Now is the time to prevent antisemitism in our public schools

By Allen Menkin, MD, Project Manager, CAMERA’s Naples Partnership of Christians and Jews

Barely four months ago we were shaking our heads in disbelief as Columbia University’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” — and remarkably similar “spontaneous” disturbances at top universities and colleges across the country — rapidly degenerated into to full blown insurrections and orgies of Jew-hatred.

The good news: Contrary to headlines, the disturbances were limited to a handful of elite universities, primarily in California and the Northeast. A Washington Monthly study found that of 1,421 public and private nonprofit colleges, 318 (22%) had protests and 123 (9%) had encampments. Despite frayed Black-Jewish relations, none of the 78 historically Black colleges had encampments, and only nine had demonstrations. The performative hysterics of underinformed, overindulged, keffiyeh draped, useful idiots accomplished almost nothing. If their goal was to promote peace in Gaza or support suffering Palestinians, they failed miserably.

The bad news: Confrontational Jewbaiting in higher education had spiraled out of control long before the October atrocities and would continue even if Israel disappeared from the map. Funded by Iran and extreme-left American foundations, the “students” managed to make campuses and neighborhoods from Morningside Heights to Berkeley look and feel like 1938 Berlin. Very few of them have been prosecuted, many have returned for the fall semester, and it is not at all clear if diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) obsessed administrations have either the integrity or the ability to rein them in. But that may be the least of our problems.

Our profoundly illiberal, antisemitic, anti-American elite universities are a product of “the long march through the institutions,” a radical project that began in the late 1960s to change their mission from the pursuit of reason and knowledge to creating radical change with white, male, capitalist domination and recasting America in the image of an increasingly post-National, neo-Marxist Europe.

Those same universities have distinguished schools of education. They train our children’s K-12 teachers, develop their curriculum and write their textbooks. Their “woke” pedagogy has strong support within the American Federation of Teachers and extends into public school systems across the country. California’s Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC) may be its most toxic version.

For those not familiar with LESMC, its course materials and strategies are studies in anti-Zionist, intersectional, “woke” dogma. They divide students into victims and oppressors, extol antiwhite violence, depict Israel as an apartheid state, claim that Zionism calls for the creation and expansion of an exclusively Jewish state in historic Palestine “by any means necessary,” and instructs teachers to make clear connections between the “struggle for Palestinian rights and the struggles of Indigenous, Black, and brown communities.”

Florida’s 2022 Individual Freedom Act, (commonly known as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act and abbreviated as the Stop WOKE Act), expanded antidiscrimination laws to prohibit schools and companies from directing guilt or blame toward students and employees based on race or sex. It banned lessons on topics like “white privilege” and created new protections for students and workers, including a stipulation that no person should be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress due to their race, color, sex or national origin.”

This June a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court upheld a previous injunction declaring the act unconstitutional, citing the same First Amendment rights that protect expressions of Jew-hatred on campus. Its ruling does not mean that Florida’s public-school systems will go the way of some in NYC, California, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia. It does mean there is a potential for our local schools to come under the influence of an educational dogma that incites antisemitism and threatens the Jewish and American identities of our children. The time to act is before that occurs.

CAMERA’s Naples Partnership of Christians and Jews was founded to prevent the rise of antisemitism in Greater Naples, including our schools. If you would like to help, please contact Tricia Miller at tricia@camera.org.