Anti-Zionism, antisemitism, lesson plans, and harassment

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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.

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.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union. If only.

Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit 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.

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.

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.”

Jewish Students Fend for Themselves
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.

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.”

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 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.

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 Israel, 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 b***h!! !!”

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: “f**k 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.)

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.

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 BS excuse that takes advantage of parents who aren’t lawyers.”

Online textbooks are easily supplemented with material from Al Jazeera or other radical sources.

An Undercover, Front-Row Seat
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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?”

I have been watching a Netflix documentary on the rise of Hitler, and to me such recent events bring to mind Germany/Austria in the 20s and 39s rather than Cold War era Eastern Europe.

I didn't realize backlash against genocide was such an important motive in the last century.

Fascism. Try to stay up to date on the political situation in the US.

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.

The Free Press



Then there is the world view that puts people into the oppressed and oppressed groups. Looking at people in this way is inherently dehumanizing.

Are you saying we shouldn't teach youths about what Hitler and Nazi Germany did to the jewish people among several groups of people during the WWII because it is inherently dehumanizing to the jewish people?

Are you of the same conviction as Abigail portrait in the article, that either European didn't oppress the Native Americans during the colonization or that it shouldn't be taught in school? Or that African people was oppressed through enslavement by the Americans or that it shouldn't be taught in school?
The reason I ask, is because to me her point sounds extremely bigoted. If not to say racist since she doesn't mind highlight the jewish ethnic minority and the struggles and hate it's people do endure (which I'm strongly are against).

Are you saying we shouldn't teach youths about what Hitler and Nazi Germany did to the jewish people among several groups of people during the WWII because it is inherently dehumanizing to the jewish people?

Are you of the same conviction as Abigail portrait in the article, that either European didn't oppress the Native Americans during the colonization or that it shouldn't be taught in school? Or that African people was oppressed through enslavement by the Americans or that it shouldn't be taught in school?
The reason I ask, is because to me her point sounds extremely bigoted. If not to say racist since she doesn't mind highlight the jewish ethnic minority and the struggles and hate it's people do endure (which I'm strongly are against).

The increasing risk of fascism is shared, but very little else is analogous.

Looking forward to you responding with more snarky comments that lack insight, instead of attempting to make any insightful comments that lack snark.

To me this article smells like a right wing witch hunt. So I decided to look into some of the details.

The article is accompanied by a video of the meeting. I am watching the video now.

First major inaccuracy I've noticed: It appears that this meeting is NOT a meeting of the teachers' union (United Teachers Los Angeles) itself. It appears to be a meeting of a separate organization, apparently some coalition of progressive teachers' groups including LA Educators for Justice in Palestine (LA EJP).

Much of the meeting does talk about the teachers' union and its internal politics, and about some LA EJP members' efforts (mostly unsuccessful) to lobby the union to take pro-Palestine stands. But, as their Instagram page says: "LA EJP is not affiliated with Los Angeles Unified School District nor United Teachers Los Angeles."

From the video, it is not immediately obvious which organization's meeting this is. However: (1) the announcements at the beginning imply that multiple groups are present, and (2) about halfway though the video, a speaker calls attention to "our button," which the camera then zooms in on; the button says "Educators for Justice in Palestine."

The article's claim that this meeting is a meeting of the teacher's union itself might be an honest mistake, depending on how the author obtained her copy of the video. But it might also be a deliberate lie, in which case its most likely motive is the general right wing agenda of vilifying teachers' unions (and labor unions in general) and/or stoking the general right wing moral panic about public schools.


The above is an out-of-context quote from about 3/4 of the way through the video. The missing context is that he is talking about helping the students organize. The initiative has to come from the students. The teacher's role is to give advice (e.g. on research) and practical assistance (such as a referral to another LA EJP member, not one of the student's own teachers, who can give the student a ride).

The author of the article, Abigail Shrier, is also the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a book making the highly controversial claim (at best) that many transmen adopt a trans identity only in adolescence, as a result of alleged peer pressure. (See the Wikipedia article Rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy.) So Abigail Shrier is no stranger to stoking right wing moral panics.

And it looks like the publisher is even more of a stoker of right wing moral panics than the author is. The article was given the sensationalistic title of "Abigail Shrier: The Kindergarten Intifada" -- although the word "kindergarten" appears nowhere else in the article (and the students being talked about in the video are clearly not kindergarteners).

...I am saying if you judge people not as individuals but as a member of a group that is dehumanizing. That is true if you judge Jews as privileged, racist, colonizers because they are Jewish, or Germans as fascists because they are German...

