Black diversity director who was fired had created an incredible Jewish Heritage Month for her college

Tabia Lee was the Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, CA, and was recently fired from that position because she didn't adhere to the standard DEI orthodoxy. She describes her experiences in Compact:

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. 

Her dismissal is a huge loss for the De Anza community.  I hope some other campus can gain her expertise.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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10/25 Links Pt2: The New Progressivism Makes No Room for Jews; How did a radical Islamist fool the West?; Adidas drops Kanye West

From Ian:

The New Progressivism Makes No Room for Jews

In 2016, as “intersectionality” escaped from academia to become a progressive buzzword—and came to to signify a doctrine that all just causes are linked and complementary—David L. Bernstein began to suspect that it was apt to be used against the Jews. As he pointed out in an article published that year, activists argued under the banner of intersectionality that anyone opposed to racism in the U.S. should also oppose the existence of Israel. He thought, however, that there was hope:
While I didn’t say so explicitly, I’d come to believe that the mainstream Jewish community needed to find a way to include the Jewish narrative in the intersectional matrix—to complicate it—so that Jews and Israel were not viewed as the perennial oppressors and Palestinians the perennial victims. Concerned about the growing backlash to my article, I used the opportunity [to participate in a panel discussion with some of my critics] to soften my stance on the topic, stating “I still have much to learn,” and that “intersectionality is a complex, interesting, and nuanced phenomenon that we need to understand, not just from the perspective of the pro-Israel community, but from its own perspective as well.”

Bernstein, at the time still president of the left-leaning Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), soon learned that there was little room for such a compromise position:
[In 2020], the JCPA pulled together a Zoom meeting for a coalition called Jews for Criminal Justice Reform, which included top Jewish criminal-justice activists from around the country. After an inspiring talk by Paul Fishman—a former federal attorney from New Jersey—on the need to end mass incarceration, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss next steps. A lawyer named Jared, the group facilitator for my breakout session, asked, “What do you all think our criminal-justice reform priorities ought to be?” Ariella, a young professional staffer from a Jewish civil-rights organization, interjected, “Before we talk about strategy, there’s a lot of internal work we have to do in the Jewish community. We need to recognize our complicity in white supremacy and ensure we have black Jews at the forefront of these efforts.”

More and more, that’s how it is now: a young staff person holding the work process hostage until we recite some prescribed litany of woke pieties. What, pray tell, did Ariella think all this self-reflection would do to help black people get out of being jailed for low-level drug charges? I suspect she didn’t have a clue. And as things turned out, our breakout session never discussed a single criminal-justice reform measure.

In short, Bernstein discovered that there is no room in this brand of progressive ideology to see Jews as anything but oppressors, and for Jews to do anything but proclaim their own imagined sins. This discovery is the subject of his newly published book, Woke Antisemitism.

How did a radical Islamist fool the West? - analysis

Many articles written about Qaradawi after his death emphasized his condemnation of al-Qaeda and ISIS and his moderate rulings permitting certain Western conduct for Muslims living as minorities in Western countries.

These articles portrayed him as many Westerners wanted to see him: a widely accepted authentic Islamic scholar who wanted to dialogue with the West and rejected violence.

However, the intelligence center noted that many of these articles left out that he helped shape “the concept of violent jihad,” especially justifying “carrying out terror attacks, including suicide bombing attacks, against Israeli citizens, the US forces in Iraq, and some of the Arab regimes.”

Qaradawi supported violent jihad and suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. He was a source of supreme religious authority for Hamas at a time when many Islamic scholars still prohibited suicide of any kind.

Qaradawi claimed that violence was a legitimate expression of the so-called “resistance” and that Israel was a militaristic society in which every civilian is a potential soldier, said the report.

His antisemitism was not limited to Israel, with the report saying he frequently expressed antisemitic statements worldwide and even issued a fatwa authorizing attacks on Jews around the world.

In that fatwa, “he claimed that there is no essential difference between Judaism and Zionism, and therefore every Jewish target equals an Israeli target,” according to the report.

‘The Squad’ urges Biden administration to negotiate ceasefire in Ukraine

30 Democratic US Congressmembers – most notably the young progressives who have become colloquially known as “The Squad” – penned a letter to President Joe Biden’s administration on Monday in which they ask the administration to avoid direct military conflict and attempt to bring Russia and Ukraine to a ceasefire.

“Given the catastrophic possibilities of nuclear escalation and miscalculation, which only increase the longer this war continues, we agree with your goal of avoiding direct military conflict as an overriding national-security priority,” the letter read. A call for diplomacy

The congress members noted the difficulties involved in a settlement, particularly with the issue of annexed territories in the east of Ukraine, though they also mentioned Biden’s commitment to end the war. While no concrete plan of action was presented in the letter, the congress members suggested that easing sanctions against Russia would be a natural step to take.

“Such a framework would presumably include incentives to end hostilities, including some form of sanctions relief, and bring together the international community to establish security guarantees for a free and independent Ukraine that are acceptable for all parties, particularly Ukrainians.”

“The alternative to diplomacy is a protracted war, with both its attendant certainties and catastrophic and unknowable risks,” the letter continues.

The signers of the letter also pointed to the food and commodity crises brought upon by the war as reasons to seek an end to the war. “Economists believe that if the situation in Ukraine is stabilized, some of the speculative concerns driving higher fuel costs will subside and likely lead to a drop in world oil prices.”

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Some recent EoZ memes

Things I tweeted over the past couple of months that were not posted here (to my recollection.)

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Recent EoZ memes

Way before Princess Leia, other royals adopted the famous hairdo

In response to yet another idiot claiming the British Mandate coin proves "Palestine"

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Elder Comix: Abortion meets intersectionality

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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The purpose of the yellow star in Nazi Germany was EXACTLY the same as that of BDS today

In 1960, Life magazine published small excerpts of transcripts of tapes from a fellow Nazi interviewing Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in the 1950s.

This excerpt explains the similarities between Nazis in the 1930s and the fanatic Israel haters today.

We did not devise the yellow star to put pressure on the Jews themselves. On the contrary, its purpose was to control the natural tendency of our German people to come to the aid of someone in trouble. The marking was intended to hinder any such assistance to Jews who were being harassed. We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed,  to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. So our administration was quite happy to distribute these bolts of yellow cloth and to regulate the time limit by which the stars would have to be worn.   

The yellow star was not to punish the Jews, but to make it difficult for non-Jews to express sympathy with them. 

Today, the people who advocate boycotts of Israel aren't primarily trying to hurt Israel. They are trying to make it difficult for other people to be pro-Israel.

Those who accuse Israel of "apartheid" or "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" aren't trying to get Israel to treat Palestinians better. They are trying to make tar anyone who supports Israel's right to exist as supporting war crimes themselves.

"We wanted Germans to feel embarrassed,  to feel afraid of having any contact with Jews. " Is there any better description of the purpose of BDS and anti-Zionism? Just look at how celebrities who visit Israel are treated by the "woke" crowd. 

It is exactly the same.

Only exceptional people could stand up to the social pressure to ostracize Jews in Germany. And only exceptional people can stand up for Israel in Leftist circles. The weaker ones in both cases cower, and then it is but a small step to claim that their cowardice is really a moral, righteous position.

The yellow star was not meant to hurt Jews. It represents the original cancel culture.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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