Is Teaching Hate Coming to a U.S. K-12 Public School Near You?

With the news on September 1, 2024 that six more Hamas hostages were executed by their captors a short time before they were found, following news about ten days earlier when the bodies of six other Hamas hostages were found with bullet wounds suggesting that they were also executed by Hamas, we are left with the fundamental question: how could human beings do these things to these hostages and to the other victims who were raped, burned, and mutilated on October 7? And how could anyone – ANYONE – support such monsters?

The answer is surprisingly simple – and unambiguously reprehensible. Creatures who can perform such acts and those who can cheer them on (and call for more) do not consider the victims to be human beings at all. And how did that come to be? Because they were taught hate from their earliest days, that Jews are not human beings. Organizations like MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch have identified how Palestinian children are taught hate in summer camps and as early as kindergarten in UNRWA-run schools. See, here (P.A. summer camp), here (P.A. encouraging children to become martyrs), here (May 2023 Gaza kindergarten assembly – note the weapons and machine gun sounds), and here (May 2018 Gaza kindergarten assembly – enacting a military operation complete with hostage-taking). In May 2023, the EU – hardly a bastion of pro-Israel sentiment – at last passed a resolution deploring hateful curriculum in Palestinian textbooks. Yet studies show that even after that resolution, and even as various EU countries began to restart funding to UNRWA, schools run by UNRWA use textbooks and teach lessons that demonize Israel and teach hate of Jews.

As justified as anger is against the current Israeli government of Bibi Netanyahu and its obscene coalition for having priorities other than bringing the hostages home alive, the fact remains that the people who actually committed these war crimes by pulling the triggers that murdered these hostages were members of Hamas. However angry one might be at the Israeli government, the truest and most intense anger should be directed at Hamas and its despicable supporters.

Well, one might think: that is over there in the Middle East. But what about here in the U.S.? We saw a partial answer to that question in the campus encampments and protests after October 7. College students, influenced by progressive faculty and entirely ignorant of which “river” and which “sea” while calling for “liberation” by “any means necessary,” adopted and celebrated Hamas treating Israelis as non-humans.

But that is only a partial answer, because that same concept is being pushed in K-12 public schools. U.S. college students didn’t suddenly become Jew-haters the day they set foot on a college campus. Their indoctrination in hate began earlier, in K-12 schools. And that indoctrination is growing. If it is not in your school yet, it is very likely that some are pushing for it to be instituted.

It is called the “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” first emerging in California, but spreading to public schools across the U.S. The website of StandWithUs includes an excellent Factsheet (as well as a Tool Kit) with numerous links to both the curriculum and statements by the creators of the curriculum demonstrating their antisemitic bias as well as the bias built into the curriculum itself. Further, the Factsheet highlights that teachers are encouraged to hide the curriculum by “flying under the radar” so that school administrators and parents who might object to it will not know what is being taught in these schools. Another good summary of the history of California’s adoption of this curriculum is by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Antisemitism and the Politics of Ethnic Studies in CA’s K-12 and  Higher Education Classrooms. The slides that accompany this paper are themselves enlightening on the extreme anti-Zionist and antisemitic language used by the Liberated curriculum’s supporters. See also this comprehensive description by CAMERA.

But this is not solely a California phenomenon. The Wall Street Journal recently featured this article explaining that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (yes, that Tim Walz, now candidate for Vice President of the United States) signed a bill in 2023 adopting the “Liberated” curriculum in Minnesota. Read the article yourself – and see the quotes from the curriculum and its supporters, including references to “liberation and systems of power,” teaching children about “resistance movements” and “racial capitalism,” “settler colonialism,” and more. (See also, this discussion of the push for Liberated Ethnic Studies in Massachusetts, as well as this description of the curriculum in Boston public schools).

Those words should look familiar. They are the same words that appeared on posters and in campus and other protests following the October 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel. Some of the encampments called themselves “Liberated Zones.” Hamas and Hezbollah refer to themselves as the “Resistance.” Israel is frequently – and falsely – accused of “settler colonialism” by the protesters and those on the U.S. and global left. The curriculum adopted in Minnesota, then, demands that public school children in K-12 schools be indoctrinated in the use and support for these terms as well as negative attitudes towards those who supposedly engage in such practices.

