CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2023, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“WILL
ANTI-SEMITISM ISSUE KILL ETHNIC STUDIES REQUIREMENT?”
“Next
year in Jerusalem!”
Final line of
virtually all Passover Seders
There suddenly appears to be a strong possibility that
the ethnic studies course requirement state legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom
adopted two years ago as a California high school graduation requirement may
never become reality in many places.
If so, it
will come as a relief to members of several ethnic groups who have felt
targeted from the moment this requirement was proposed about five years ago.
Two drafts of rules and suggested content for the required course were rejected
by lawmakers and the state Board of Education before a plan was finally
approved with “guardrails” supposedly preventing content that promotes “bias,
bigotry and discrimination.”
But some
school districts have hired groups including authors of the rejected ethnic
studies versions to write local plans, and some of those have allegedly
amounted to end runs around the so-called guardrails.
Among
other things, the early versions of the model curriculum adopted by the state
claimed that immigrant groups including Irish-, Polish- and Jewish-Americans
arrived in this country with built-in “white privilege,” no matter how
poverty-ridden and filled with discrimination their lives really were.
The
authors of the rejected versions also have at times tried to make a distinction
between Jews and Zionists, usually defined as believers in the concept that the
land occupied by the current state of Israel and the Palestinian territories in
Gaza and on the West Bank of the Jordan River should be a Jewish homeland.
But there
is no real distinction, as that last line of the texts used at millions of
Passover Seders over the centuries makes clear. Almost all Zionists are Jews
and most Jews believe there needs to be an Israel if only to provide a refuge
in case of future reruns of the Holocaust.
The
reason for this attempted distinction is clear: the ethnic studies authors –
many dedicated to the cause of “liberated” or “critical” ethnic studies, do not
want to be accused of anti-Semitism, even while they back largely unfounded
claims that Israel is a racist “apartheid” state that persecutes Palestinians.
These
folks ignore history, including the five-nation 1948 Arab assault on Israel
moments after it declared independence and they ignore the charters of some
leading Palestinian groups that call for ethnic cleansing of Israel's Jews
“from the (Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea.”
There is
little doubt that if their version of Jewish and Jewish-American history were
widely taught, it would promote anti-Semitism of the type that has led to
synagogue shootings from Pittsburgh to Poway.
But
because the 2021 AB 101, the measure that established the upcoming new
graduation requirement, allows school boards to devise their own curricula, and
not use the state’s model, the authors of rejected ethnic studies versions
remain active and continue making money off their prejudices.
Some
school districts – including Hayward Unified, Castro Valley Unified and Santa
Ana Unified – have already hired University of California and California State
University faculty who are members of the Critical Ethnic Studies Assn. to
write their curricula.
That’s
why, as a letter to legislators from more than 1,000 Californians noted,
“Jewish communities across our state have discovered discriminatory content in
several school districts in which anti-Semitic and/or anti-Israel biases are
being adopted in ethnic studies curricula.”
The way to stop this, the letter suggests,
is for the Legislature not to provide the estimated $275 million per year
needed to fund the graduation requirement. An amendment to AB 101 stipulates
that the bill “is operative only upon an appropriation of funds…for purposes of
(funding ethnic studies).”
As of late summer, less than one-fifth of
that money had been allocated, and the letter suggests not providing more until
or unless the curriculum is cleaned up and discriminatory language or false and
defamatory information in local curricula is also corrected.
Without the money, most districts won’t
implement the new graduation requirement, which might then fade away under
terms of the funding amendment to AB 101.
It just may be that precisely such a
disappearance is the right disposition of this requirement, which has always
been motivated in part by resentment rather than documentable history.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,"
is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
