Anti-Israel Activists Still Pushing Poisonous Ethnic Studies Curriculum in California

Anti-Israel Activists Still Pushing Poisonous Ethnic Studies Curriculum in California

Parts of California’s embattled ethnic studies curriculum has now been dissed by the state’s own Department of Education. The California DOE ruled that an antizionist lesson taught at Branham High School in San Jose discriminated against Jewish students:

In the lesson, according to the state DOE ruling, the teacher showed students two videos about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but didn’t offer students a pro-Israel perspective. After the first video, a Vox explainer called “The Israel-Palestine conflict: a brief, simple history,” the topic of whether Israel is a “settler colonial state” was discussed, according to the report.

“In this lesson, in order for the information to be unbiased, there would have needed to be a video that reflected a pro-Israel  perspective,” the ruling said. “This would have encouraged students to create authentic  answers regarding the questions provided in the lesson.”

In another instance, a student group presented a project with a slide titled “Genocide of Palestinians.” The investigation found that the teacher in that case did not respond adequately to the presentation to ensure the classroom wasn’t “hostile” to Jewish students.

California first proposed its Ethnic Studies Curriculum in 2018 and pushed it over the objections of more than eighty community organizations, including the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Based in Marxian critical race theory, the class encourages so-called post-colonial third world grievances and flattens ethnic diversity within the white groups while completely excluding non-whites like Jews and Armenians prosecuted outside of the United States. Aside from the divisive identintarian ideological spin, the discipline requires activist praxis, or political engagement. One now amended lesson went as far as requiring students to stage mock Aztec ceremonies, violating the establishment clause.

Although governor Gavin Newsom signed off on the graduation requirement in 2021 with the goal of requiring a semester of the newly-creates discipline for the class of 2030, legal action by multiple slighted ethnic groups continued. The curriculum is particularly controversial for Jewish Californians who shudder to see American students being instructed to parrot antisemitic talking points.

Although the proposed curriculum was revised in 2023 to exclude some of its most toxic excesses, school districts remain free to teach the so-called Liberated Ethnic Studies, or LES, that are rife with antisemitism. In the 2024 plan to counter antisemitism, Newsom conceded that California public schools teach bias — and promised to address it at a later date.

It’s unclear whether Branham High adopted LES or an enterprising teacher took it upon himself to introduce antizionism in the classroom. Nevertheless, DOE required an hour-long training for English and social studies teachers at the guilty school to corrects bias. Color me skeptical — I don’t think an hour-long tutorial will correct the obvious deep-seated animosity among the teachers. More likely they will learn how to mask it. Instead of neutralizing it, California is managing antisemitism in its educational institutions.

No doubt the content of the lesson is hurtful to Jewish minors subjected to it — and that’s argument of the organizations representing their case before the DOE. Unfortunately, the framing of the issue in terms of sore feelings sidesteps most important issues and leaves most important business unfinished.

There exists objective truth about Israel — and that truth is knowable. Children are taught bits and pieces of that truth in history classes — first when study Ancient Israel, then the Islamic Expansion, followed by British colonialism. Likewise, the physical realities of the current war in Gaza are knowable — the fact that there is no genocide is easy to establish, for instance. All these facts remain true regardless of whether or not a Jewish child gets upset when forced to sit through a peer presentation on Israeli settler-colonialism.

Conversely, an Arab child can feel upset when hearing about the factually accurate Israeli story because it doesn’t match what he learned at home. Delivering facts to the large population of immigrant kids who in their places of origin would be taught hate — and whose parents and grandparents were inculcated in hate — is the key challenge of assimilation. Considering the substance of UNRWA textbooks, for instance, this problem has to be anticipated. Yet, according to the current understanding, instead of countering the objectively wrong information, we view it as a postcolonial perspective worth including.t

The purpose of education should not be the airing of perspectives or even hurt feeling avoidance, but the search for truth. With this in mind, the substance of a lesson should be determined not by pleasing an ethnic enclave but by using cool logic to separate fact from fiction.

Regardless, LES puts American Jewry in a dangerous position whether or not a Jewish child may find himself in a hostile classroom. Disseminating blood libels to future generations will surely have negative consequences even if the Jewish population of California dwindles to zero, making exposure to antizionism a non-issue from this point of view. Teaching children to hate runs the risk of them acting out on that hate.

Yet the key issue at hand is not offering an Israeli American rebuttal — or even the Jewish future. What is to be gained by coercing teens to discuss whether or not Israel is committing genocide? The question itself is artificially engineered — and the answer is a resounding no, regardless of how another ethnic group feels about the situation. If our goal is search for truth, dipping into antizionist conspiracy theories is counterproductive.

Moreover, Golden State students don’t need to spend their time cracking current affairs hoaxes — and maybe, in their naïveté, getting persuaded that bloodthirsty Jews are slaughtering babies. I’m being generous here — these children do not grow up in a vacuum and, unfortunately, many have been exposed to hate from birth.

There is no genocide in Gaza — and this is an easily verifiable fact. To present this item for consideration of an underage audience under the auspices of the state is to insinuate the Jewish State’s guilt. It’s a lie smuggled into the classroom in the just asking questions format.

By design, Ethnic Studies is a divisive discipline — if it can be called a discipline at all. Never-ending mess of litigation and subsequent regulations following its rollout are a testimony to that. If the lessons are ripe with hysterical accusations and teachers need to pass special anti-bias training — and the state government admits that the program is full of lies and hate, maybe the best option is to drop it altogether. No reason to fetishize current affairs to the point of passing it as an academic subject. California students will be better served learning the basics — they are notoriously behind.

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