California Is Cleansing Jews From History
"In the fall of 2016, California’s then Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a mandate to develop an ethnic studies program for high schools in California...
Elina Kaplan, a former high-tech manager who had just stepped down as senior VP of one of California’s largest affordable housing nonprofits, remembers agreeing wholeheartedly with the idea at the time. “The objective was to build bridges of understanding between people,” said Kaplan, an immigrant herself, who moved to California from the former Soviet Union with her family when she was 11...
When the first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) was released, Kaplan couldn’t believe what she was reading. In one sample lesson, she saw that a list of historic U.S. social movements – ones like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Criminal Justice Reform – also included the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS), described as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Kaplan wondered why a foreign movement, whose target was another country, would be mischaracterized as a domestic social movement, and she was shocked that in a curriculum that would be taught to millions of students, BDS’s primary goal – the elimination of Israel – was not mentioned. Kaplan also saw that the 1948 Israel War of Independence was only referred to as the “Nakba” – “catastrophe” in Arabic – and Arabic verses included in the sample lessons were insulting and provocative to Jews.
Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area mother of two grown children who describes herself as a lifelong Democrat, was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.
Kaplan began calling friends. “Have you read this?” she asked, urging them to plow through the 600-page document. The language was bewildering. “Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations. …” This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades.
The new curriculum, which will eventually be promulgated throughout the California school system of 6 million children, would “critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism … and other forms of power and oppression,” according to the proposal. It would “build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.”
Capitalism was classified as a form of “power and oppression,” and although “classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia” were also listed as forms of oppression, anti-Semitism was not. Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group.
It didn’t take long for Kaplan to realize that the education offered up by the ESMC had little in common with the program described at the time of the law’s passage. Instead, it was a crude pastiche of idiosyncratic neo-Marxism that advocated the end of capitalism and divided the world into a simple polarity of victims and oppressors. The victims, according to this schema, included four groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx, and Native Americans...
As a refugee from the Soviet Union, she understood the challenge intimately. “The reason I’m doing this – full time and not sleeping” she said, is that “this curriculum is pervasive and all-inclusive. It creates a means of understanding the world that does not allow questioning. And it’s a view that actively invites anti-Zionism into the classroom. It requires it. This is the greatest threat facing American Jews today.”
Kaplan wasn’t the only one upset about the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Clarence Jones, former legal counsel and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr., in a letter he wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s Instructional Quality Commission, called the ESMC a “perversion of history” for providing material that refers to non-violent Black leaders as “passive” and “docile.” Jones, who is co-founder of the University of San Francisco Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice, decried the “glorification” of violence and Black nationalism as “role models for the students,” and rejected the curriculum as “morally indecent and deeply offensive.”
The unassailably liberal LA Times editorial board weighed in, criticizing the offering as “an impenetrable mélange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements” that served as an “exercise in groupthink, designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform and open minds.” It warned it was “in bad need of an overhaul.”
A group of Asian Americans urged the state to develop a program that would “inspire ethnic pride in all students and inspire them to work together, rather than against one another,” while Hindu, Korean, Armenian, and Sikh groups complained of being left out as did several Jewish groups. The California Legislative Jewish caucus published a letter saying the ESMC “effectively erases the American Jewish experience.”
Several émigrés from the former Soviet Union found the curriculum so traumatizing they couldn’t read it through. Three hundred signed a letter to Gov. Newsom and other state agencies saying: “We escaped a Marxist-socialist system and its associated tyranny and oppression. Never could we have imagined that, decades later, the same ideology and concepts that we escaped, would show up in, of all places ... the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”
They wrote of their shock at seeing Marxist “code-words” in the text, such as urging students to fight for a “truer democracy,” which Marx used to refer to the abolition of private property. They also noted other terms that look innocuous or even enlightened to the uninitiated, such as “transformative resistance,” “radical healing,” “critical hope,” have specific meanings in critical race theory, which the ESMC explicitly directs teachers to use as the key theoretical framework for teaching ethnic studies.
Critical race theory in education, writes Daniel Solorzano, a scholar cited in the ESMC, “challenges the traditional claims of the educational system such as objectivity, meritocracy, color-blindness, race neutrality, and equal opportunity.” Critical race theorists argue that these traditional claims act as a camouflage for the self-interest, power, and privilege of dominant groups in U.S. society.
CRT is not just an educational pedagogy that seeks to overturn academics as we know it, but it is also a guide for activism “animated by the spirit of the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberationist movements.”
Ethnic studies is a California native...
There is a straight line from the 1968 strike to today’s ESMC, whose text explicitly acknowledges its debt to the Third World Liberation Front. In a speech a week before his firing, George Murray, who also served as the minister of education for the Black Panther Party, declared the U.S. Constitution was a “lie” and the American flag was a “piece of toilet paper” deserving to be flushed. He also attacked Jewish people as “exploiters of the Negroes in America and South Africa” and called for “victory to the Arab people” over Israel.
Many of the 18 people chosen by the State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Committee to create the ESMC hail from San Francisco State’s School of Ethnic Studies, and most are adherents of the radical critical ethnic studies movement who refer to themselves as scholar-activists...
Nevertheless, in 2020, Gov. Newsom signed into law AB 1460, which requires that every student in the Cal State system – the largest four-year public university system in the country, of which San Francisco State is a part – take a three-unit course in ethnic studies. The governor’s decision defied the recommendations of the university’s own chancellor, members of the university’s board of trustees, and the university’s academic senate, all of whom opposed the bill, objecting to the government’s unprecedented intrusion into the university’s curriculum...
