Sunday, April 02, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
What made me persona non grata? On paper, I was a good fit for the job. I am a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, I established a network to help minority teachers attain National Board Certification. I designed and facilitated numerous teacher trainings and developed a civic-education program that garnered accolades from the LAUSD Board of Education.My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions.
One section of her essay is relevant for this site:
The conflicts were not limited to my tenure-review process. At every turn, I experienced strident opposition when I deviated from the accepted line. When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”When I later sought the support of our academic senate for the Heritage Month project, one opponent asked me if it was “about all the Jewish-inclusion stuff you have been pushing here,” and argued that the senate shouldn’t support the Heritage Month Workgroup efforts, because I was attempting to “turn our school into a religious school.” The senate president deferred to this claim, and the workgroup was denied support.
I looked up what she did for Jewish Heritage Month, and from what I can see, it was incredible.
The first event in 2022, I believe, was this one on defining antisemitism, with panelists Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder, Esq. from the National Jewish Advocacy Center and Alyza Lewin from the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law. They both explain the logic behind the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and explain why the "3D" test is an accurate description of when criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism. Rabbi Goldfeder spoke specifically about why labeling Israel as an apartheid state, as the then-recent Amnesty report did, is in fact antisemitism.
Dr. Lee even went through a breakout room exercise where students could take real world examples of "anti-Israel" slanders and identify whether and why they were antisemitic.
No wonder the hard Left on campus was upset about this!
This video is nearly two hours long, but it includes not only excellent presentations by Goldfeder and Lewin, but also a video by the later Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explaining why anti-Zionism is often antisemitism.
I don't know how many people attended this, but it is astonishing that this was shown on any campus today.
There are many other videos of different events celebrating Jewishness, moderated by Dr. Lee, that interview Jews who are unabashedly woke but also often unabashedly Zionist. One example: This one interviews Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, a Black Jewish social worker who disagrees with critical social justice and intersectionality theory, and features rap videos by her quite proudly Jewish son "Westside Gravy."
I am fairly certain that De Anza will not have another Jewish Heritage Month.
Tabia Lee appears to be a principled warrior against all kinds of racism and bigotry, and as such she couldn't survive on that campus. I hope that there might be a larger university that actually cares about real equality and anti-racism that hires her and gives her the resources she needs to lead the students, not be led by the extremists.
