By Will Swaim
Saturday, September 27, 2025
California has a problem with antisemitism in its public
schools, but the proposed remedy — a massive new regulatory agency outlined in
a bill on the governor’s desk — will do approximately nothing to end the
madness.
But not exactly nothing: If you’re a leader of the
state’s powerful teachers’ union, debating “settler colonialism” in Israel, the
plight of Palestinians in Gaza, genocide, the virtues of Hamas, and whether
American Jews are “white” or “white-adjacent” (and in either case equally
“privileged”) is far better than confronting the union’s role in the 40-year
decline of public education in California.
In February, months before it arrived on Governor Gavin
Newsom’s desk, Assembly Bill 715 started life as a laser-focused response to
the problem of antisemitism in the state’s schools. Approved unanimously in the
state assembly, it seemed certain to move through the state senate with a
standing ovation, ticker tape falling from the gallery, and a college drumline.
Instead, the bill ran into the state’s powerful
California Teachers Association (CTA). Lengthy negotiations followed. By the
time the state senate approved the bill and moved it to the office of Governor
Newsom, AB
715 had become something different and even malign: a blueprint for the
creation of a massive new office of civil rights attached loosely to
California’s education department — an office charged with policing
“violations” of the civil rights of all of the familiar racial, ethnic, and
gender-fluid identities favored by the far left . . . plus antisemitism. It’s
small comfort that, among its new employees, AB 715 “would also require the
Office of Civil Rights to employ the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to be
appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate” — all of whom benefit
magnificently from CTA political campaign activities. The legislation even
helpfully provides a job description for that employee: “to, among other
things, develop, consult, and provide antisemitism education to school personnel
to identify and proactively prevent antisemitism and to make recommendations,
in coordination with the executive director of the state board, to the
Legislature on legislation necessary for the prevention of antisemitism in
educational settings.”
That’s a lot of developing, consulting, and recommending
in the proposed law. But there’s little — if any — obvious authority. And
that’s one reason to bet that Gavin Newsom will sign the bill: In this fight
between his allies in the state legislature’s Jewish Caucus and the California
Teachers Association — itself a kind of fourth branch of government — AB 715 is
the perfect political solution: a do-nothing law that promises to do
everything.
But there is a silver lining. In blocking real reform, AB
715, the California Teachers Association has revealed why California’s schools,
once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst.
***
In its July letter opposing the assembly measure, the CTA
makes it clear that its highest priority isn’t the education of students. It’s
about progressive politics.
The letter opens with a prefabricated declaration that
the union is (of course) “firmly committed to schools that are free of racism,
sexism, religious and gender discrimination.” The implied “but” arrives
promptly: “We are also concerned with academic freedom and the ability of
educators to ensure that instruction include perspectives and materials that
reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of all of California’s students.”
The union tips its hand immediately, and all of its cards
are political. Supporting the assembly version of AB 715, the union says, would
offer comfort to the real enemy — “a regime [a regime!] in Washington
D.C. that sows division at all levels of academia and seeks to drive a wedge
between communities that should be working together to address hate and
discrimination.” To make matters worse, the CTA says, the assembly version
“would unfortunately arm some others” — “ill-intentioned people” — with the
tools they “seek to weaponize public education.” The CTA knows this will happen
because, it says, these “extremists” have already filed “meritless” complaints
“meant to disrupt or challenge policies that support LGBTQ+ inclusivity or to
target LGBTQ+ students and staff.”
But the CTA’s biggest concern about the antisemitism bill
is that it might “privilege” Jews over other groups, and that would undo the
union’s primary political objective of advancing the rights of some groups
above others — not of eliminating “privilege,” in other words, but of granting
privilege to the people CTA believes deserve it.
The letter allows us to watch as the CTA performs a magic
trick in reverse, stuffing a rabbit back into a top hat, turning the problem of
antisemitism into merely one problem among many. As approved in the assembly,
the CTA asserts, AB 715 would “impose limits and define standards for course
instruction regarding Israel, Palestine, Zionism, or the Israeli/Palestinian
conflict, something that we don’t do for any other active conflict in the
world, e.g., conflicts in Ukraine, Rwanda, Congo.” Union “members have
expressed concerns about lifting these experiences of inequity above those of
other groups,” the letter claims. “Focusing on antisemitism alone might be seen
as prioritizing one form of discrimination over others, potentially alienating
groups facing other forms of systemic discrimination, such as racism,
Islamophobia, or anti-LGBTQ+ bias.” The bill’s key provision, the creation of a
state Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, would “not address any other forms
of hate or discrimination, something that is equally needed.”
“Equally needed”? Equating the very real problem of
antisemitism in public education with other “forms of hate or discrimination”
ignores reality. There is, thank God, no pedagogical effort in California
schools — no curriculum, no program, no courses, no teacher, no third-party
vendors or nonprofits — working to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan, marginalizing
Muslim children, forcing young women into a handmaid’s tale of barefoot early
motherhood, or campaigning to vilify gay kids.
None of that exists. On the other hand, the CTA and its
hundreds of local affiliates — and the thousands of state and local officials,
from the governor to every local school board member, whose political campaigns
those unions fund — have indeed run a very well-organized campaign to bash
Jews.
***
The strange fruit of the teachers’ unions’ formalized
antisemitism is evident everywhere in the state’s public schools. Following
Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis, the Oakland Unified school board
backed Hamas. “We want to make sure Palestinians have the liberation they so
rightfully deserve in their own land,” said board member Valarie Bachelor, switching seamlessly
between singular and plural first-person pronouns. “I want to make sure we
stand on our progressive organizing history and we don’t just sit on it. We
stand on it and we say we need to do more and we need to do this now.”
