When California’s legislature mandated that schools include ethnic studies in the curriculum, Jewish groups and those supportive of them warned that it would lead to antisemitic teaching in the classroom. When the bill was passed, they tried (and, so far, have failed) to add language preventing antisemitic teaching. Now, Santa Ana school district in Southern California has been caught red-handed using its ethnic studies as a vehicle for virulent antisemitism.

In October 2021, California’s legislature passed, and Governor Newsom signed, a bill requiring “Ethnic Studies” to graduate from high school. As the Model Curriculum shows, the goal was pure DEI/CRT Marxism. Just look at the definition of race they use:

Within the field of ethnic studies, “race” is defined as a (neo)colonial social construction. It is viewed as a “master category” based upon a Eurocentric biological fallacy that is central to inequitable power relations in society. As a social and historical construct, the idea of race is primarily filtered through physical traits (phenotype), including pigmentation (skin color) and other physical features; where people’s ancestral origins are from (precolonial geographic ancestry); cultural traits; and sometimes economic class. Since race produces material impacts, it also produces racial consciousness and facilitates the process of racialization and racial projects, including both the oppositional projects of racism/colorism/anti-Blackness/ anti-Indigeneity and anti-racism/racial justice. The People of Color Power movements that emerged in the 1960s (“Black Power, Red Power, Brown Power, Yellow Power”) are key examples of how race has also been embraced and leveraged in the resistance against racism; they are the movements that Ethnic Studies rose from. In the United States today, races very broadly break down as people of color (POC) and white people. (R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, Miguel Zavala, Christine Sleeter, and Wayne Au, eds. 2019. Rethinking Ethnic Studies. Milwaukee, OR: Rethinking Schools.)

It was already clear in 2019, when the bill was still being debated that anything coming from the left would be hostile to Israel:

California’s proposed curriculum guide in ethnic studies is being sent back for substantial revision after a pileup of criticism that it’s anti-Semitic and freighted with jargon and political correctness.

Nothing had changed two years later when the bill was on the verge of passing:

Jewish groups strenuously objected to the first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, or ESMC, saying it did not reflect the American Jewish experience and even advanced some forms of anti-Semitism.

While some people were happy with the third version of the model curriculum, not all were. From the same article in the leans-left Times of Israel:

Not everyone is happy with the latest draft: On Wednesday, the authors of the original curriculum disavowed the project in protest of the revised versions, which they feel “silenced the voices of Ethnic Studies teachers/educators, who are all from racially and politically underrepresented groups.”

And other Jewish activists say that regardless of how the project discusses Jews, its basic ideology is unacceptable. They see this as the latest front in an ongoing battle over critical race theory, an approach to education that views race and racism as embedded in, and central to, society and its institutions. Opponents of critical race theory see it as a threat to open debate and a return to classifying people based on their race, which they see as a danger to Jews.

Once the bill went into effect. rumors about antisemitic curricula started cropping up. Concerned people, therefore, tried to get a bill passed to stop that development—but the bill failed:

A California bill designed to prevent mandated high school ethnic studies courses from veering into antisemitism has been delayed a year amid opposition from teacher and university faculty unions and an Islamic civil rights group who call it censorship.

Well, some things should be censored.

Enter Santa Ana, California, a mid-size community in once-conservative Orange County, California. The people in charge of Santa Ana’s public schools are virulent antisemites, something they dress up in the politically correct garb of “anti-Zionism.” We know this because of the results of discovery in a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District (“SAUSD”) for violating California’s open meeting laws.

The suit began a year ago when Jewish groups became concerned that the SAUSD was putting antisemitic content into its ethnic studies program. However, this was based on rumors because SAUSD refused to release any information about its planned ethnic curriculum. By keeping this secret, SAUSD was violating the state’s open meeting law, which mandates that matters of public concern must be available to the public.

The ADL has just announced via a press release that discovery revealed that the concerns were valid because SAUSD employees who were working on the ethnic studies steering committee were hostile to Jews and doing everything they could to hide that fact:

• When members of SAUSD’s Ethnic Studies Steering Committee were apprised of the Jewish community’s concerns about antisemitism in ethnic studies plans, they noted in an official agenda that they would need to “address the Jewish question.”
• Senior officials mused about using Jewish holidays to approve courses at the Board level to prevent Jews from attending.
• The Steering Committee hired an external consultant whose writings equate Israel with “settler colonialism” and who uses social media to actively promote anti-Israel bias with antisemitic tropes, including a post about “Zionist control of the CA Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” and a comment that the Legislative Jewish Caucus needs to “stay in their lane,” claiming “the Zionist CA Jewish Caucus hijacked Ethnic Studies,” as well as “a small white minority” should not “dictate a curriculum that is not about them.”
• A Committee leader referred to the only Jewish member as a “colonized Jewish mind” and a “f---ing baby” for expressing concerns over antisemitism on the Committee.
• An SAUSD Board member suggested that Jewish Americans do not belong in ethnic studies because they are “racialized as under the White category.”
• A Committee leader referred to the Jewish Federation of Orange County as “racist Zionists” and suggested SAUSD should not “cave” to their representatives.
• Members of the Steering Committee reportedly said, “Jews are not a disadvantaged ethnic group in the U.S. because they were never slaves,” that “Jews greatly benefit from white privilege, so they have it better,” and “we don't need to give both sides. We only support the oppressed, and Jews are the oppressors.”
• Jewish staff members at SAUSD wrote about how they were “sick” of the “thinly veiled antisemitism” coming from Committee leaders and were “hurt by some of things” they “said about Jews.”

In other words, everything that Jews feared would happen with the ethnic studies program has come to pass in Santa Ana—and currently, there’s nothing in California law to stop other school districts from doing the same. Theoretically, this violates the Civil Rights Act, but nobody seriously believes that, if Democrats retain the White House, Merrick Garland, or any successor, will address this problem.

Christian antisemitism lingers in certain pockets of America, but the reality is that it’s a spent force. If you want to see virulent antisemitism, look to the unholy alliance of leftism and Islam, which exists at the heart of the Democrat party in politicians such Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Andre Carson, Al Green, Summer Lee, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush—the last two of whom got the boot in their primaries in part for embracing this anti-American attitude. Kamala’s Middle East policy advisor is also relentlessly hostile to the world’s only Jewish state, as is her Jewish liaison.

This is the modern Democrat party. We also know where this alliance leads (hint: It rhymes with Mazis).

Image: A lesson from a Nazi textbook instructing students how to identify a Jewish nose—coming soon to California classrooms. (United States Holocaust Museum.)