over the past five years, coincides with a sharp decline in statewide test scores for grades 3-8 and 11 in English Language Arts and math. While activists spent years crafting curricula that demonize America, Israel, Jews, and the West, students were robbed of the opportunity to master fundamentals. Originally Posted In: https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2025/11/23/the_ideological_erosion_of_college_readiness_1149189.html < Back A stunning new report from the University of California, San Diego documents what many educators have feared: incoming college students are less prepared than ever. This “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of incoming college students isn’t limited to advanced subjects; it’s hitting the bedrock of learning: literacy and numeracy. These are the skills upon which all higher-order thinking depends. The report points to pandemic disruptions, the removal of standardized tests like the SAT, and grade inflation masking academic weakness. But these are symptoms, not causes. The deeper problem is an ideological takeover of America’s K-12 system -- an approach that dismisses standardized tests as “products of white supremacy” and inflates grades to preserve the illusion of success. It’s an approach that relies on a teaching philosophy that promotes activism in the classroom for causes like decolonization (“down with America”) and anti-racism (solving racism with more racism), all at the expense of core academic proficiency. No one made this clearer than Cecily Myart-Cruz, head of Los Angeles’s teachers union, who said : “ It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” California’s Ethnic Studies mandate, which took hold over the past five years, coincides with a sharp decline in statewide test scores for grades 3-8 and 11 in English Language Arts and math. While activists spent years crafting curricula that demonize America, Israel, Jews, and the West, students were robbed of the opportunity to master fundamentals. This is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country. Minnesota ’s ethnic studies mandate will take effect in 2026–27. Michigan has considered similar proposals. Nationally, ideologically-driven curricula like Rethinking Schools -- endorsed by the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union -- are spreading rapidly. If California’s experience is any guide, academic decline will not remain a regional problem. The irony is painful: these ideological experiments claim to uplift minority and disadvantaged students, yet they harm them most. Low-income families, English-language learners, and first-generation college aspirants suffer when schools trade core skills for political agendas. Recent research shows widening excellence gaps; even high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds are falling further behind. The ripple effects are not trivial: mastery of basic mathematics is a gatekeeper for access to STEM pathways, and strong reading comprehension is essential for civic and informational literacy. A high school diploma that no longer signals readiness wastes time and money for students and the state, and it undermines social mobility. Public education’s primary duty is to teach what is demonstrably necessary for the next stage of life. If mandatory ethnic studies courses or ideologically organized curricula prevent that duty from being fulfilled, they must be rethought. The modern university and the modern high school exist in a contract: high schools certify that graduates possess the fundamentals needed to succeed in college, and colleges admit on the expectation that those fundamentals exist. But the UCSD data show that even admitted students with “acceptable” high school credentials may still lag significantly in readiness. Schools must recommit to the basics: coherent writing, mathematical reasoning, scientific analysis, and evidence-based thinking. Schools should publicly track and report not just representation goals and qualitative indicators of representation, school climate, discipline, and engagement, but also measurable growth in reading, mathematics, science attainment, and readiness for tertiary education. And inflating grades to make students look more successful than they actually are only exacerbates the problem. While there may be some inherent biases in the tools we use to measure academic success, research shows these tests are critical predictors of success in higher education. According to researchers at Brown University , while disparities do exist in standardized test outcomes, these disparities cannot be solely blamed on test biases. NAEP ’s own interpretive guidance makes clear that demographic variables correlate with scores and do not by themselves establish causality. Doing away with meaningful grades and standardized tests entirely only does a disservice to the very students the ideologues aim to lift up. We should, of course, strive to make measurement tools as unbiased as possible, but we must do this without sacrificing the ability to measure, and thereby promote, meaningful achievement. This is an educational emergency. Every American who believes in equal opportunity must resist the ideological capture of our schools. In order to lift up all students to meet their highest potential, we should be fighting against the ideological takeover in America’s K-12 system. Curricula should unite, not divide. Schools should prepare students for success based on skills, not activism. If we fail to act, we risk sacrificing an entire generation’s potential on the altar of politics. The UC San Diego report should serve as a wake-up call. Academic preparedness is not a partisan issue; it is a national imperative. If we want students to thrive, we must restore rigor, accountability, and a shared commitment to excellence. Anything less is a betrayal of the very students these ideological experiments claim to serve. Tamar Caspi is a co-founder of PeerK12, a San Diego-based grassroots movement defending Jewish civil rights. Sharon Sorkin is the Director of Community Engagement at the North American Values Institute. Previous Next

September 19, 2023 The Cult of ‘Antizionism’ Izabella Tabarovsky American progressive ideologues have formed a new ideology based on the negation of an all-powerful phantasm they call ‘Zionism.’ To fight them, we need to understand the origins of their beliefs in the Soviet academic propaganda apparatus. Originally Posted In: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/cult-of-antizionism-icsz < Back A group of anti-Israel academics and BDS activists have taken a new step toward rebuilding the long-forgotten Soviet discipline of “scientific antizionism” on American campuses. The “founding collective” of 10 has established an Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which aims “to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies” and “to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism.” The new institute defines Zionism as a “political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.” This October, ICSZ will hold its inaugural conference titled “Battling the ‘IHRA Definition’: Theory and Activism.” The ICSZ’s website presents a vision of an overtly academic institution that will churn out politically motivated “research” designed to move the American public toward the idea of doing away with American support for Israel and, ultimately, with Israel itself. Coming at a time when American Jews and Jewish identity are under comprehensive attack within mainstream institutions, ICSZ sounds like bad news—and it is. American progressives have scored numerous successes in recent years by using the power of tenured academic positions, in-class bullying, and threats of physical intimidation to enforce anti-Zionist culture at American universities and within the elite cultural spaces that employ American liberal arts graduates. Now, they have taken opposition to Zionism a step further, by transforming their hatred of “Zionists” and rejection of the historical dynamics of Jewish self-identification and national self-determination into its own free-standing ideology, which is politically aligned with, but not dependent on, the wider progressive movement. Anti-Zionists, as part of the broader far left, are eerily reproducing elements of the cultural deformations that once defined the lives of the citizens of the communist bloc: They have introduced Americans to the practices of collective demonization, blacklists, and denouncing friends and colleagues. They have injected political reeducation and oversight committees into workplaces and academic institutions as part of a new cultural revolution that overtly targets “Zionists” as present-day villains and boogeymen, on a par with “white supremacists” and “fascists.” And they have forced colleagues and coworkers who don’t agree with them to either hide their true opinions, or, more often, to stop having opinions at all, in order to keep their jobs. Within academia, progressives who primarily derive their personal and professional identity from expressing extreme loathing of Israel have notched additional victories. They have reorganized the missions of entire academic disciplines, including Middle Eastern, Jewish, and Israel studies, around demonization of the Jewish state. They have pushed states to introduce radical “liberated