As social pathogens go, I’ve always felt that antisemitism is less like a virus and more of a fungal superbug we can never fully stamp out. Like a fungus, antisemitism spreads through branching networks of filaments and tendrils of hate under the surface, forming dense, matted networks that remain unseen, seeking out symbiotic partnerships with rotting communities it can break down and digest. On their own calendar, something causes mushroom heads to pop up where things were fine a week ago.
Fungi are notoriously difficult to kill without killing their host. Like fungi, antisemitism is opportunistic. Wherever there is social decay or a weakened social fabric, over thousands of years, we have seen how it finds ways to adapt and infect communities anew.
The best defense against it is a healthy social fabric of connection. Thriving societies are less vulnerable to opportunistic social pathogens, which is why human flourishing is one of the best ways to inhibit antisemitism. A healthy democracy is a healthy organism. But just like eating right and getting enough exercise and sleep, keeping democracy’s immune system healthy is easier said than done.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in light of the shockingly antisemitic slide that made its way into a mandatory ethnic studies course for ninth graders at my school a few weeks ago.
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the slide made national news and seems to have slipped through the district’s mission, values, goals, and guardrails — even after a district training on Jews and antisemitism that was deemed necessary due to the shocking levels of antisemitic hate that Jewish students and staff have been experiencing in SFUSD — what’s really left me shaken and furious are the four distinct and interlocking levels of violation of the mission, norms, and laws of public education that brought this slide into our classrooms as a form of information warfare against Jewish children and our whole community.
The first level of violation — both of state and federal law, as well as of factual accuracy and historical truth — occurs in the content of the slide itself. This level is the easiest to see, which makes it hard to understand how this slipped through the legally mandated Board of Education approval process.
To claim — falsely — that Israel is the result of a “settler-colonialist invasion” ignores the most basic facts of history, contemporaneous accounts, and large-scale physical and archaeological evidence of Jews’ continuous presence in Eretz Yisrael for more than 3,000 years. In fact, among other big things, Arch of Titus — a monumental stone artifact in the center of Rome that documents how, after the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD by the Roman Army and the destruction of the Second Temple, our Jewish ancestors were sold into slavery and frog-marched from Jerusalem to Rome, which — spoiler alert — is how we got to Europe in the first place (look it up).
Using the widely accepted Antisemitism Detection Checklist for K-12 Communities by the National Education Association’s Jewish Affairs Caucus, this clearly meets the definition of “Denying Indigeneity.”
This sentence also drives straight through “Blood Libel,” “Erasure,” “Denying Right to Self-Determination,” and “Holocaust Inversion.” Any one of these would be offensive enough, but their publication together in an official SFUSD curriculum document can only be labeled educational malpractice (or malice).
The second level of violation comes from the fact of the slide itself — the timing and context of its release. In addition to not having been approved by the Board of Education, as per state law, and not having been presented for public comment (same), it was also scheduled for release right after the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 slaughter, mass rape, and mutilation of 1,200 Jewish Israelis — young Jews not much older than the Jewish ninth graders it was unleashed on. Was this intended to be triggering to young Jewish students starting high school without a support network or was that just a lucky accident? The casual psychological cruelty of this particular scheduling decision simply boggles my mind.
The third level of violation is the harm done to the isolated young Jewish students themselves — a minority population who were subjected to these assaults on reality while sitting among their new classmates in a well-regarded SFUSD public school classroom. Imagine being a 14-year-old student having your indigenous identity erased by an authority figure licensed by the State of California to make instructional decisions you are forced to listen to. Imagine the social cruelty of encountering this in an official piece of curriculum that has been “published” by your district — and was therefore presumably approved by your elected officials. Imagine encountering these falsehoods as a young teen in a new school, sitting next to strangers, with no one you know or trust to advocate on your behalf against the lies being spread about your people in this required course.
Imagine wearing a Hebrew name necklace in this class. Or a Star of David. Now imagine experiencing this kind of institutionalized hate in your loudly progressive school district. Imagine you are an academically ambitious student and this is a required course. Are you getting the picture yet?
The fourth level of violation is that this was all done at the expense of the four original ethnic communities who were intended by the Legislature to be lifted up through ethnic studies in the first place. So instead of learning about “the often-untold struggles and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Latino/a/x Americans, and Asian Americans in California,” now our Jewish students find themselves instead being used as a prop and a bludgeon in a class required for graduation — and an unexpected distraction from the work of educating students about these essential and underrepresented histories — just because somebody in a position of authority over them happens to hate Jews.
If that isn’t a betrayal of the ethnic studies promise, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
It definitely rips the mask off the bad faith of those in power. And it shows they’re using this opportunity for their own agendas, not for the stated purpose. They are robbing the people they’ve been using all along. And they’re doing so at the expense of our students.
This is why it is essential that SFUSD leadership and the Board of Education provide a full investigation and accounting of who authored this slide, who approved its placement in the slide deck, and what guardrails will be put into place so that this kind of institutionalized curricular hate never happens again to any child in our care in SFUSD.
Ethnic studies was not enacted by the California Legislature or signed into law by the governor as open season on California’s Jewish children. It was not created as an act of war on the identify of California’s Jews or of any other ethnic group that has fallen out of periodic popularity or favor.
The fact that this happened in SFUSD is a complete betrayal of its mission of public education. If somebody doesn’t end up fired over this, it will be a confirmation of the absolute moral rot that has overtaken this school district.
This is also why both SFUSD and the California Legislature need to institute new guardrails so that those in charge of ethnic studies can never again misuse it for their own hateful personal and political agendas — or to abuse other vulnerable, minoritized children in California’s classrooms.