Leaders of the city’s teachers’ union, the Oakland Educators Association, amplified the board’s
declaration with their own statement calling for the elimination of Israel.
More than 30 Jewish families left the district. “I just felt that there wasn’t
a path forward for Jewish families because I had reached out to OUSD and asked
them to have a conversation about how they were going to keep Jewish families
feeling safe and included,” one parent explained. “When there were lesson plans that
were being taught that said, ‘Draw the Zionist bully,’ or ‘I for Intifada, J is
for Jesus,’ to me, it felt like – honestly – we were being targeted and singled
out and alienated.”
In February 2024, the Louis D. Brandeis Center and the
Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint against nearby Berkeley
Unified, alleging “severe and persistent” antisemitic harassment of Jewish and
Israeli students. The complaint cited students being taunted with such slurs as
“You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” asking what their “number
is” (an apparent reference to Holocaust tattoos), a teacher posting “messages
of anti-hate” targeting the district’s only Jewish teacher, and antisemitic
imagery in art classes. Some students have departed the district. Anti-Israel
teachers marched students in Berkeley’s middle school and high school out of
classes in 2024 protests — in one case to celebrate the one-year anniversary of
Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Across the Bay, immediately following the October 7,
2023, attack, the San Francisco Unified School District hired the Arab Resource and Organizing Center to run
student and teacher trainings “related to leadership development and cultural
empowerment.” AROC describes
itself as a group of “abolitionists, feminists, and internationalists who
believe that the liberation of SWANA (South West Asian and North African)
people is inextricably tied to the liberation of all oppressed people.”
Meanwhile, the district’s antisemitism training for teachers ran into
organized resistance from teachers’ union activists. By contract, the district
could require teachers to attend the training — but not to listen. Members of
the American Jewish Committee asked to run that training say that as soon as
their training began, a leader of United Educators–San Francisco stood up and
described “at great length” his own take on the problem of antisemitism: it’s
an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, the union leader asserted. He then led
most of the teachers out of the room for a separate conversation. By then, the
clock on the formal training had nearly run down.
We could go on and never exhaust the catalog of
formalized antisemitism. In July 2024, federal officials concluded that Jewish students in the central coast town of Carmel were
“subjected to pervasive, antisemitic harassment over a three-year period,
exposed to repeated swastika graffiti in bathrooms and on desks, a Hitler
reference and a verbal threat targeting Jewish people.” California officials
say two ethnic studies teachers in the nearby city of Campbell violated state
law by presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a “one-sided
anti-Zionism” lesson. In Los Angeles, teachers at an August 2024 United
Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference were
caught on video training their colleagues to “advocate and leverage your
positionality” in the classroom in order to “globalize the intifada” — that is,
to help Los Angeles students understand the putative link between the war in
Gaza and their own struggles in California.
In April, officials at a meeting of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District upbraided Jewish
parents for their objections to an ethnic studies curriculum that singled out
Jews for their white privilege. “I’ve been a little bit taken aback by the lack
of acknowledgement of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community,”
said board member Joy Flynn.
“I don’t see you people at protests against immigration,”
said board member Gabriel Medina. “I don’t see you at protests when people are
being taken away right now. I don’t see you advocating to bring back Abrego
Garcia or Mahmoud Khalil. I don’t see you guys doing that. You only show up to
meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they
are.” Days later, the district’s superintendent offered the usual anodyne
explanation that, their Jew-bashing notwithstanding, Pajaro Valley “stands
firmly against all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate.”
The most prominent case erupted in Southern California’s
Santa Ana Unified, where that district, the eighth largest in the state,
settled a lawsuit in February 2025 over its ethnic studies courses. The
highlight in that showdown came when district officials offered the defense
that they were merely relying on guidance from the California Department of
Education. The department’s 2019 draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum
condemned Israel and otherwise omitted mention of Jewish Americans. The
compromise version released a year later still allowed districts to include
materials linked to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.
***
It’s much easier to opine on the plight of the
Palestinian people and to assert what’s simply not true about Israel than to
defend the 40-year decline of public education in California. And what a
trajectory: Data emerging from the most recent national student testing shows
that all U.S. students continue to fall behind their global counterparts
in math, writing, and science. The decline has been especially steep in
California. Despite spending more per student than any other state in the
union, California consistently ranks among the nation’s worst states
for public education.
Some California teachers’ union leaders deny they’re
running a political campaign with children as their targets. Others admit
that’s the plan — and accept any learning loss as a necessary trade-off. Cecily
Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, famously told a reporter, “It’s OK that our babies may not
have learned all their times tables . . . They know the difference between a
riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
It was Myart-Cruz who, confronted with a parent rebellion over lousy teacher
performance, launched a UTLA “research project” to track the ethnic identity of the union’s public critics. Like most
teachers’ union websites in California, the United Teachers of LA website looks
like an advertisement for the Democratic Socialists of America: it’s a visual
cacophony of demonstrations, bullhorns, protest signs, and clenched fists.
To paraphrase the old joke, those who can’t do, teach —
and those like Myart-Cruz who can’t teach fall back instead on controversial
political ideologies they half-learned as college sophomores in order to
lecture California K–12 students about the evils of Israel.
It’s time to end that sort of pedagogical sleight-of-hand
— to stop bashing Jews. Terminate teachers who, misunderstanding the actual job
for which they’ve been hired, prefer to use their classrooms as indoctrination
camps.
California could follow that with a classic California
practice: the burning of sage in every school and government building in the
state, after which, having banished all bad spirits, it could return to the
teaching of math, English, and science along with the classroom practices that
once made a California education the envy of the world.
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