ethnic studies” maligning Jews and Israel in K-12 schools. They have coopted countless academics into signing defamatory anti-Israel petitions that are of questionable academic validity and, word has it, are now working to place signatories on the synagogue lecture circuit, as part of their strategy of legitimizing the openly racist, and even genocidal, views at the heart of anti-Zionist ideology by co-opting wealthy Jewish institutions and funders who seek to buy protection from progressives, despite the radical unpopularity of their views among ordinary American Jews. The establishment of ICSZ marks a new stage in the relentless regressive march of this bizarre progressive movement. How delighted would the institute’s forebears in the Soviet security and propaganda apparatus have been to witness the spectacle of Americans, including Jews, coming together of their own free will to provide academic legitimacy and a Jewish institutional imprimatur to conspiracy theories about Zionism that they spent their entire careers developing, and then inculcating with sympathetic audiences around the globe? The ICSZ’s founders are known figures in the BDS movement and the movement for the academic boycott of Israel. They include Rabab Abdulhadi of San Francisco State University, who tried to bring convicted PFLP terrorist and airline hijacker Leila Khaled to SFSU; Lau Barrios, who has served as campaign manager at Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change and as a co-organizer of the “No Tech for Apartheid” campaign geared at pressuring Google and Amazon to end their work with Israel; and Emmaia Gelman, ICSZ’s founding director, who serves as a trustee of the Sparkplug Foundation, a funder of IfNotNow and Palestinian Youth Movement, and also a co-sponsor of the ICSZ conference. ICSZ’s advisory board, which has grown from 16 to 29 members as of this writing in less than two weeks, now includes the UC Berkeley professor Judith Butler, an academic superstar of the American BDS movement who famously described Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive social movements that are “on the Left” and are “part of a global Left,” and New York University’s Lisa Duggan, who defended Rasmea Odeh , a PFLP operative who helped organize two deadly bombings inside Israel. ICSZ claims it has the backing of well-funded pro-BDS NGOs like Jewish Voice for Peace and American Friends Service Committee , both listed as co-sponsors of the conference, and that it plans to grant “annual fellowships for students and academics, conferences, [and] publications.” The ICSZ’s apparent affiliation with the NYU and University of California at Santa Cruz, which the founders have claimed will be hosting their first conference, furthers its veneer of academic legitimacy, though both the NYU and UCSC have denied affiliation with the conference or providing space for it but remain listed on the site. Those who are tempted to dismiss ICSZ as fringe today need only to remember that it is part of a network of NGOs that also began on the margins before raising millions of dollars and going mainstream on campuses like NYU and UCSC. The rapid expansion of ICSZ’s advisory board and the inclusion on it of celebrity BDS activists such as Butler, suggests that ICSZ is already capturing the imagination of the anti-Israel crowd. ICSZ presents the clearest articulation yet of the philosophy, goals, and methods of the anti-Israel hard left as it breaks free from conventional modes of progressive analysis and coalition-building and becomes its own self-contained ideological universe. The first thing that an examination of ICSZ’s website makes clear is that, contrary to their claims, ICSZ’s founders are not, in fact, anti-Zionists. ICSZ describes Zionism as “a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it.” It views it as a “political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession” and intends to demonstrate “how the critical study of Zionism is deeply and essentially connected to the study of global forces including contests over power, race, colonialism, capital, militarism, and violence.” This deeply contrived view of Zionism bears no relationship to how the founders of Zionism framed their beliefs, nor how Jews have historically perceived and experienced Zionism. Jews who argued against Zionism as the answer to the “Jewish question” in the run-up to World War II (an entirely legitimate debate until the war proved Zionism right in the most terrible way possible) would not have recognized in this description the Zionism that they opposed. Calling ICSZ founders anti-Zionists, then, is a profound misnomer. To find a better term for them, let’s turn to the work of British scholars David Seymour and David Hirsh. In a 2019 paper , Seymour argues that the philosophy of those who oppose an imaginary, rather than real, Zionism should be framed not in opposition to Zionism but as a free-standing ideology and should be spelled, akin to antisemitism, as “antizionism”—i.e., without the hyphen. Just as “the ideology of antisemitism tells us nothing about Jews” but everything about antisemites, writes Seymour, “the ideology of antizionism tells us more about itself” than it does about Israel or Zionism. Expounding on this, Hirsh notes in his essay in the forthcoming The Routledge History of Antisemitism that the “‘Zionism’ against which antizionism defines its ideology” is “something conjured by the anti-Jewish imagination.” The antizionist conceives Zionism as “colonialism, apartheid, racism, the surveillance state, as being like Nazism, and as everything else that good people oppose”—in other words, as a phenomenon that is “profoundly different” from the Zionism embraced by Jews. Just like antisemites do battle against a fantasy of “the Jews” that exists in their own heads, the new antizionists battle a “Zionism” that exists nowhere on earth, and is instead conjured up by their own fevered imaginations. Dropping the hyphen may not seem like the radical step this moment calls for, but just like changing the spelling of anti-Semitism to antisemitism, it has important conceptual implications, and helps us view the phenomenon from new angles. While most American Jews understand why it is important to know the history of Nazi Germany and its antisemitic ideology, even though Nazi Germany has ceased to exist and its ideas are widely discredited, few American Jews can identify the provenance of ideas espoused by today’s antizionist left. As I have noted here , here , here , and here , today’s antizionists reproduce, with extraordinary fidelity, the tropes, the motifs and the explanatory logic of Soviet antizionism. But Soviet history vanished from Americans’ curricula as though that vast totalitarian empire never existed. Americans’ understanding of communism today seems limited to opposing McCarthyism, resulting in a deeply provincial perception of communists as a powerless minority of well-meaning idealists standing up to a bigoted, nativist American establishment. It is no wonder, then, that American Jews are unable to trace the kind of demonizing antizionism that ICSZ’s founders preach to its source. Nor do they know that ICSZ’s language associating Zionism with racism, fascism, capitalism, colonialism, and militarism was once monotonously weaponized against millions of Soviet Jews, who suffered exclusion, professional and educational discrimination, and severe limitations on their Jewish identity as a result. Only a fraction of Soviet Jews were openly Zionist (these were tried in kangaroo courts and given lengthy sentences in prison colonies), but the antizionist campaign put a mark on every Soviet Jewish citizen. A million and a half Jews left the country the moment they could. What American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of antizionism spreads in left-of-center spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s-80s USSR. American Jews increasingly find themselves under pressure to disavow their connection to Israel and lower their Jewish profiles. They are excluded from progressive groups. They are losing professional and educational opportunities. Some were physically attacked during the 2021 flare-up of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Nearly 60% of American Jewish college students report being targeted by antisemitism directed against them, personally. Even more alarming than this explosion of anti-Jewish bigotry is the blanket silence with which it has been greeted by institutions whose reactions to even a handful of such incidents targeting other social groups is easy to imagine. The fact that there is no formal apparatus of state repression behind American antizionism offers only a measure of relief. If there is anything the last few years have shown, it’s that the radical left is capable of imposing its norms on society without directly capturing institutions of the state. One implication of viewing antizionism as a standalone philosophy with a distinct historical and political lineage, then, is that it gives the lie to ICSZ’s claim that it is not anti-Jewish (we’ll come back to this in a moment). Another is that there is nothing remotely organic about contemporary antizionist language. Far from being an outgrowth of grassroots activism on behalf of Palestinians or an attempt to speak truth to power, this language is imposed from