November 7, 2024 — San Francisco
San Francisco Unified School District families are confronting multiple crises. Along with leadership changes, budget deficits and school closures, many students and parents are also contending with a climate of hate and exclusion.
For the Jewish community, the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel marked the beginning of a sharp increase in antisemitic incidents in classrooms, on campuses and on social media — beyond already historically high numbers.
Following months of appeals for support, Jewish students and families asked SFUSD to offer anti-bias training from the American Jewish Committee to help teachers and staff learn about who the Jewish people are, what antisemitism is and what faculty can do when they encounter it.
Ironically, the district’s granting of this simple request for training inspired its own spate of antisemitism this fall.
The bias took many forms. It included slanderous accusations invoking a classic trope that Jews promote war for their benefit, in this case smearing AJC as “pro-war.” It tokenized a fringe group of anti-Zionist Jews as representatives of the Jewish community, accompanied by denying that a connection to Israel is an aspect of Jewish identity.
District administrators who organized a September training and teachers who were asked to attend it received significant pushback from some teachers union leaders who invoked the above biases. Opponents of the training further asserted that “all life is sacred,” a blithe and hypocritical echo of “all lives matter.” And the Jewish community was gaslighted as many denied or minimized the antisemitism that students, families and teachers face.
Indeed, unequal treatment of Jews, even if it is unintentional, is still antisemitism.
There were also demands that any training about antisemitism had to include discussions of Islamophobia. While our society must address Islamophobia, the impulse to always pair antisemitism with Islamophobia is inappropriate and counterproductive. Muslims deserve a vigorous response to the bias they experience in the Bay Area on its own merits. The Jewish community is no less worthy. Whenever bias is perpetrated, it is critical to be timely, specific and unequivocal in confronting it.
Uniquely conditioning a discussion of antisemitism to include other biases is itself a form of bias. Doing so reinforces or creates a dynamic of conflict between communities, which educators should instead seek to defuse.
When it came time for AJC’s district-mandated training, which was eventually rescheduled for October, members of the teachers union organized an alternative training session about antisemitism from a group that was neither vetted nor approved by the school district.
The curriculum consultant that led the unsanctioned program, Participatory Action Research Center for Education Organizing (PARCEO), makes bizarre and radical claims about antisemitism even over ostensibly uncontroversial matters. For example, one of PARCEO’s video presentations falsely asserts that when Jews seek protection from law enforcement in response to hate crimes — including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, the deadliest attack against Jews in U.S. history — they “endanger” and contribute to the “continued oppression, incarceration and murder of [Black] people.”
In the SFUSD training I led on Oct. 9, I was temporarily prevented from speaking while a dozen union representatives holding signs took control of the room to make accusatory statements about core values of Jewish identity and AJC — at the expense of their colleagues seeking to learn. About 40 or 50 exited en masse as a form of protest.
Those who left did not walk out on AJC; they walked out on their students and parents who asked for our training.
The inability of some teachers to even listen to a different point of view in an educational setting amid our proudly diverse city was jarring. Education is a foundational pillar of democracy. As Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of religion, warned in 2019, antisemitism is “toxic to democracies” and a “threat to all societies if left unaddressed.”
Like other expressions of hate, antisemitism is underreported by its targets. As San Francisco students and parents see teachers and schools ignoring, minimizing or even fomenting antisemitism, they will no longer feel that reporting will lead to any action or change and therefore won’t report it at all. There is also fear within the Jewish community about the potential for retaliation.
The lessons we impart to our children are critical and lasting. Equity and fairness are not limited resources, and there is no need to substitute one form of bias for another. School must be a place where young minds and ideas, even those that are challenging or uncomfortable, are nurtured. Free expression is enhanced, not hindered when harassment is confronted. During an epidemic of hate, we should trust experts on the topic instead of trying to do our own research or turning to the fringe for answers.
Clearly, there is a lot to learn.
