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| DATE | 2024-12-09 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Indoctrination from the Cradle
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Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada
There is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist
organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children
against Israel. A Free Press investigation.
By Abigail Shrier
October 31, 2024
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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.
The Free Press obtained a video of the United Teachers Los Angeles
meeting. You can watch it here:
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 nonprofit
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.
The above was shown to students at Lowell High School as part of their
Ethnic Studies class. (Image obtained by The Free Press)
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
Ella Hassner. (Yadid Levy for The Free Press)
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.”
Classmates said to Ella Hassner, “Your people are terrorists.” The same
girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not
real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger
brother. (Yadid Levy for The Free Press)
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.” The 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.
Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley has three Jewish children. Her son 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.” (Jason Henry
for The Free Press)
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.)
Nicole Neily is the founder of Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit
that exposes radicalism in schools. (Jason Henry for The Free Press)
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.”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus. (Caroline Gutman for The Free Press)
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. (Caroline Gutman for The Free Press)
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.
Elina Kaplan, founder of the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies.
(Jason Henry for The Free Press)
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.
Image obtained by The Free Press.
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.
Image obtained by The Free Press.
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?”
Abigail Shrier is a contributing editor to The Free Press, a senior
fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the New York Times best-selling
author of Bad Therapy.
--
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DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
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http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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