the top down, by antizionist ideologues and activists whose own views are the products of professional Soviet Cold War propagandists such as Yuri Ivanov and Yevgeny Yevseyev (for more on them see here and here ), Vladimir Bolshakov , Valery Yemelyanov , and others like them—right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theorists employed by an authoritarian regime that perceived Zionism and Israel as its biggest ideological enemies. Contemporary antizionists should ask themselves whether this is a political tradition they want to associate themselves with. What American Jews are experiencing today, as the ideology of ‘antizionism’ spreads in left-of-center spaces, looks eerily familiar to anyone who came of age in the 1970s-80s USSR. ICSZ leads with the bizarre proposition of supporting “the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies.” Doing that is as weird as, say, attempting to describe Armenian or Basque nationalism outside the context of the history of Armenians or the Basque. “Zionism’s project,” on the other hand, ICSZ informs us, “extends beyond the borders of Palestine,” and so the study of Zionism needs to be spread “across multiple fields ,” to include “Asian American studies, Asian studies, critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, queer studies, Palestinian studies and beyond.” This idea could be dismissed as silly if it weren’t so malicious. The point being that Jews are the universal oppressor, and so the Jewish story can be maimed as the haters please. There is a reason, of course, why ICSZ’s founders are so keen on amputating Zionism from its Jewish context, and that is to avoid being labeled as antisemitic. If you can convince the gullible that Zionism is not related to Jews, then you can demonize the former with impunity: Accusations of antisemitism will not apply. Here, too, the founders walk firmly in the footsteps of their Soviet predecessors. Soviet propagandists cannibalized the history of Zionism to underscore its supposedly inherent evil nature, ripping Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau quotes out of context and presenting Zionists as the Jewish people’s greatest enemy. For ICSZ to cut Zionism off conceptually from its roots in the Jewish faith, Jewish history, and Jewish collective popular memory is an obnoxious attempt to undermine the integrity of the Jewish story, and to propagandize its followers. What draws the antizionist left’s special ire is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Alone among several existing definitions, the IHRA definition, which has now been adopted by over 1,100 global entities and 43 countries and numerous other political entities, provides tools to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and demonization. ICSZ’s upcoming conference intends to help out those battling the definition, which, it claims, “both amplifies and hides repressive power and state violence.” The conference also plans to address IHRA’s “enabling conditions,” which range from the “neo-liberal university” to “the ways that the idea of antisemitism has been constructed,” to “student organizing,” to “the DEI as a cooptable and abusable format for leveraging demands for rights and attention” (presumably, by Jews and Zionists). ICSZ intends to center the work of “activists and communities whose lives are shaped by Zionist institutions’ political work” through “points of unity” that all academics will be expected to sign onto, in order to continue engaging in academic work. Zionist Jews, obviously, will not be part of the conversation. ICSZ’s “points of unity” are the most obvious proof that ICSZ’s academic mission is a fiction. “Is it even legal to impose loyalty oaths on a college campus?” asked Jarrod Tanny, a Jewish history professor and founder of the Jewish Studies Zionist Network with reference to its upcoming conference. In a letter to UCSC, David Bernstein and Marcy Braverman Goldstein of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values argued that ideological litmus tests go against university policy and urged it to “immediately withdraw sponsorship from this event.” The “points of unity” betray ICSZ as a political project in search of academic legitimacy. What kind of scholarship a project like this might produce is, once again, apparent from the history of “scientific antizionism” in the Soviet Union. One of its emblematic products is Mahmoud Abbas’ dissertation , which the Palestinian leader defended in 1982 at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies—the linchpin of Soviet “Zionology.” The dissertation is shot through with factual errors, decontextualizations, distortions, and outright falsifications of sources. It is a safe assumption that ICSZ’s “scholarly” output will be of similar quality. When it comes to conceptualizing Zionism, ICSZ’s founders think big—very big. In their minds, Zionism is a global, powerful, and malevolent entity. It needs to be studied “transnationally” because of its “direct work for the Israeli state and its ‘other work,’” ICSZ informs us, leaving unexplained the insinuating quotes around “other work.” Not only is Zionism central to such societal ills as “racism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the appropriation of liberatory rhetoric by repressive political forces, among other harms,” but it is impeding numerous crucial “political pursuits” animating the good people of the earth, ranging “from democracy to decolonization.” It doesn’t end here, however. “The study of Zionism,” we learn from the institute’s FAQ page , “extends to Zionist institutions and logics, their role in the production of racial and gendered knowledge, their function in naturalizing and reproducing structures of militarized colonial violence, and the ways that Zionism interplays with, and relationally shapes, bigger spheres including politics, culture, the movement of capital, and ways of thinking about the world.” ICSZ’s vision further incorporates “research on the role of Zionism in the development of U.S. hate crimes policy and homonationalism , the linkages between Zionist and Hindutva politics, the ties between Zionist institutions, the Israeli state, and the evangelical Christian right , the Zionist surveillance technology deployed at the U.S.-Mexico border , the destruction of Indigenous agriculture in Guatemala, the centrality of Zionism in the opposition to and attempted cooptation of ethnic studies in the United States, and the fostering of post-9/11 interventionist human rights politics with regard to North Korea .” As if this were not enough, critical study of Zionism, we’re told, is “deeply and essentially connected to the study of global forces including contests over power, race, colonialism, capital, militarism, and violence.” In a Mondoweiss op-ed, Abdulhadi and Heike Schotten, another ICSZ co-founder, tell us that new and “exciting” work on Zionism is being done in “seemingly unexpected domains” such as “surveillance, education, farming, and critically analyzing how Zionist logics are reproduced and utilized in ideas and arguments about race, policing, land usage and climate change, and neoliberal capitalism.” Cue in cartoons of hook-nosed octopuses and spiders holding the world in their tentacles. It’s unsurprising that contemporary antizionists trade in the tropes of right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theory, replacing the word “Jew” with the word “Zionist.” Soviet Zionology grew out of the right-wing Russian nationalist movement that emerged in the USSR after Stalin’s death and was nurtured on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . ICSZ founders may hide behind contemporary academic jargon, but they are reproducing eliminationist antisemitic conspiracy theory under the guise of progressive language. The fact that some antizionists may not be entirely aware of the origins of their ideas doesn’t diminish the damage that they are doing. Peeking through the lines of ICSZ’s web pages is a deeply dismal vision of society that is as anti-Jewish as it is anti-democratic. The complaint about DEI councils as a “cooptable and abusable format for leveraging demands for rights and attention” hints at a desire to put an end to all the democratic nonsense of discussion and compromise. The intention to keep “Zionist” Jews—i.e., the majority of American and Israeli Jews—out of discussions about Israel, Zionism, antisemitism and other topics crucial to the well-being of the community—reveals a vision that is dangerous not only to Jews but to any other minority that gets in the way of the hard-left manifesting its utopia. The founders think nothing of trashing a fundamental aspect of the academy—academic freedom—while arrogating to themselves the right to decide who has a right to speak. ICSZ is the latest product of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment on the left, but it most certainly won’t be the last. The confusion that has greeted its establishment is symptomatic of the failures of the Jewish leadership, which has for decades looked exclusively to the right for sources of danger to the community. In the current environment, it is entirely possible that ICSZ will manage to secure a valid academic base and respectable sources of funding and start churning out anti-Jewish propaganda couched in the language of antizionism. Unfortunately, American Jewish institutions are three decades too late coming into this fight, and it is still not clear that they fully grasp the landscape in which they are operating. We need to recognize that teaching about the dangers of Nazi antisemitism does nothing to prepare the next generation of American Jews to defend themselves against antizionist antisemitism. Along with German Nazism, American Jews need to be learning about Soviet communism and the disasters that the left visited on the Jews in the 20th century. Young American Jews in particular need to be inoculated against the siren song of woke antizionists seeking to usurp their Jewish identity and draw them into fighting their own people, before it is once again too late. Previous Next