Meanwhile, the city of Seattle has already created a proposed framework for implementing ethnic studies throughout its K-12 curriculum. Math teachers will ask the following questions: “identify how math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color,” “analyze the ways in which ancient mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture,” “how important is it to be right?” and “Who gets to say if an answer is right?” It appears educational leaders are all for this. The president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Robert Q. Berry III, told Education Week: “What they’re doing follows the line of work we hope we can move forward as we think about the history of math and who contributes to that, and also about deepening students’ connection with identity and agency.” This, despite the fact that students in the United States already perform poorly in math...
One of the selling points for ethnic studies is that it would help California’s students do better in school overall...
Almost every article touting the ESMC makes reference to a single paper that showed some improvement in at-risk students who took an ethnic studies class. Thomas Dee, professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, compared a group of ninth grade students in San Francisco high schools at risk of dropping out with a similar group who took a class offering “culturally relevant pedagogy.” He described the results as “highly encouraging” – the latter showing improved attendance, completing more courses, and earning improved grades. Basically, students earning Ds became C+ students after taking the classes...
But Dee cautioned that his study was small and its results not easily scalable. He explained that the teachers who offered the classes had spent “years developing them and getting them right” with the help of outside experts. “This kind of pedagogy requires teacher skills of a high order,” he said. He is not sure the ESMC, a huge statewide top-down project, is focused on providing the kind of sensitive, close teaching that produced the positive results...
In the current, third draft, released in December, some of the most offensive material was actually moved back in. For example, an historical resource was added with the following description of prewar Zionism: “the Jews have filled the air with their cries and lamentations in an effort to raise funds and American Jews, as is well known, are the richest in the world.”
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, which fights campus anti-Semitism, points out that all 13 founding members of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) are BDS activists. CESA, the national home base for critical studies, passed a resolution to boycott all Israeli academic institutions in 2014, and the group’s past four biennial meetings included multiple sessions demonizing Israel. “There are a couple thousand academic boycotters of Israel in the country,” she said, “and the largest percentage of them come from ethnic studies. Anti-Zionism is built into the theory and the discipline of ethnic studies, which demonizes Israel as an apartheid settler-colonialist Nazi state.”
But of even greater concern to Jews, she believes, is the singling out of Jewish students as enjoying racial privilege. “I don’t see any way that Jewish students can sit in an ethnic studies class and not feel they have a double target on their backs,” she said, fearing hatred and violence will ensue. First, because they’re Jewish, and considered white and part of the 1%, the purported villains of the teaching, and then through an assumed association with Israel. “There’s a state requirement that you have to sit through a class that says to Jewish students they have extraordinary racial privilege and yet forbids them from speaking because ‘this course is not about you?’ If you don’t accept it, you’re publicly shamed and ostracized – you can’t even speak up and say, ‘I’m not sure if I think that all white people are racists.’”...
The Jewish Journal points out that Jews are the only group in the curriculum for whom the term “privilege” is used. And this privilege is not earned by way of talent, or educational and professional attainment, but rather trickery. The ESMC, echoing Nazi propaganda about Jews as impostors and appropriators hiding in plain sight, points out that American Jews often change their names (“this practice of name-changing continues to the present day”) to change their rank in the social hierarchy.
The historical reality of repeated genocidal attacks on Jews because of their perceived or imagined privilege is not offered as counterpoint, because ethnic studies teachers assume the Holocaust is taught in world history class. But next year in San Mateo County, world history will be replaced by ethnic studies"Weird. I thought only bigoted white racists were against ethnic studies,
and that the evil Jews behind Cultural Marxism were exempting Jews from
white hatred because of their nefarious plot to undermine Western
society
ETHNIC STUDIES MODEL CURRICULUM
"Adopted by the California State Board of Education March 2021...
Teachers and administrators should begin with a careful, deliberate analysis of their own personal identities, backgrounds, knowledge base, and biases. They should familiarize themselves with current scholarly research around ethnic studies instruction, such as critically and culturally or community relevant and responsive pedagogies, critical race theory, and intersectionality, which are key theoretical frameworks and pedagogies that can be used in ethnic studies research and instruction...
Unit 2. Text Structures, Purpose, and Audience: Inventing Images, Representing Otherness...
Students will be introduced to the concept of critical race theory as they highlight and discuss the Morris reading in small groups (Wesley Morris, “Fast Forward: Why a Movie About Car Thieves is the Most Progressive Force in American Cinema”)...
One of the main focuses of ethnic studies is translating historical lessons and critical race theory into direct action for social justice. This section will address the instructional methods used to develop the content knowledge and skills necessary for student empowerment and social action on a school and community level. While direct instruction and modeling are used to introduce new concepts (such as defining intersectionality and tracing Native American history in Sacramento in unit 1 and defining critical race theory, stereotypes, and internalized and externalized oppression in unit 2), learning will also take place through small and large group discussion"
Liberals are still trying to pretend that critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools
Even after I quoted the official curriculum which had multiple mentions of critical race theory, this guy kept insisting that "ethnic studies is NOT CRT, I'm still waiting on a link showing them implementing CRT verbatim", and that I was "intentionally being disingenuous and dishonest in order to promote your narrative...which is kinda gross".
When you're so ideologically motivated that you're unable to read...