Teaching one-sided, false, and dehumanizing narratives about Jews has always been how history’s worst eras of antisemitic violence have begun.
Toss in implied state sponsorship and you’ve got the accelerant and the trigger for unchecked Jew-hate in public schools.
We Jews come by this knowledge honestly.
The first Jews in America were still fleeing the Inquisition. Literally. Twenty-three Sephardic Jews narrowly escaped the colony of Brazil when Portugal defeated the Dutch to regain control of it, ending up in New Amsterdam.
The second wave of Jews in America fled murderous Central European pogroms, where repressive regimes prevented Jews from marrying, working, or settling anywhere. These Jews thrived on grit and business imagination. A rag peddler spotted trends in how commodities got bought and sold, which revolutionized financial markets. Another invented blue jeans. In a fast-growing country of hardworking young people, opportunity was always around the corner.
The third and final wave of Jewish immigrants was the largest and the most desperate. Starting in 1881, and over the next 43 years, 2.5 million peasants fled violent grassroots annihilations that chased Jews across the southern Russian Empire, peaking in the 1903 mass slaughter that finally woke the world up to the carnage.
Jews in America were fleeing the same cycles of oppression, enslavement, mass slaughter, and exile we’ve been subjected to for more than 2,000 years — ever since my ancestors were first frog-marched out of Jerusalem as Roman slaves and into Europe in 71 AD.
California needs better and stronger tools to prevent activist antisemitic teachers from abusing their access to California’s K–12 students before it is too late.
But in the United States, Jews were welcomed to become citizens.
For the first time since we emerged as a people 3,600 years ago in our indigenous ancestral homeland, we were told, “You can belong here.”
We took American citizenship seriously.
We lived our Jewish lives as Americans, and our American lives as Jews.
We found new ways to celebrate our unique Jewish identity.
We built a strong cultural legacy as California Jews. We’ve contributed to technology, music, art, comedy, film, law, politics, social justice, education, science and medical research, governance, and philanthropy.
We’ve forged deep and enduring bonds of affection with new friends in other ethnic communities. We’ve marched together and fought together for Black civil rights and against anti-Asian hate. We’ve become fans of lion dance and mochi pounding, and we’ve cheered our friends’ milestones — the first Black president of the United States. The first Black and Indian vice president. The first Latina Supreme Court justice. And the too-long-overdue appointment of a Black woman to the Supreme Court.
My favorite winter holiday meme is a photo of a hand-drawn – and probably tongue in cheek – window poster from a Chinese restaurant owner, thanking the Jewish people and observing that, “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your God insists you eat our food on Christmas.” The fusion and enjoyment of each others’ cultural and artistic traditions is a sign of a healthy and thriving multi-ethnic society.
But now we American Jews need your help.
Over the last 10 years, antisemitic violence in America has exploded. There’ve been mass shootings and armed hostage-taking at synagogues; a coordinated nationwide campaign of neo-Nazi vandalism against Jewish houses of worship; and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses. Jewish students at The Cooper Union in New York were barricaded inside their library against a frenzied campus mob.
Over the past two months, the pace of attacks has quickened.
Our young people are being targeted and gunned down in our nation’s capital for being affiliated with Jewish causes. Our cherished elders — including Holocaust survivors — are attacked with Molotov cocktails. A beloved cafe in San Francisco owned by a Jewish man has been subjected to repeated antisemitic vandalism, with ever-greater destruction. Even our elected government officials are not safe from being firebombed in their official government residences.
All these attacks have one thing in common — their victims were targeted for being Jews.
Californians can no longer afford to pretend not to notice this trend.
There’s been a failure to recognize the virus of left-wing antisemitism in America, but the latest, nearly weekly attacks have made it undeniable. Mass murderers now loudly trumpet their affiliations with Jew-hate.
Meanwhile, across California schools, Jewish and Israeli-American students are being targeted using the same poisonous blood libels that have been weaponized against Jews for more than 2,000 years.
And unlike other forms of bigotry and racism, Jew hate has been allowed to metastasize across California’s K–12 schools. We now have a very serious advanced case of cancer.
The California Department of Education (CDE) has responded with direct investigations that have yielded three landmark decisions just this year — one against Campbell Union High School District, another against Santa Clara Unified School District, and a third against Tamalpais Union High School District. Taken together, these three decisions reveal a pattern of false and hateful curriculum that demonizes Jews in California classrooms — with no appropriate legal mechanisms in sight.
California needs better and stronger tools to prevent activist antisemitic teachers from abusing their access to California’s K–12 students before it is too late.
Because of this urgent and worsening state of antisemitic hate in California schools, Assembly members Rick Chavez Zbur and Dawn Addis came together swiftly with the chairs of the Jewish, Black, Latino, Native American, and AAPI Legislative Caucuses as principal co-authors to put forward AB 715. This bill is a narrowly targeted, solutions-oriented bill aimed solely at combating antisemitism in K–12.
The bill passed unanimously out of the Assembly Education Committee (9–0) and without any no votes in the Assembly Appropriations Committee or on the Assembly Floor. It has been praised for its three limited areas of focus: (1) strengthening CDE’s Uniform Complaint Procedures, so that complaints are handled more efficiently and consistently; (2) adding a dedicated, full‑time State Antisemitism Coordinator to help clarify and support districts in applying the law to antisemitic incidents; and (3) broadening the Ed Code’s protections against all forms of ethnically-motivated, religious, and nationality‑based discrimination, which will ultimately benefit all diverse students.
Once enacted, AB 715 will increase accountability and help ensure a uniformly safe and supportive school climate across California. Standing together, the Diversity Caucus co-chairs are sending a strong and united message that Jewish students must be treated fairly and accorded the same level of civil rights protections afforded to every other ethnic or religious minority in California schools.
A line has been crossed and the California Legislature’s Diversity Caucuses are taking strong and principled action to stop Jew-hate from spreading. They see what’s happening to Jews in our country, and with their co-sponsorship of AB 715, they are stepping forward to say, “Not in our name.”
