California school district adopts anti-Semitic ethnic-studies curriculum
Curriculum includes the history
and experiences of blacks, “Chicanx-Latinx,” Asians and Pacific
Islanders, as well as Palestinians and other Arab Americans, Native
Americans and other communities — but not Jews.
By JNS
This academic year, Hayward Unified School District (HUSD), a public
school district serving the city of Hayward in Alameda County near San
Francisco, will implement an ethnic-studies curriculum created by a
group that has faced accusations of antisemitism and anti-Zionism from
Jewish leaders and state officials.
The district in the city of some 163,000 residents unanimously
approved the curriculum from the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model
Curriculum Coalition (LESMCC) in an effort to comply with a new
California law that mandates students attend a semester of ethnic
studies in order to graduate from charter and public high schools,
starting with the class of 2030.
In doing so, the district joins the Castro Valley Unified School
District, also in Northern California, in adopting the LESMCC’s program.
In 2019, California’s Board of Education released the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which provoked widespread criticism
from many in the Jewish community and beyond, who described it as
“anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist and BDS-promoting” for lauding the BDS
movement and accusing Israel of subjecting Palestinians to “apartheid
conditions” comparable those under the former regime in South Africa.
Among those who opposed the curriculum was the state’s Gov. Gavin
Newsom, who called it “offensive in so many ways, particularly to the
Jewish community.”
The Los Angeles Times editorial board accused the LESMCC of
groupthink “designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform
and open minds.” One example of this blatant bias, it wrote, is its
“suggested list of social movements” for students to explore, including
the BDS movement.
After intense pushback, the California Board of Education rejected
the draft curriculum and approved one that removed the antisemitic and
anti-Israel canards.
That
prompted the curriculum’s creators to launch an online petition in an
effort to save it. They went on to establish the LESMCC and offer
resources to help school districts implement it.
Under the LESMCC model, ethnic studies refers only to the history and
experiences of blacks, “Chicanx-Latinx,” Asians and Pacific
Islanders—the chapter includes Palestinians and other Arab Americans,
Native Americans and other communities of color. It does not include the
Jewish experience in Israel, America or elsewhere.
‘Ethnic-studies courses should help build understanding’
LESMCC’s site offers to help school districts implement its ethnic-studies curriculum.
“Giving taxpayer funds to LESMCC sends a message that the district
does not care about the well-being of Jews, Israelis or anyone who
values critical thinking,” said Roz Rothstein, CEO of StandWithUs, an
Israel-education organization.
“Ethnic-studies courses should help build understanding of
marginalized communities, fight racism and empower students to make our
society better for everyone. Unfortunately, LESMCC has repeatedly taken
the opposite approach, fueling hatred and division across California and
beyond,” she stressed.
Rothstein charged that the curriculum makes false allegations against
Israel, such as accusing it of colonialism, thus “erasing 3,000 years
of the Jewish people’s history in their ancestral home.”
The Anti-Defamation League also stands strongly against the Hayward School District decision.
Seth Brysk, regional director of the ADL, told JNS that the
curriculum Hayward approved dangerously “includes the excised
antisemitic and anti-Israel content” from the original rejected draft
that is composed of “anti-Semitic and gratuitous anti-Israel content and
likely violates district policy, the state Education Code and the new
law.”
On Aug. 22, the district defended the curriculum in a statement to JNS.
“HUSD strongly and unequivocally condemns all forms of hate,
including racism and anti-Semitism,” said Michael Bazeley, HUSD’s
public-information director. “The board policy on ethnic studies,
adopted in June of last year, advocates for teaching ethnic studies with
fidelity to the discipline.”
The district will not be devoting a set time to addressing
antisemitism because “Jewish studies and Israeli studies are not part of
the ethnic-studies discipline,” Bazeley told JNS.
‘Ignores Jewish history in just about every particularity’
The LESMCC has long been embroiled in antisemitic controversy. One
leader of the organization, Theresa Montaño, characterized the ADL as
“white supremacist, right-wing [and] conservative.”
In January, the LESMCC formed the National Liberated Ethnic Studies
Coalition with groups such as Teach Palestine Project/Middle East
Children’s Alliance and the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, groups
that accuse the “Israeli Apartheid Regime” of “systematic
settler-colonial violence” and “strongly support the BDS movement.”
In its “Preparing to Teach Palestine: A Toolkit,” the coalition
accuses the Museum of Tolerance, a Los Angeles museum devoted to
Holocaust history, of “prevent[ing] teachers and students from making
connections between the U.S. and Israel as white settler states.” The
toolkit also pushes back on the “Zionist” argument that “any discussion
of Palestine or critique of Israel creates an ‘unsafe climate’ for
Jewish students.”
On May 12, Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles
(CJPTLA), a group of Jewish and Zionist Los Angeles School District
educators and parents, filed a federal lawsuit against the LESMCC. The
Deborah Project, the organization providing legal assistance to CPTLA,
told JNS it hopes to “prevent the infiltration of a discriminatory,
antisemitic set of teaching materials and orientation into the LAUSD
schools.”
According
to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, the
LESMCC “ignores Jewish history in just about every particularity,”
painting Israel as “the outsider who brutally ‘stole’ the land from the
alleged original inhabitants.”
Beyond denying Jewish history in the land of Israel, says Marcus, the
LESMCC “teaches a fictionalized version of a history and civilization
of those known as Palestinians.”
Another issue highlighted in the lawsuit is the LESMCC’s designation
of Israelis as white. According to Marcus, doing so ignores “the reality
that more than half of all Israelis are ‘people of color,’ according to
their own ludicrous insistence on labeling people based on skin color,
real or imagined.”
According to the suit, in an effort to cover its tracks, the LESMCC
has deleted many posts on its website about Israel. The LESMCC also
urged teachers to “be strategic” and determine if they are supported by
their schools or “better off trying to fly under the radar.”
According to material cited in the Deborah Project’s lawsuit, LESMC
rejects the “conflation of the State of Israel with Jewish Identity” as a
Zionist “strategy.”
The CJPTLA repudiates that assertion, among many others because it
“claims the right to control the definition of Judaism,” an action that
the CJPTLA say is “explicitly racist and anti-Semitic.” Marcus sees this
as an unmistakable attempt to “assert what is and is not Judaism and
what is and is not anti-Semitism.”
Marcus sees CJPTLA’s lawsuit as “a clarion call for Americans to
reject the unending efforts to cast Jews as the evil-doer and usurper in
their homeland, and as malevolent actors with targets drawn on their
backs in California.”
|