November 18, 2023 The Inside Story of How Palestinians Took Over the World Gary Wexler The brilliant Palestinian plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students was laid out in front of me 25 years ago, during a very sinister business meeting in Israel. Originally Posted In: https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/columnist/365220/the-inside-story-of-how-palestinians-took-over-the-world/ < Back The brilliant Palestinian plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students was laid out in front of me 25 years ago, during a very sinister business meeting in Israel. It was around the time of the Oslo Accords. I had been hired by the Ford Foundation to create a marketing institute for their grantees in the country. Ford was funding the operations of both Jewish and Arab organizations within the Israeli green line, in an effort to help build a vibrant liberal civil society. Ford put me in partnership with a young Israeli woman, Debra London. (Debra, now one of my closest friends, has just been selected to head up fundraising for the rebuilding of Kibbutz Be’eri.) She and I drew up a plan to interview each of the grantees, as well as Israeli ad agencies and media firms. While we wanted to learn about the grantees, we also planned to secure free marketing work and media to be an essential part of the institute. When we interviewed the Jewish organizations, the atmosphere was almost giddy with hope, possibility and belief in Shimon Peres’s new Middle East. Each organization we interviewed talked excitedly about peace and co-existence, a flourishing economy among both the Jews and the Palestinians, collaborative projects and interchanges. But when we interviewed the Arab organizations, the word “peace” never passed their lips. They spoke of independence, dignity, self-rule, a state. One person even told me she would never use the word “du-kiyum ” (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.” I tried to explain to my fellow Jewish liberals that we — the Jews and the Arabs — were having two very separate conversations. We were talking “peace.” They were talking “independence.” But as the weeks of interviews progressed, I found the Arab organizations were talking about a whole lot more. I asked hard questions of both the Jews and Arabs in the interviewing process. With the Arab organizations, when I brought up any sensitive, and not-so-sensitive, issues—like terrorism, cooperation and even budget—the interviewee would slam on the brakes. And then from each organization, the same words were spoken: “When you are in Haifa meeting with Itijaa, you can ask that question to Ameer Makhoul.” Itijaa was an Arab civil rights organization. Ameer Makhoul was its executive director. It became clear to me that Ameer Makhoul had some type of control over all the Arab NGOs I was speaking to. Finally, Debra and I arrived at the offices of Itijaa. Skinny, bespectacled, young Ameer Makhoul emerged from his office, took a look at me and said, “So this is the Gary Wexler who has been asking all the questions.” And then he ticked off every question I had asked along with the name of each person I had posed the question to. He brought us into his office and began pacing. “So, Gary Wexler, let me answer your questions in the following way. One: Gary Wexler, who is sitting in front of me now, went to Los Angeles City College for two years where you were an Israel activist and editor of the school newspaper. You wrote a lot about Israel. And continued to do so at California State University, Northridge. You spent five summers as a volunteer on Kibbutz Ayelet Hashachar. Through your marketing agency, Passion Marketing, you service the following clients of the Jewish world and in Israel.” He named every one. I knew this guy was trouble. “And now, Gary Wexler,” he sat down, “let me give you more direct answers.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.” He stood again this time, right over me. “You wonder how we will make this happen, how we will pay for this? Not with the money from your liberal Jewish organizations who are now funding us. But from the European Union, Arab and Muslim governments, wealthy Arab people and their organizations. Eventually, we will not take another dollar from the Jews.” Then he approached real close. “What do you think of this?” I took a breath. I remained professional. “Nothing. I’m here on behalf of the Ford Foundation collecting information for a planned marketing institute.” He came even closer. “I am asking what does Gary Wexler think of what I just said. You, Gary Wexler.” I repeated my answer. He came even closer. “I ask again. What does Gary Wexler think of what I just said.” Debra and I got up. I took my writing pad. “I feel that you are threatening me and we are leaving.” The next morning I received a call from the program officer at the Ford Foundation. “Gary, we have a problem. We received a call from Ameer Makhoul and we understand you spewed out all sorts of Zionist propaganda and he felt very threatened by you.” I told him it was a lie. The program officer continued to press me as to what I had said. I related the conversation word for word. He repeated what Ameer Makhoul had said. I told him to call Debra London who was with me through the entire interview, and verify it with her. I also told him that they better check their funding to these Arab organizations, because Ameer Makhoul appeared to be controlling all of them with some very hateful behaviors. He backed down. Debra and I wrote up our recommendations for how they needed to build the marketing institute, including a recommendation for using the pro bono work, worth nearly 1 million shekels, that we had secured from the ad agencies. The program officer, a former academic focused on the nonprofit sector, couldn’t understand the value of businesses being involved and rejected it out of hand. A few weeks later, he told Debra and me that he had hired an NGO consulting team to finish the work. They would be giving several hours of consultation to each organization. Several years later, I learned Ameer Makhoul had been arrested by the Israelis as a spy for Syria. As the years went on, I began to see what Ameer Makhoul had laid out to me taking shape. The PR coverage was first: The Muhammad al-Durrah incident in Gaza, when a 12-year-old boy was shot to death on the second day of the Second Intifada, capturing global headlines. The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish Flotilla to Gaza that the Israelis stormed, killing several Palestinian activists, grabbing global headlines. I knew the Mavi Marmara was manufactured for the exposure it would gain. Then the campuses: The creation of Apartheid Week worldwide. The growth of BDS. The student volunteers who began by the thousands to work in the Palestinian territories and its refugee camps. The shocking creation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups. As an award-winning copywriter and creative director in ad agencies and a professor of Communication at USC, I have developed an intuitive antenna to detect similarities between writing styles, idea styles and conceptual creation. In the early years of this pro-Palestinian campaign, I could see the commonalities of excellence, style and manipulation across all their platforms. Teaching on a university campus gave me a front-row seat at this theater of darkening skies. People of color, particularly antisemitic Black groups like BLM, were organizing to identify with the Palestinians. Many organizations representing people seen as oppressed were moved to identify with the Palestinians. Students of every variety were swayed. People of color, particularly antisemitic Black groups like BLM, were organizing to identify with the Palestinians. Many organizations representing people seen as oppressed were moved to identify with the Palestinians. Students of every variety were swayed. I could see the commonalities of language creation and transfer — my field — being applied to the Jews. Many of them were old antisemitic tropes into which new life was being breathed: Israel and Jews are colonialists just like other white oppressors around the world. Israel is an apartheid society, the same as South Africa was. Jews have white privileg e, even though more than 50% of Jews are dark-skinned people from the Arab world, Iran and Africa. Jews hold power in media and banking, making them the enemy. Jews center themselves as capitalists and donors. Jews don’t hold space for anyone but themselves. Jews need to be held accountable for the pain they are causing. If you challenged any of