Sorry for the delayed follow-up. Between High Holy Days, space laser maintenance, and controlling the weather, it’s been a busy time.
The anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel was rough. I had to go into the bathroom between classes and cry a couple times. I’ve pretty much given up wearing eye makeup. But the whole San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Jewish community has been toughening up.
The miracle happened on Oct. 9, when the American Jewish Committee (AJC) trainings went ahead as (re)scheduled for the teachers at the four high school sites with the greatest number of antisemitic incident reports over the past year.
Like most miracles, it was a little bumpy and lopsided. But that didn’t make it any less miraculous.
Of course, wouldn’t have been a day that ends in ‘y’ in San Francisco if there hadn’t been at least a little drama.
When the Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) and Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) supporters failed to get the AJC training canceled altogether, they set out to sabotage them.
Local union site committees tried to go rogue. They sent out emails demonizing Jews’ relationship to our ancestral homeland and providing teachers with instructions about how to attend their own antisemitic “alternative” training instead of the AJC training. Their program had been both developed and vetted by a fringe organization of non-Jewish Jew-haters, and was thoroughly grounded in distortions and erasures of mainstream Jewish identity.
This was a huge first step in breaking the trance of antisemitism in San Francisco, and SFUSD leadership deserves credit for following through.
There were just two small problems with this strategy. The first was that Jewish community members got wind of this sabotage and objected. The second was that SFUSD administration pushed back bluntly and clearly.
There was kvetching. There was howling. There were all the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression — all except acceptance.
As KQED carefully documented and published, unidentified teachers wept and gnashed their teeth because Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) had assured them that AJC is “very biased in favor of Israel.”
As I’ve pointed out before, this is a silly argument. Water is wet. Jews are from Judea. It’s right there in our name. Three thousand years of history and archaeology back us up.
Unfortunately, this was also the same day when JVP had chosen to announce that “Violence is the only path forward,” which didn’t do much to strengthen the haters’ position with SFUSD. This is, after all, a school district under federal investigation by the Department of Education for antisemitism.
To its credit, SFUSD held firm.
District officials refused to be intimidated and declined to back down. False and defamatory objections about the training and about AJC were dismissed. The union hadn’t been aware that the Jewish community group that recommended AJC had included dues-paying union members.
This particular equity journey is going to be a long, slow, painful road for us all. Jew-hate is a very hard habit to break. So any break in the bad-faith fevers needs to be considered its own kind of minor miracle.
The trainings themselves were straightforward and fact-based. They talked frankly about who Jews are and consider ourselves to be. Teachers who had walked out to attend the unapproved alternative session started filtering back in. Maybe they were curious or maybe they were covering their butts. Some of them held up protest signs, but a number of them filled out question cards and engaged in dialogue — some of it heated — with local AJC leaders who had come to facilitate the trainings. There were some who tried to disrupt the AJC sessions, but they were admonished by older colleagues for stealing other people’s time.
Those who had come had come to listen.
It took courage to resist union pressures. A number of teachers — both Jewish and non-Jewish — expressed appreciation for the training. Even those of differing opinions engaged with the AJC leaders who’d come to speak and to listen. I’m hoping this training will soon be given at every SFUSD school.
Privately, some United Educators–San Francisco members expressed to each other that they felt bullied and intimidated into going. Some teachers who left the AJC training gave their Jewish colleagues weird, creepy non-apology apologies for leaving.
But even in spite of all this mishegas, I would argue this is a step toward progress — and healing.
It shouldn’t be this hard to broaden social contact in our city, but we’ve all gotten locked into our silos. Public schools are the ideal place to achieve the kind of intergroup contact that, as many prominent studies have shown, are the most effective way to change people’s behaviors toward each other in positive ways — even if people aren’t aware that their behaviors and belief systems are shifting.
Research has shown that the only way polarized democracies ever make change is one step at a time, day by day. Change is relational. As Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written:
Polarized democracies get out of cycles of conflict by creating spaces, arguments, and ideas that can get large cross-sections of people to come together across their polarized divides to work towards shared goals. Achieving pluralism involves building coalitions of unlikely allies by searching out common ground on which to begin pushing shared ideas forward.
Nobody’s head exploded as a result of attending the AJC training. Nobody was harmed by hearing mainstream Jewish ideas about mainstream Jewish self-concepts, even if they felt uncomfortable about what they heard. This was a huge first step in breaking the trance of antisemitism in San Francisco, and SFUSD leadership deserves credit for following through.
AROC and its leader, Lara Kiswani, have made it clear they don’t care for mainstream Jews or anybody else who supports the right of Israel to exist, but I can live with that disappointment.
What I don’t have to do — and what my Jewish students, colleagues and fellow community members in SFUSD don’t have to do either — is submit to the moral inversions of those who hate us.
That’s not how equity works, and it’s not how public education works in a vibrant, multiethnic democracy.
Who will define the future of education in San Francisco in this election — the people who chained themselves to the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent organ transplants or the incredible coalition using AI and robotics to perform those transplants?
We’ll know in a few weeks.
