Opinion | California Parents Say No to Anti-Semitic Ethnic Studies

Advocates—together with academics union officers, public-school academics and different ideologues—have fashioned the Liberated Ethnic Research Mannequin Curriculum Consortium, by means of which they hope to affect the educating of ethnic research within the state. The consortium, which disseminates educating supplies lifted straight from radical anti-Israel web sites, rejects the concept that all cultures needs to be studied. It asserts that ethnic research is about solely 4 teams: Native Individuals, black Individuals, Chicanos/Latinos, and Asian-Individuals/Pacific Islanders. That final group consists of Arabs from the Center East—however not Jews, who’ve lived in that very same area for millennia.

The consortium’s supplies—lots of which have been taken offline in current months—are crammed with assaults on Jews and the Jewish state. They deny that Jews are indigenous to the Center East and educate that Israel is a “colonialist” and “settler state” based by means of “genocide,” “ethnic cleaning” and “apartheid.” They falsely outline Judaism, educating that “Zionism is distinct from Judaism” and that Zionism isn’t a Jewish spiritual perception however an invention of the “late nineteenth century.”

Inform that to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who finish their Passover Seders with “subsequent 12 months in Jerusalem,” or finish each Jewish wedding ceremony by breaking a glass to mourn Jerusalem’s destruction, or pray every day going through Jerusalem—or whose bible, prayer guide and calendar have for 1000’s of years been crammed with the craving for a return of the folks of Israel to sovereignty within the land of Israel.

The consortium’s supplies describe Zionism as a “nationalist colonial ideology” that seeks the “enlargement of the Jewish state into historic Palestine by any means needed,” and says Israel and the U.S. are “white settler states,” though Israel’s Jewish inhabitants is greater than half “folks of shade”—together with folks whose ancestors lived in Africa and India and extra three million Israelis descended from Jews who’ve lived within the Center East since earlier than the Babylonian exile 2,600 years in the past.

California regulation requires that publicly funded educating supplies be public, so that folks and taxpayers know what’s occurring within the colleges they use and pay for. However the consortium instructs academics to violate that mandate. Lessons instructing academics in regards to the curriculum are by invitation solely. The consortium urges sympathetic academics to “fly below the radar” and advises that it might be greatest to “shut their doorways” earlier than educating the “liberatory curriculum”—together with the denunciation of Jewish beliefs and the Jewish state—so dad and mom can’t discover out what’s occurring.

The lawsuit has two goals: removing of educating supplies denouncing the plaintiffs’ sincerely held spiritual beliefs, and public disclosure of all ethnic-studies supplies in Los Angeles public colleges. The dad and mom and academics we signify search public disclosure of what’s truly being taught with public cash in public colleges and an finish to using taxpayer-funded anti-Semitic educating supplies. Jewish academics have the precise to a office, and Jewish dad and mom to a public faculty for his or her youngsters, the place government-paid academics don’t denounce their homeland, characterize their folks as genocidal criminals, or disparage their spiritual beliefs.

If the Liberated Ethnic Research Mannequin Curriculum Consortium prevails in California, it’s prone to be deployed elsewhere. Israel and the Jews are solely the primary of the left’s perceived ideological enemies to be denounced on the general public dime. If proponents of the curriculum aren’t stopped, different enemies—and their denunciations—are prone to observe.

Ms. Marcus is authorized director of the Deborah Mission and lead counsel in Involved Jewish Mother and father and Lecturers of LA v. Liberated Ethnic Research Mannequin Curriculum Consortium. Mr. Fried is a professor at Harvard Regulation Faculty and chairman of the Deborah Mission’s board of administrators.