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Source: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2632879
More Education Will Not Fix Politically-Based Antisemitism
(Los Angeles Jewish Journal) David Bernstein - The antisemitic hostility we're seeing today in K-12 schools has very little to do with education and everything to do with power. Antisemitism in schools is rising because many of our school systems have been captured by radical actors who promote ideological frameworks that cast Jews, Israel, and the West as villains within an oppressor/oppressed morality play. You can't teach it away. Over the last decade, activist ideologies rooted in power and identity have permeated colleges of education, teacher unions, state bureaucracies, curriculum providers, and school boards. The result is a self-reinforcing ecosystem that replaces academic instruction with political activism. Once installed, this worldview distorts American history, suppresses dissent, and normalizes hostility toward Jews. Within this ideological frame, Jews are often portrayed as "privileged" or "colonizers" or stand-ins for oppressive systems. Israel becomes a "settler-colonial" regime. Zionism becomes racism. And Jewish students find themselves recast in roles they never auditioned for. Schools of education teach future teachers that their primary job is to raise political consciousness. Teacher unions adopt social-justice programs that encourage educators to see themselves first as activists and second as instructors. School boards adopt curricula shaped by these ideas or are taken over by factions explicitly seeking to embed them. Adding more education about antisemitism will not fix the problem. In fact, it can actually increase hostility toward Jews, because the information is filtered back through the very ideological lens that produced the prejudice to begin with. The Jewish community's traditional playbook, such as Holocaust lessons, anti-bias workshops, and cultural programs, treat antisemitism as a misunderstanding, but today's antisemitism is a feature, not a glitch, of an ideological system that sees the West as malevolent and Jews as its beneficiaries. You cannot appease an ideology that insists your existence is oppressive. We must abandon the fantasy that we can educate our way out of a problem birthed by political extremists. The writer is the Founder and CEO of the North American Values Institute.