The Left’s Latest Enthusiasm is a Nightmare for Jewish Kids in Public Schools

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As you’re probably already aware, there’s a very fine line between the left’s pro-Palestinian rhetoric and outright anti-Semitism. Student groups who claim they aren’t anti-Semitic have nevertheless endorsed Hamas and their goals of removing Israel from the land and murdering any Jews who opposes them.

But as is always the case with the left these days, whatever far left views they are pushing in college quickly trickle down into public schools. We’ve seen this with Critical Race Theory and BLM. We’ve seen it with gender and trans identity and now we’re seeing the same with the left’s latest fixation, Palestine and Israel. What starts out as an academic argument among college-aged adults and their professors eventually becomes a new form of indoctrination for Elementary School kids. 

Today the Free Press has a lengthy story about what this new form of indoctrination looks like up close and, no surprise, it’s a nightmare for Jewish students who suddenly find themselves singled out by peers and teachers.

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…

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.

A group called Act Now K12, started by three Jewish parents, has been collecting stories like this from schools in Northern California.

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?”

More examples:

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…

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.” 

Some of this is opportunistic but in California it has also been carefully coordinated. Ethinic Studies became a requirement in California in 2021 and about a dozen other states have followed their lead. Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky has been sitting in on meetings connected to these anti-Israel curricula since she was 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…

The original curriculum, “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” was so outrageously antisemitic, it was officially abandoned.

There’s a reformed version of the curriculum now in place but it’s apparently still very anti-Israel.

The left’s various ideological fixations change quickly but rarely work out well for school children, some of whom are inevitably on the wrong side of the simplistic oppressors vs. oppressed vision of the world being taught in these classes. When the focus was BLM, it was white kids who were on the hot seat as oppressors and beneficiaries of “white supremacy.” When the left was pushing the gender unicorn it was straight kids and parents who were treated like outsiders. And now it’s Jewish kids who are being targeted. The left’s march through the public schools leaves a lot of damage in its wake.