this you were a racist, the worst thing you could possibly be accused of. (Except if you are racist against Jews. Then you prove you are a true ally of the oppressed.) Our enemies have had a real success. They have formed a winning international communication army with trained troops everywhere. Israeli writer, producer and former antisemitism envoy Noa Tishby recently said that students, particularly Jewish ones who are protesting against Israel, have been “played,” but I don’t know if even she understands the background and extent of it. They haven’t just been played, they’ve been turned. Many of them are alumni of Jewish day schools and camps. Those students believe they have joined the other side because they were the victims of a propagandized Zionist education and have now seen the light. No, they are the victims of a propagandized, slow, well-crafted plan, laid out to me by Ameer Makhoul. And what has been the Jewish world’s response to all of this? Funders are now putting up pro-Jewish and pro-Israel billboards in American cities. As if a clever one-line message can combat all these brilliant, strategized organizing efforts on behalf of our enemies. Others are organizing TikTok and Twitter troops. But that work is in response to the playing field that has been established and won by the enemies of the Jewish people. We show ourselves in a defensive mode. We are playing on the field they have drawn. We need to draw our own, in a very big way. There are many good organizations being funded and working on our behalf, but their work, alone, is not the answer. It is imperative we have overall strategizing and coordinating. Right now, it is every organization for itself. It’s an uncoordinated battlefield where each squadron is moving in its own direction, rather than toward the same hill—the only way for victory. It is imperative that we create big, brilliant, creative ideas of engagement. We must view this as a pervasive Jewish community organizing effort for communication purposes, in collaboration with the Israelis. American Jews are sending cans of food and socks to Israel while the Palestinians are conceptualizing bigger and better worldwide actions. We’re still fighting and demonizing one another. Many organizations have not yet woken up that it is no longer business as usual. In the last three weeks I have received no fewer than 200 solicitations for 200 separate efforts. American Jews are sending cans of food and socks to Israel while the Palestinians are conceptualizing bigger and better worldwide actions. We’re still fighting and demonizing one another. Many organizations have not yet woken up that it is no longer business as usual. I’m on the board of one that I’ve had to rattle, saying, “No, we cannot position what we are doing just as we always have. Everything now has to be repositioned against the background of this war on Israel and the Jewish people.” In the propaganda war, we could be learning a lot from our enemies, who have learned a lot from us. Maybe we need our own Ameer Makhoul and all his buddies? Is any leadership team, that we can all get behind, going to step forward? --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Gary Wexler was recently honored by the National Library of Israel with the creation of The Gary Wexler Archive, a 20 year history of Jewish life told through the advertising campaigns he created for Jewish organizations in the US, Canada and Israel. Previous Next

June 24, 2024 The Child Soldiers of Ethnic Studies Neetu Arnold How American students are radicalized against the West Originally Posted In: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/child-soldiers-ethnic-studies < Back Shortly after the start of the organized pro-Palestinian student riots on campuses across the country last fall, the Rutgers University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) issued a set of demands that followed a standard template now evident at multiple universities. In addition to divestment from Israel, incorporating “anti-Palestinian racism“ into all mandatory DEI training and race-based curricula for faculty and staff, and the creation of an Arab Cultural Center, the students demanded that Rutgers “hire additional professors specializing in Palestine and settler-colonial studies and institute a department of Middle East studies.” Since then, Rutgers and other universities have caved to the demands of the mob. Middle East and Islamic studies centers became avenues for foreign governments to purchase influence and prestige a long time ago. But today, these centers play a much broader role in national politics, law, scholarship, and culture. And the drivers are no longer just foreign political actors, but increasingly domestic ones, too. In this context, student activists’ apparently spontaneous demands to establish more Middle East studies departments, to hire more Palestinian and Middle East faculty, and to integrate Palestine into DEI and ethnic and race-based curricula should be viewed instead as the intentional expansion and consolidation of leftist institutional power. This has meant the creation of jobs and patronage for a new phalanx of progressive sectarian foot soldiers under the umbrella of ethnic studies. Many of these programs aim to create a reserve of activists who cover a wide array of ethnic and identity grievances and causes that extend beyond the halls of academia, with recruitment beginning in grade school. From a young age, an increasing number of American students are being fed anti-Western and anti-Israel material funded and distributed by a constellation of dark money, left-wing groups and foreign governments. Worse, their success to date can largely be attributed to backing, financial and otherwise, from our own federal government. The nuclei of Middle East education at American universities are the Middle East and Islamic studies centers. There are around 50 such centers distributed across the country, depending on how you count them. Columbia University alone hosts three: the Center for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Institute, and the Sakip Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies. These centers are no strangers to controversy. For at least two decades, scholars and policymakers alike have decried the centers’ whitewashing of Islamic extremism and anti-Israel bias. Yet the centers have remained mostly untouched, and a few new ones have even appeared. Throughout their history, these centers have taken money from both the federal government and foreign governments. For instance, archived documents retrieved by the National Association of Scholars show that Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) relied heavily on foreign countries in its early days during the 1970s. Arab countries contributed two-thirds of the funding needed to help Georgetown leaders reach their $6.1 million fundraising goal for CCAS. During this same time, the foreign governments of Oman, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) contributed more than $1 million for various professorships at CCAS. Today, the center is one of about a dozen Middle East National Resource Centers (NRC) that receive more than $3 million in funding from the federal government. Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies started in the 1950s with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and then-American-owned oil company Aramco. Soon thereafter, it received funding from the federal government as an early NRC. Beginning in the 1980s, the center helped secure tens of millions of dollars in funds primarily from Turkey and Saudi Arabia both for its own faculty and for affiliated programs at Harvard. The original purpose for the centers, established in the 1950s, was to produce policy-relevant information that the government could use to develop sound Middle East foreign policy. Relatively little expertise on the region existed in the United States at the time, which made getting up to speed a national security priority. But it’s hard to see that purpose in what passes through the centers and their affiliated faculty today. Today, the old foundations have combined with new ones to push for more ideological education on the Middle East not only on college campuses, but also in K-12 education. While it’s easy to dismiss the centers as too niche or academic to have any real influence, this would be a mistake. For one, these centers have long produced area experts that populate U.S. government agencies and the foreign service. The degeneration of the education provided by these programs into its current activist form tracks with the increasing activism of government bureaucrats, such as the political appointees and staff members of several government agencies who signed a letter objecting to the administration’s Israel policy, and the various State Department officials who have resigned in protest. But the toxic influence extends beyond government bureaucracy. Federally funded Middle East centers produced more than 2,500 instructional materials between 2000 and 2020, of which over 60% were intended for use by K-12 educators. Content matter ranged from climate justice to Islamophobia to youth activism. These centers also conducted over 22,000 outreach programs throughout the same time period, of which over 20% were intended for K-12 educators. Both the