The last 11 months since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel have been a tough time to be a Jew in San Francisco.
Progressives are still angry over their electoral losses, and they were adrift without a power base until they latched onto the anti-Israel cause and its fashion accessories. For Jewish San Franciscans and students, that’s been a match made in hell.
Like other Jews around here, over the past year I’ve been attacked and harassed in my school, in my classroom, in my labor union. I’ve had to file a civil rights complaint. I’ve had to hire a Jewish civil rights lawyer.
There’s also been a dark side.
Friends from around the country ask me how we are coping. Mostly badly. We cry. We kvetch. But we also kvell. And we fight.
Then things got worse.
When I saw the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Arab Resource & Organizing Center’s (AROC) press release the other day celebrating their victory at having killed off SFUSD’s antisemitism training, it struck me as so outrageous and crazy it actually made me laugh. Their claims about the American Jewish Committee (AJC) were such obscene fabrications they were unrecognizable.
AJC is one of the oldest and most mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States — in fact, they are so mildly mainstream, they were vetted and chosen by the Biden administration to lead the country’s national antisemitism strategy.
To demonize AJC as “controversial” is simply dumb.
To screech about AJC being “pro-Israel” is equally foolish. Water is wet. Jews are from Judea. It’s right there in our name. Jews have more than 3,600 years’ worth of history and connection to our ancestral homeland of Israel.
To claim that AJC’s “primary mission [is] ‘advocating for Israel’” suggests an undiagnosed reading problem. Their home page clearly lays out their three-part mission: “advocating for the Jewish people and Israel. Defending democratic values for all” — just like my grandparents taught me.
To claim that AJC is “a pro-war lobbying group” makes me question whether the writers have read and understood the definitions of those terms. AJC is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, just like AROC’s fiscal sponsor, the Tides Foundation. Nonprofit 501(c)3s are required to stay neutral with regard to political parties and activities. Lobbying organizations are set up differently — as AROC should know — and they’re governed by different IRS rules.
My first thought when I finished reading the press release was that this kind of training really needs to be offered by an organization like AJC that is uncontroversial, unflappable, collaborative, and fact-based. When it comes to antisemitism over the last hundred years, AJC has seen it all. There’s nothing so hateful or new at this point that it could surprise them.
But once I started looking under the hood of AROC’s language, I spotted a darker and more dangerous purpose than mere discrimination. That’s why they don’t want you to notice it. And to help them accelerate their implementation, AROC and others have latched onto a small group of loud, nominally “Jewish” organizations they can use as a fig leaf and a human shield for their efforts.
What could be more depressingly emblematic than Jewish parents in San Francisco having to argue over who gets to define “the Jews”?
One group they’ve attached themselves to is the so-called Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group that quite literally defines itself as the enemy of the mainstream Jewish community in America. JVP’s explicit strategy is to “create a wedge” within the American Jewish community to weaken U.S. support for Israel. Their explicit goal is to end Israel as a sovereign Jewish state.
You might remember JVP from May of last year, when they became something of an Internet punchline. That was when UC Berkeley professor and noted anti-Zionist Dr. Hatem Bazian inadvertently exposed himself as a well-known JVP spokeswoman— using a “sock puppet” account — posting one of his outraged “azzajew” tweets from his personal, Hamas-affiliated account rather than from his deepfake “azzajew” account. Twitter went wild over the error, and he tried to delete the evidence, but the damage was done. The Internet, being what it is, had already taken screenshots and circulated them widely.
Does any of this sound like objective, apolitical, or fact-based behavior to you?
AROC amplifies voices like these to make their own Jew-hate seem less toxic and more palatable to an easily outraged but exhausted American audience. “We can’t be antisemitic!” they seem to be saying. “Some of our best friends are Jewish!”
And that’s the crux of our current dilemma.
What could be more depressingly emblematic of this moment than Jewish parents in San Francisco having to argue over who gets to define “the Jews” at an identity training for the schools with the city’s worst track records of antisemitic civil rights violations?
The distance between AROC’s claims about Jews and the verifiable, fact-based information about real Jews is a distance AROC doesn’t want you to cross. That’s because if you did, it would soon become obvious that what they’re engaged in isn’t merely advocacy — it’s information warfare. It’s an assault on democracy. And that doesn’t belong anywhere near our schools.
This is what writer Shelby Steele has termed “poetic truth.” Kellyanne Conway called it “alternative facts.” Stephen Colbert called it “truthiness.” It’s a shell game of claims and numbers and accusations, tossed out with such volume and at such dizzying speeds it’s impossible for exhausted and busy people of good conscience to keep up.
Which is exactly the point.
That’s why this AJC training is so important — both for San Francisco’s Jewish students and for the entire project of liberal democracy. Our educators need factual, apolitical information about Jewish identity — not propaganda. Not information warfare.
We Jews have lived in San Francisco long enough to know that once our neighbors and colleagues understand who we are, they’re smart enough to reach their own wise conclusions. Education should be about teaching and learning how to think – not what to think.
And anybody who’s trying to hide the facts about a subject or a people they don’t like from their fellow citizens isn’t engaged in education — they’re pushing indoctrination.
So here’s my advice for the haters.
If your vision of inclusive training means depicting Jews as a greedy cabal of violent, power-mad, hawk-nosed vermin who control world affairs like the demonic puppet masters you’ve always believed us to be, then yes — you are indeed on the path of helping turn 2024 San Francisco into 1938 Berlin -— and you’re just in time to restage Kristallnacht.
But that’s not the vision that San Francisco parents and voters want.
And we’re not going down without a fight.
We’ll keep fighting for a vibrant multiethnic democratic future and for our right to live and work as Jews, as Americans, and as San Franciscans.
We’ll keep focusing on liberal values in our schools and on a more perfect union in our democracy because that’s our best hope for all children’s futures.
We’ll keep doing our best to be good neighbors and strong allies against hate while holding onto our own Jewish beliefs and culture and practices, along with our unwavering love for our indigenous ancestral homeland.
If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the situation room, charging my space laser.
Updated: Sept. 17, 2024 at 9:49 a.m. to reflect the correct name of the Council on American Islamic Relations.