Indeed, recently filed court papers (for a summary, see here, but the details in the court filing itself are worth reading) in a California state court against the Santa Ana Unified School District disclose that the supporters of the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum in that school district sought to hold meetings to adopt the curriculum on Jewish holidays so that Jews would be less likely to be present.

Nor is that all, because national associations of teachers are pushing this narrative. Dr. Mika Hackner highlights this in her recent article, “Teachers unions are fueling anti-Israelism.” She points out that both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have both embraced programs such as “Teaching While Muslim,” which among other things, was used by Portland Teachers Association:

In its school and educator resources on Palestine, Teaching While Muslim shares an infographic on “why schools should reject the ADL.” Israel is surrounded in quotation marks or otherwise only referred to as the “Zionist entity.”

Dr. Hackner also references the influence in NEA and AFT by an organization called BAMN (an acronym for “By Any Means Necessary” – another phrase that should resonate from the post-10/7 protests on and off campus. As to Israel-Palestine, BAMN calls to “Renew the Palestinian intifada.”

This is not about the First Amendment or whether these groups do or do not have the right to advocate on these issues – although where it crosses the line into hate speech, there is indeed a very powerful argument to be made that it is not protected by the First Amendment. See, David H. Levitt, Hate Speech and the First Amendment, The Decalogue Tablets, Spring 2024, beginning at p. 19. Rather, this is about indoctrinating U.S. public school students against, among other things, Jews and Israel.

Nor is this about white-washing, pink-washing, green-washing, or pick-your-color-washing of U.S. and world history. Serious people do not doubt that America has a long way to go, regardless of how far it has come, to meet the ideals stated in its founding documents – nor that public school students should be taught of America’s past sins and failures as much as about its many successes. But that is a far cry from inculcating the next generation of grammar and high school students in hate-filled, binary oppressed-oppressor lessons that include, among many other flaws, the language of Jew-hatred, much less making such activism a graduation requirement.

Given Governor Walz’s 2023 embrace of the “Liberated” curriculum, a real concern exists whether the Department of Education in a Harris-Walz administration would continue the Executive Order issued in 2019 by then-President Trump –left unchanged by the Biden administration – that mandated that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism be considered in the Department’s evaluation of Title VI claims, or the U.S. State Department’s use of that same definition.

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Most people to whom I mention this issue, including those self-selected, very involved people actively participating in the Jewish community, are not even aware of the existence of the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, even if they are somewhat familiar with the related but less specific issue of Critical Race Theory.

We need to learn whether it has been proposed or adopted by our school districts – and oppose it if it has been. The StandWithUs Tool Kit linked earlier has suggestions about how to proceed, and StandWithUs (and other organizations) have participated in the discussions about the issue.

It is one thing, though, to strongly criticize (however justifiably and accurately) the Liberated curriculum, but quite another to present an alternative curriculum that can meet the goals of teaching about both America’s successes and its failures while avoiding the anti-American and antisemitic bias of the Liberated curriculum.

Where is the counter-curriculum? Is it, perhaps, this one by the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies? Or is it one still to be developed? Among the alphabet soup of Jewish organizations, so many that there is a need for a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, are there any whose focus is on not just attacking the Liberated program but coming up with an alternative that can be presented to school districts that are rightly concerned that our public school students are taught about sensitivity to others and that everyone’s life experience and family history in America is not the same?

This is a stealth issue, but one that is of utmost importance to the American Jewish community. The opponents of Zionism are far ahead in the race to teach America’s children. Teaching hate has resulted in inhuman treatment of Israelis. It is irresponsible for U.S. politicians to push at this time for a two-state solution – even though I strongly agree that this must be the eventual solution – until generations of Palestinian children are taught something other than hatred of Jews and Israel; we should and must insist that U.S. tax dollars not be spent on organizations that perpetuate that hate, and should and must insist that other world governments do the same.

But the issue is quite dangerous here in the U.S. as well – and we must act now to prevent the growth of such teaching of hate in our public schools.