instructional materials and outreach programs are part of the centers’ mandate from the federal government, so our taxpayer dollars directly fund these programs. The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Middle East Studies, along with other NRCs at the school, used federal funds in 2021 to host a critical race literacy workshop, where K-12 teachers “(Un)learn[ed] patterns of whiteness in literacy teaching.” The university claims on its website that the event supported “instructional goals for literacy standards for the State of Texas.” Or consider a toolkit on “Women and Gender in the Middle East” produced by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Their set of readings directs students to a YouTube video of an overview of Edward Said’s Orientalism, produced by a channel called “Invictapalestina.” For those students who prefer a book, the toolkit points them to an anthology of Arab feminist writing, including by Columbia University professor Lila Abu-Lughod, who, ironically, in the past has criticized the “focus on gender-based violence” in Arab and Islamic countries as it “leave[s] aside the violence of states … like Israel.” Middle East faculty at top universities train the next generation of anti-Israel and anti-American activists by training K-12 teachers. For instance, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies partners with Jordan-based nonprofit Global Nomads Group to host an annual fellowship program for grades 7-12 teachers. During the fellowship, teachers create curricula to teach students about the Middle East. New Utrecht High School teacher Nathan Floro’s curriculum, to take one example, would ensure students have a “basic understanding of orientalism and be able to critique various media through a post-colonial lens.” NYU also funded Newton Public Schools teacher David Bedar, whose fellowship at NYU focused on redeveloping college-level content for high school students on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), throughout 2018 and 2019, acquired Bedar’s curriculum materials and found in a detailed analysis that the course favored the Palestinian over the Zionist narrative of the conflict by distorting and omitting facts. Global Nomads Group offers its own series of “youth courses” promoting similar messages. In a lesson plan within their “Human Rights” course, Global Nomads claims students will learn the difference between equity and equality and why “marginalized people are denied human rights.” They also offer courses on “Art in Action,” “Ocean Health,” and in a twist of irony, “Overcoming Bias.” On its website, Global Nomads discloses that its Student to World program “is supported by the Stevens Initiative, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute. The Stevens Initiative is also supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.” Other donors listed on the group’s website include Qatar Foundation International. In 2021, Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies hosted a summer conference for New Haven Public Schools teachers where they received free access to films featuring former Women’s March co-chair and antisemitic activist Linda Sarsour, and a list of books, many of which advocate for looser immigration policies. The event primarily featured Palestinian and other Arab speakers and panelists. The one session that featured an official from the American Jewish Committee consisted of a discussion about centering the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish experience—in other words, challenging what the Columbia School of Social Work orientation guidebook calls “Ashkenormativity.” Foreign governments also support these programs, whether directly or indirectly by funding the Middle East centers themselves. Some centers, such as the Saudi-funded King Fahd Center at the University of Arkansas, were started with funding from foreign governments. Others have received periodic funding from foreign governments, such as the United Arab Emirate’s funding to UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. Still others work in partnership with foreign governments to host teacher workshops. Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the American arm of the Qatar Foundation, is a common collaborator for these programs. QFI funds professional development workshops for Arabic language teachers through Arabic Teacher Councils. The councils are hosted by schools such as George Washington University, Georgia State University, and the University of Chicago. In their early days in the 1950s and 1960s, Middle East studies centers were beneficiaries of funding by large private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation, which, in turn, enjoyed close relationships with the government. Today, the old foundations have combined with new ones to push for more ideological education on the Middle East not only on college campuses, but also in K-12 education. Left-wing organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Tides Foundation actively fund efforts to bring K-12 education in line with progressive dogma and socialize American kids into its politics. This same network of organizations funds many of the pro-Palestinian student demonstrators who have taken over elite campuses. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC), and the Tides Foundation are just a handful of the organizations that have financially supported the student protests. For instance, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights has received at least $355,000 from Rockefeller Brothers Fund and $300,000 from Open Society Foundations, according to The New York Post. U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights member Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) hosts a project called “Teach Palestine,” where educators disseminate instructional materials and teaching strategies on the Middle East. Teach Palestine is coordinated by two educators affiliated with the Liberated Ethnic Studies initiatives nationally and in California. Between 2017 and 2023, the Open Society Foundations and Rockefeller Brothers Fund cumulatively gave MECA $1.3 million. Teach Palestine includes testimonials from educators who actively teach about the region in their classrooms. Once students arrive on campus and are exposed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in further detail, little is needed to radicalize them. One teacher goes beyond the third grade curriculum standards by fitting “lessons about the Middle East into the nooks and crannies of our day.” Her description of Israeli history is that it is a “European colony” for the Jewish people that has been continually committing ethnic cleansing since its founding. A librarian brought MECA members to teach children about the “similarities between Israeli and US settler colonialism.” A sixth grade teacher had her students write acrostic poems on settler colonialism as part of a curriculum that focused on “centering Palestinian youth voices” and connected the Palestinian youth experience to Black Lives Matter. She proudly states that “some strong activism and advocacy could come” if students were pushed to the “next level” when engaging in her lesson activities. The Proteus Fund, which connects “philanthropy with the frontlines of social justice,” is another key player. Since 2016, the Proteus Fund and its lobbying arm Proteus Action League have received $16 million from the Open Society Foundations. Aside from Open Society Foundations, Proteus lists nearly 40 funding partners, which includes the Tides Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. One of Proteus’ recent initiatives, the RISE Together Fund, claims to oppose intolerance against “Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities.” As part of this initiative, they offer organizations immediate and flexible grants through its Rapid Response Fund. Since Oct. 7, Proteus has focused on K-12 advocacy, coordinating legal support, and connecting attorneys with those who have lost educational opportunities due to protests. In the latter half of 2023, Proteus gave a cumulative $700,000 to 35 organizations for flexible spending grants. The beneficiaries of these recent grants include pro-BDS organizations such as the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Adalah Justice Project, and the Palestinian Youth Movement. Some of these organizations have been tied to the recent wave of demonstrations among high school students. New York City’s Community Education Council for District 14 partnered with several groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, to encourage a 700-student protest. