On the night of May 21, Elias Rodriguez loaded his legally obtained and licensed gun in our nation’s capital and set out for the Jewish Museum, hunting for Jews.
He didn’t particularly care which Jews he shot, so long as he bagged some.
Rodriguez went to an American Jewish Committee event for young Jewish and Israeli professionals, waited until the event was over, and then gunned down two Israeli Embassy employees, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Laschinsky in cold blood.
The details of how he executed Sarah were particularly depraved, but they’re fully spelled out in the criminal complaint.
His Jew-hunt came to an end only when his gun jammed.
Like our own United Educators of San Francisco leaders, Rodriguez was a motivated and active member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation or PSL. As he outlined in his online manifesto, he was driven by a desire to smash democracy, capitalism, and the State of Israel.
As a proud product of public schools, Rodriguez came by his Jew-hate honestly.
In fact, we can see those same ideologies at work in SFUSD’s own ninth grade ethnic studies curriculum materials, which are now at the center of another in a series of self-inflicted political controversies.
Through its combination of pseudo-history, pseudo-social science, and the sanctified academic theology of the oppressors and the oppressed, Unit 2 (“Systems and Power”) of SFUSD’s ninth grade ethnic studies curriculum feeds our young teens a romanticized fantasy of moral rebellion — what Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has dubbed “revolutionary romanticism” — a theatrical performance targeted at “spectators whose ideological appetites demand heroes and villains reduced to easily digestible images, disconnected entirely from the messy truths of actual lived experiences.”
Throughout the slide deck, there is no pretending that any of this is grounded in facts. It’s all about the vibes. Nowhere in the slides is the operative theology given any context. Nowhere are students encouraged to question. The assumptions are simply woven through the slides and activities as if they were facts.
In this theology, “the oppressed” are used primarily as an orchard of useful symbolism, ripe for the picking. And in spite of their claims to advocate for the liberation of these vulnerable populations, the slides themselves make no attempt to provide positive, accurate, or fact-based representations of these people. For example, in the sections on “Ableism,” there are no images of differently abled or disabled people, nor are there any images of the elderly in the sections on “Ageism” (slide 68). Any time Western standards of beauty cannot be centered, stick figures are used.
At what point do we have to acknowledge that this kind of mythmaking is its own colonization of K-12 education?
Given that SFUSD is demographically 41 percent Asian, I was surprised to find only one slide on the exploitation of Asian populations in the United States or California. There, the Chinese are depicted through a shocking cartoon from the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act — an historical event which ninth graders in SFUSD won’t even hear about for another two years. The cartoon features a few hapless, faceless immigrants wearing their stereotypical conical sun hats and carrying buckets or brooms. They are stuck at the base of a brick wall, and white American men at the top of that wall are throwing things down at them pushing away the ladder that would have granted them access. The Japanese Americans mentioned on this slide don’t fare much better — they’re only mentioned in reference to a map of the U.S. government’s World War II-era internment camps. The small black text on a dark blue background explaining all of this is barely readable.
Overwhelmingly, all human beings who serve as point of view characters in the presentation are shown as cartoon characters. Each of these cartoons is romanticized in standardized ways, according to familiar Western stereotypes of beauty. For example, the glamorized woman in a hijab character is drawn according to stereotypical Western standards of female beauty, with large wide eyes, heavy mascara, lipstick, and a small nose. She is the most frequently used human figure in the slide deck. Other characters include a white male police officer who serves as the point of view character for the “systems and expressions of power” section. He is drawn to fill up as much space as he can, and the fact that his eyes are hidden by aviator sunglasses adds an additional hint of menace. No thought seems to be given to the use of these common clichés.
I found no actual or drawn images of disabled, overweight, or older people.
Throughout the Unit 2 slides, the sole representation of Jews is based not in California history, but comes rather from an aggressively stereotyped article about greedy Jewish luxury real estate developers in New York City exploiting poor people of color. What — did we not have enough Jews to demonize here in California? In fairness, the article does also mention criminal Israeli diamond magnates. The article mostly invokes terrible, dehumanizing antisemitic tropes about Jews with ties to Israel, citing their lavish spending habits and terrible judgment as they wield their oppressive control over the lives of poor people of color.
This slide concludes by praising the targeting and “resistance” of these Jews as a heroic act of “symbolic solidarity.”
At what point do we acknowledge that this kind of mythmaking is its own colonization of K-12 education?
Delivering young students into an uncritical and “ecstatic certainty of their awakening” is neither solidarity nor equity.
It’s the road to fascism.
Edited June 10, 2025 to deactivate a link.
