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New Israel-Hating Curriculum Coming to California Schools
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) David Bernstein and Pamela Paresky - When an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) was unanimously adopted in March by the California Board of Education, some members of the Jewish community pushed for various modifications and ultimately supported it. Now, the very people who authored earlier versions of the curriculum so explicitly anti-Semitic they were unable to pass it, are now pushing a "Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum" that contains even more extreme prescriptions. Their website promotes a curriculum "toolkit" that refers to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish Community Resource (sic) Council (JCRC), and Simon Wiesenthal's Museum of Tolerance as "Zionist organizations" whose "primary goal is to stunt the development of authentic anti-racist curriculum." They define Zionism as a "colonial ideology," claim that there is "current apartheid in Israel" and that Israel's "settler colonialism" must be included in California's ethnic studies curriculum. What makes Israel an appropriate subject for a curriculum that is supposed to be about ethnic groups in the U.S.? The authors subscribe to the conspiracy theory that there are clear "connections between the struggle for Palestinian rights and the struggles of Indigenous, Black and brown communities" in the U.S. California is about to pass a bill mandating Ethnic Studies as a graduation requirement, and 14 school districts have already passed resolutions endorsing this anti-Semitic version. David Bernstein, past president and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, where Pamela Paresky is Board Chair.