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center hosted walkouts for Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) students. BUSD teachers covered for protesters by marking these students as legitimately “excused,” even though school policy said otherwise. Last month, hundreds of NYC school kids staged a pro-Palestinian walkout and protested at the Department of Education in Lower Manhattan. The walkout was organized by Teachers Unite and the Palestine Youth Movement, along with NYC Educators for Palestine, Al-AWDA: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Movement of Rank-&-File Educators (MORE), and Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM). Similar movements in New Jersey, Oregon, and elsewhere in the country also involve mushrooming “educators for Palestine” organizations that are contracted to develop curricula and organize student action. It would be one thing if this educational infrastructure simply resulted in American school kids learning a biased set of facts about Israel and Palestine. But simply teaching even skewed history is not the goal, as evidenced by the many “Free Palestine” student protesters who apparently didn’t even know what they were protesting. The goal, rather, is to teach school students a framework of values that they can apply blindly to every social and political issue. To see how this looks in practice, consider one teacher’s comment at a March QFI-funded Arabic Teachers Council workshop. Attendees were asked how they enact social justice education in their classrooms. The teacher responded: Instead of asking them [students] “what do you think about this topic,” we talk more about principles and values and structures. Right, like I asked them last week “Do you think we have freedom of expression here at [inaudible] about any social, political, or religious topic?” So, we talk about structures versus the topic itself specifically because some of them are afraid that if they speak specifically about the topic that something might happen. Later in the workshop, teachers were presented a social justice rubric they could use in classrooms. One of the rubric components assesses how well students produce “insights from social justice theme(s).” Students who want to exceed expectations must demonstrate their understanding of social justice themes by incorporating evidence, such as observing and applying power structures. This “education” is indistinguishable from so-called protest “toolkits” that “teach Palestine” groups put together for school kids, which is made up of “talking points,” “chants,” and “demands”—that is, material designed to develop “activists” or foot soldiers to be deployed on the streets at will. Unsurprisingly, the talking points and “demands” grade school kids are taught to recite are identical to those of their college counterparts and mentors, serving the same purpose of recruitment and consolidation of institutional power. In NYC, for instance, the demands were to “Support Palestinian-led curriculum initiatives about Palestinian culture and history. Mandate education about Palestine in history curriculums that centers Palestinian perspectives and experiences. Redirect city funding away from policing and into our public schools, prioritizing low-income Black and Brown communities.” Once students arrive on campus and are exposed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in further detail, little is needed to radicalize them. As an organizer for SJP told The New Yorker in December: “S.J.P. is oriented in a special way. The idea is to appeal to people who know nothing.” As we deal with the fallout of the anti-Israel protests over the coming months, it will be tempting to look for easy solutions. Perhaps universities can rework their policies to prevent future disruptions. Maybe even some programs can be defunded. But the process that led to this was years-long, requiring the coordination of dozens of organizations and millions of dollars in funding. Undoing it will require reversing the proliferation of sectarian fake disciplines and leftist identitarian studies programs, and replacing activist curricula with fact-based lessons that promote critical thinking—a tall order, to be sure. Middle East education at all levels needs a complete overhaul. It has gone from an attempt to help inform our geopolitics and augment our security posture against the various threats facing the United States in the region, to a factory of apologists for America’s enemies and advocates on their behalf. Now, they have brought the threat home. Previous Next

October 3, 2025 California Teachers’ Union Ruins an Earnest Effort to Confront Antisemitism Will Swaim And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. Originally Posted In: https://californiapolicycenter.org/unions-ruin-antisemitism-effort/ < Back California has a problem with antisemitism in its public schools, but the proposed remedy — a massive new regulatory agency outlined in a bill on the governor’s desk — will do approximately nothing to end the madness. But not exactly nothing: If you’re a leader of the state’s powerful teachers’ union, debating “settler colonialism” in Israel, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, genocide, the virtues of Hamas, and whether American Jews are “white” or “white-adjacent” (and in either case equally “privileged”) is far better than confronting the union’s role in the 40-year decline of public education in California. In February, months before it arrived on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, Assembly Bill 715 started life as a laser-focused response to the problem of antisemitism in the state’s schools. Approved unanimously in the state assembly, it seemed certain to move through the state senate with a standing ovation, ticker tape falling from the gallery, and a college drumline. Instead, the bill ran into the state’s powerful California Teachers Association (CTA). Lengthy negotiations followed. By the time the state senate approved the bill and moved it to the office of Governor Newsom, AB 715 had become something different and even malign : a blueprint for the creation of a massive new office of civil rights attached loosely to California’s education department — an office charged with policing “violations” of the civil rights of all of the familiar racial, ethnic, and gender-fluid identities favored by the far left . . . plus antisemitism. It’s small comfort that, among its new employees, AB 715 “would also require the Office of Civil Rights to employ the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to be appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate” — all of whom benefit magnificently from CTA political campaign activities. The legislation even helpfully provides a job description for that employee: “to, among other things, develop, consult, and provide antisemitism education to school personnel to identify and proactively prevent antisemitism and to make recommendations, in coordination with the executive director of the state board, to the Legislature on legislation necessary for the prevention of antisemitism in educational settings.” That’s a lot of developing, consulting, and recommending in the proposed law. But there’s little — if any — obvious authority. And that’s one reason to bet that Gavin Newsom will sign the bill: In this fight between his allies in the state legislature’s Jewish Caucus and the California Teachers Association — itself a kind of fourth branch of government — AB 715 is the perfect political solution: a do-nothing law that promises to do everything. But there is a silver lining. In blocking real reform, AB 715, the California Teachers Association has revealed why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. * * * In its July letter opposing the assembly measure, the CTA makes it clear that its highest priority isn’t the education of students. It’s about progressive politics. The letter opens with a prefabricated declaration that the union is (of course) “firmly committed to schools that are free of racism, sexism, religious and gender discrimination.” The implied “but” arrives promptly: “We are also concerned with academic freedom and the ability of educators to ensure that instruction include perspectives and materials that reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of all of California’s students.” The union tips its hand immediately, and all of its cards are political. Supporting the assembly version of AB 715, the union says, would offer comfort to the real enemy — “a regime [a regime! ] in Washington D.C. that sows division at all levels of academia and seeks to drive a wedge between communities that should be working together to address hate and discrimination.” To make matters worse, the CTA says, the assembly version “would unfortunately arm some others” — “ill-intentioned people” — with the tools they “seek to weaponize public education.” The CTA knows this will happen because, it says, these “extremists” have already filed “meritless” complaints “meant to disrupt or challenge policies that support LGBTQ+ inclusivity or to target LGBTQ+ students and staff.” But the CTA’s biggest concern about the antisemitism bill is that it might “privilege” Jews over other groups, and that would undo the union’s primary political objective of advancing the rights of some groups above others — not of eliminating “privilege,” in other words, but of granting privilege to the people CTA believes deserve it. The letter allows us to watch as the CTA performs a magic trick in reverse, stuffing a rabbit back into a top hat, turning the problem of antisemitism into merely one problem among many. As approved in the assembly, the CTA asserts, AB 715 would “impose limits and define standards for course instruction regarding Israel, Palestine, Zionism, or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, something that we don’t do for any other active conflict in the world, e.g., conflicts in Ukraine, Rwanda, Congo.” Union “members have expressed concerns about lifting these