An important job requirement is that teachers protect their students. That means understanding what is going on. Unlike Jewish Americans over Gaza, German Americans are not being bullied because of the Third Reich. As bizarre and as wrong as it may seem to the teachers, many if not most Jewish students conflate Judaism with Israel and so do the bullies that yell "Hey Jew" and "You people".

Teachers and administrators are doing the opposite of protecting students when they organize protests or actively assist students in a cause. That is because they are adult authority figures who have a degree of control over students' current and future lives. This creates intimidating pressure to conform. It also makes bullies feel these authority figures have their backs.

...Highlighting the issues one group is facing is not racism, it's activism. It is nice when activists advocate for multiple groups but as humans, they only have time and energy for so many groups. As nice as it is to say "I'm advocating for Jews, but I also feel bad about these other groups it both deflects from the main group you are advocating for and makes you seem defensive.

I agree with you on this. That's not her point in the article, thou. Therefore my question to you. I genuinely want to know your thoughts and reasoning.
She implies it's bad to teach youths about ethnic minority's and their oppression.



I'm curious. In Sweden we have a government body with experts in pedagogy who write the curriculum in every subject which teachers has to comply to. Some teachers do it better than others. With the reasoning to create a more equal education wherever you may live in the country and if it's a public or private school.
Don't you have something similar in the US? Is it really up to every single teacher to decide freely what the curriculum should be? I find that hard to believe.

Like Mona does, ground.news also points out that it is a right wing news source.
And poorly written, reasoning wise, according to me (centrist/left wing can also be poorly written). I don't trust this source.

I apologize, but I might misunderstand you.
An example. With Trump and Vance repeating the Nazi propaganda lie about legal immigrants eating the people's pets (which is established to come from a Nazi group in Cleveland). Would it be wrong of teachers to talk about it and that it is a lie? Would it be activism according to you, if they spoke about the importance to of participating in democratic process, by voting for an example? Maybe explain how and where it's done.
Isn't it protecting the students to talk about it, to educate the students. To clarify what hate is and isn't.



Agree. But that's not what she does. She's claiming that teaching about other minorities and their atrocities is hurting Israel (her cause?).
By selecting my cause over others, not allowing them to exists at the same time. In that case I would be racist.
Isn't that her point? Since it hurting Israel it shouldn't exist? And so isn't she conflating anti-Israel with antisemitism? Or what you left out and didn't answer why you did. The cause of the teacher's organizing in the first place, anti-genocide and conflating it with antisemitism.


Like Max says, teachers are normalizing antisemitism. Can you do that without being antisemitic? Not sure if this is what you mean Max, but could anyone explain to me how anti-genocide could be antisemitic?
A side note: Netanyahu claims to be jewish zionist, he also claims to speak for the Jews. Isn't that antisemitic?


About a month ago there was a political debate with all the leaders of the political parties in Sweden. The Left and the Nazi party (Far-right wing party) got questions about antisemitism in their parties. (I call them the Nazi party since 30 years ago or so, before they entered the parliament, they had their meetings in Nazi uniforms)
The Far-right wing answer was: I'm not antisemitic, I'm the most pro-Israel of all.
Isn't that in itself an antisemitic thing to say?

It is a slanted article.

Is this any more slanted than the plethora of pro-Palestinian videos used on Wrong Planet? I expect readers of the PPR section to have an understanding of advocacy videos and articles. When I watch the anti Israel videos I expect the most grievous sensationalist of Israeli atrocities to be highlighted because they are trying to prove that Israel as a Jewish state is wrong and has always been. That does not mean I dismiss everything in these videos as lies out of hand.

What was not reconstituted from my reply that got lost is that I understand trying to teach students this subject in this climate is a very difficult to impossible job to do, but the effort has to be made. Some of the incidents cited as antisemitism in the article are not antisemitism in my view but some are. As a human they might feel that the Jewish students claiming antisemitism are whiny genocidal racists, and claims that they are being bullied because a classmate is wearing a keffiyeh could not be more wrong, it is still their job to protect the students.

From the article, I could not tell who organized the protests, But assuming the most innocuous explanation I still don't think assisting students get to protests or helping them organize them should be part of their job description. Depending on the teacher's tone referring students to the student the student pro-Palestinian club is probably not out of line, but there is a lot more than that going on here.

Teenagers often have too much of a need for approval from others and take even minor slights as disasters. As teachers, they must take this and that they are adult authority figures into consideration.

The schoolteachers in this situation are normalizing antisemitism which is in line with other aspects of the trend towards Fascism.

If you have access to Netflix you should watch that documentary. Scary for a modern day American and you aren't all that safe from what happens here.