By Christine Rosen
Tuesday, December 07, 2021
Why was an anti-Semitic activist group invited to a
public school to recruit children to its cause?
The group in question, Sunrise Movement, is a
“full-fledged advocacy organization with a paid staff of more than 100 people,
millions of dollars between its 501(c)3, 501(c)4, and PAC, and thousands of
regular volunteers across the country,” as Politico describes. Best known for staging attention-grabbing sit-ins on behalf of its climate
agenda, the group garnered some well-deserved negative attention last month
when its D.C. chapter refused to participate in a march for D.C. statehood
because Jewish organizations were also involved.
Sunrise DC’s statement said it was declining its speaking spot at
the rally “due to the participation of a number of Zionist organizations,”
including the Jewish Council on Public Affairs and the National Council of
Jewish Women, which “are in alignment with and in support of Zionism and the
State of Israel.” The organization continued: “Given our commitment to racial
justice, self-governance, and indigenous sovereignty, we oppose Zionism and any
state that enforces its ideology.” Sunrise further accused Israel of engaging
in “violent oppressive tactics,” and demanded that the rally’s organizers
remove Jewish groups from its coalition.
There are approximately 300,000 Jews in the D.C. area.
Nationwide, according to Pew Research Center, 82 percent of Jews
said, “caring about Israel is either ‘essential’ or ‘important’ to what being
Jewish means to them.” Sunrise’s blatant anti-Semitism flies in the face not
only of its supposedly progressive values but of the feelings of a vast
majority of the nation’s Jews. As one progressive Jewish activist
correctly noted, “If someone ignored the voices and lived realities
of 80-90% of any other minority group, most progressives would quickly
recognize that as an act of tokenization to shield biases (or worse).”
As the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington
observed in a statement, “The ‘opposition to Zionism’ Sunrise DC so proudly
espouses constitutes the fundamental denial of the Jewish people’s right to
self-determination and is therefore antisemitic at its core.” And as Jonathan
Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League argued in the Washington Post, Sunrise
DC’s exclusionary activism is part of a larger and growing problem of
anti-Semitism on the left. “Despite what others, including some progressive
Jewish thinkers, may suggest, denying the right of Jews—alone among the peoples
of the world—to the right of self-determination is antisemitism even when you
call it ‘anti-Zionism,’” he wrote. “Denying Jews the rights afforded to other
people is discrimination.”
Rather than condemning or disavowing Sunrise DC’s
anti-Semitism, however, the national Sunrise organization punted on the issue by claiming they had not had a chance
to read the statement beforehand. A “reflection” by the group a few days later continued to link
Zionism with oppression.
Strange, then, that only one week after the public outcry
over this anti-Semitic behavior, a public high school in Washington D.C.,
promoted a Sunrise-sponsored recruiting effort on school grounds on October 27.
Wilson High School in D.C. (where one of my sons is a student) sent a message
to students encouraging them to join Sunrise DC (a concerned parent alerted me
to the announcement). “Curious about the Green New Deal? . . . Come join the
Sunrise Movement at Wilson to talk about the Green New Deal and climate
activism during lunch.” The announcement noted there would be “opportunities to
win candy!”
In fact, Wilson High School, like many high schools and
colleges across the nation, has its own Sunrise Movement chapter; at my son’s school, it is the only group among the
school’s many clubs affiliated with a registered lobbying
organization or an avowed activist movement. Called “Sunrise Hubs,” these are the recruitment arm of the
organization, with detailed scripts to follow and even training worksheets on “anti-oppression” for each hub
(notably lacking in Sunrise’s anti-oppression worksheets? Information on
anti-Semitism). At Wilson, the group has a staff sponsor and uses school
facilities for its activities.
Most parents have no problem with high school students
engaging in activism for causes their children care about, but we should draw
the line at a school offering support for an organization that is blatantly
bigoted in its public statements, as Sunrise DC has been.
Even absent the egregious expressions of anti-Semitism,
however, it’s worth examining whether Sunrise DC is an organization that
taxpayer-funded public schools should be supporting.
Consider the Guiding
Principles of Sunrise DC: Calling itself an “abolitionist”
organization, Sunrise DC says it is “anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and
anti-imperialist.” Further, the group states, “We demand land back for
Indigenous people and reparations for Black and brown people” and further
claims that “climate justice is racial justice, disability justice, class
justice.” Their agenda this fall also includes defunding
the police—or “police abolition”—as well as eliminating school safety
officers. At a time when the city’s homicide and armed violent crime rates are
skyrocketing, Sunrise DC says its “long-term vision is for DC to fully abolish
the Metropolitan Police Department, and for all to understand the connection
between climate justice and abolition, and other intersecting forms of
oppression.”
Or consider the kind of actions they are training their
recruits to pursue. As Politico reported, during a Sunrise
organizational meeting at a church in D.C. this summer, “dozens of teenagers
and twenty-somethings stood in church pews and repeated in unison an empty
placeholder phrase—literally, ‘Three-word chant!’—as they pretended to hold
signs in their hands and got coached on the best posture to be taken seriously
(neither ‘slouched’ nor ‘robotic’).” The chant that replaced the placeholder,
and that was deployed in early November when Sunrise protested outside
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s houseboat in D.C., was “Fuck Joe Manchin.”
The organization is also not a fan of our constitutional
balance of powers or of political compromise. “For us to really be able to pass
the whole vision of what it takes to stop the climate crisis, it’s essential
that we abolish the filibuster,” a Sunrise leader told Politico.
Constitutional checks and balances are viewed not as the inherent genius of our
political system, but as an obstacle to progressive goals: “Every way that you
turn, there’s some arcane Senate rule that is corrupting our ability to get the
progress that we need,” the Sunrise spokesperson complained.
In another press release issued in the wake of Democratic
victories in the special elections for U.S. Senate in Georgia and the January 6
attack on the capitol, Sunrise stated, “There is no middle ground, and Joe
Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi cannot ‘compromise,’ ‘negotiate,’
or ‘come to the table’ with the GOP tyrants.” Even the socialist magazine Jacobin has scolded Sunrise for its overly broad agenda and often
overheated rhetoric.
Sunrise DC’s anti-Semitism should not be excused. At a
time when political polarization is high, and anti-Semitism in the U.S. is on
the rise, public schools shouldn’t be supporting an organization that promotes
both.
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