experiences of inequity above those of other groups,” the letter claims. “Focusing on antisemitism alone might be seen as prioritizing one form of discrimination over others, potentially alienating groups facing other forms of systemic discrimination, such as racism, Islamophobia, or anti-LGBTQ+ bias.” The bill’s key provision, the creation of a state Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, would “not address any other forms of hate or discrimination, something that is equally needed.” “Equally needed”? Equating the very real problem of antisemitism in public education with other “forms of hate or discrimination” ignores reality. There is, thank God, no pedagogical effort in California schools — no curriculum, no program, no courses, no teacher, no third-party vendors or nonprofits — working to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan, marginalizing Muslim children, forcing young women into a handmaid’s tale of barefoot early motherhood, or campaigning to vilify gay kids. None of that exists. On the other hand, the CTA and its hundreds of local affiliates — and the thousands of state and local officials, from the governor to every local school board member, whose political campaigns those unions fund — have indeed run a very well-organized campaign to bash Jews. * * * The strange fruit of the teachers’ unions’ formalized antisemitism is evident everywhere in the state’s public schools. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis, the Oakland Unified school board backed Hamas. “We want to make sure Palestinians have the liberation they so rightfully deserve in their own land,” said board member Valarie Bachelor, switching seamlessly between singular and plural first-person pronouns . “I want to make sure we stand on our progressive organizing history and we don’t just sit on it. We stand on it and we say we need to do more and we need to do this now.” Leaders of the city’s teachers’ union, the Oakland Educators Association , amplified the board’s declaration with their own statement calling for the elimination of Israel. More than 30 Jewish families left the district. “I just felt that there wasn’t a path forward for Jewish families because I had reached out to OUSD and asked them to have a conversation about how they were going to keep Jewish families feeling safe and included,” one parent explained . “When there were lesson plans that were being taught that said, ‘Draw the Zionist bully,’ or ‘I for Intifada, J is for Jesus,’ to me, it felt like – honestly – we were being targeted and singled out and alienated.” In February 2024 , the Louis D. Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint against nearby Berkeley Unified, alleging “severe and persistent” antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. The complaint cited students being taunted with such slurs as “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” asking what their “number is” (an apparent reference to Holocaust tattoos), a teacher posting “messages of anti-hate” targeting the district’s only Jewish teacher, and antisemitic imagery in art classes. Some students have departed the district. Anti-Israel teachers marched students in Berkeley’s middle school and high school out of classes in 2024 protests — in one case to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack. Across the Bay, immediately following the October 7, 2023, attack, the San Francisco Unified School District hired the Arab Resource and Organizing Center to run student and teacher trainings “related to leadership development and cultural empowerment.” AROC describes itself as a group of “abolitionists, feminists, and internationalists who believe that the liberation of SWANA (South West Asian and North African) people is inextricably tied to the liberation of all oppressed people.” Meanwhile, the district’s antisemitism training for teachers ran into organized resistance from teachers’ union activists. By contract, the district could require teachers to attend the training — but not to listen. Members of the American Jewish Committee asked to run that training say that as soon as their training began, a leader of United Educators–San Francisco stood up and described “at great length” his own take on the problem of antisemitism: it’s an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, the union leader asserted. He then led most of the teachers out of the room for a separate conversation. By then, the clock on the formal training had nearly run down. We could go on and never exhaust the catalog of formalized antisemitism. In July 2024, federal officials concluded that Jewish students in the central coast town of Carmel were “subjected to pervasive, antisemitic harassment over a three-year period, exposed to repeated swastika graffiti in bathrooms and on desks, a Hitler reference and a verbal threat targeting Jewish people.” California officials say two ethnic studies teachers in the nearby city of Campbell violated state law by presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a “one-sided anti-Zionism” lesson. In Los Angeles, teachers at an August 2024 United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference were caught on video training their colleagues to “advocate and leverage your positionality” in the classroom in order to “globalize the intifada” — that is, to help Los Angeles students understand the putative link between the war in Gaza and their own struggles in California. In April, officials at a meeting of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District upbraided Jewish parents for their objections to an ethnic studies curriculum that singled out Jews for their white privilege. “I’ve been a little bit taken aback by the lack of acknowledgement of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community,” said board member Joy Flynn. “I don’t see you people at protests against immigration,” said board member Gabriel Medina. “I don’t see you at protests when people are being taken away right now. I don’t see you advocating to bring back Abrego Garcia or Mahmoud Khalil. I don’t see you guys doing that. You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are.” Days later, the district’s superintendent offered the usual anodyne explanation that, their Jew-bashing notwithstanding, Pajaro Valley “stands firmly against all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate.” The most prominent case erupted in Southern California’s Santa Ana Unified, where that district, the eighth largest in the state, settled a lawsuit in February 2025 over its ethnic studies courses. The highlight in that showdown came when district officials offered the defense that they were merely relying on guidance from the California Department of Education. The department’s 2019 draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum condemned Israel and otherwise omitted mention of Jewish Americans. The compromise version released a year later still allowed districts to include materials linked to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. * * * It’s much easier to opine on the plight of the Palestinian people and to assert what’s simply not true about Israel than to defend the 40-year decline of public education in California. And what a trajectory: Data emerging from the most recent national student testing shows that all U.S. students continue to fall behind their global counterparts in math, writing, and science . The decline has been especially steep in California. Despite spending more per student than any other state in the union, California consistently ranks among the nation’s worst states for public education . Some California teachers’ union leaders deny they’re running a political campaign with children as their targets. Others admit that’s the plan — and accept any learning loss as a necessary trade-off. Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, famously told a reporter , “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables...They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup .” It was Myart-Cruz who, confronted with a parent rebellion over lousy teacher performance, launched a UTLA “research project” to track the ethnic identity of the union’s public critics. Like most teachers’ union websites in California, the United Teachers of LA website looks like an advertisement for the Democratic Socialists of America: it’s a visual cacophony of demonstrations, bullhorns, protest signs, and clenched fists. To paraphrase the old joke, those who can’t do, teach — and those like Myart-Cruz who can’t teach fall back instead on controversial political ideologies they half-learned as college sophomores in order to lecture California K–12 students about the evils of Israel. It’s time to end that sort of pedagogical sleight-of-hand — to stop bashing Jews. Terminate teachers who, misunderstanding the actual job for which they’ve been hired, prefer to use their classrooms as indoctrination camps. California could follow that with a classic California practice: the burning of sage in every school and government building in the state, after which, having banished all bad spirits, it could return to the teaching of math, English, and science along with the classroom practices that once made a California education the envy of the world. Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast. Previous Next