Tuesday, December 19, 2023
From Ian:
Natan Sharansky: Our False Partners
Natan Sharansky: Our False Partners
In the early decades of the 20th century, a number of social democrats who were committed to liberal values thought that Soviet communism shared their basic goals. Some believed this so fervently that, when they traveled in the USSR during the darkest moments of Stalin’s terror, they came back full of glowing reports. They were so desperate to believe in the communist utopia that they failed to see its millions of victims.Jewish Voices for Hate
Today, the ideological blinders of many progressives make them as insensible to Hamas’ atrocities as those naive liberals were to Stalin’s.
It is time for liberal Jews to accept that neo-Marxist social movements only appear to be our allies. They speak of equality but perpetuate discrimination. They speak of freedom but seek to subjugate the “privileged.” They speak of justice but will use any means necessary to promote their warped ends.
Some people believe that as we fight against antisemitism, our goal should be to prove to progressives that Jews belong in the ranks of the oppressed, that not all of us are white and privileged. But why should we accept the premises of a corrupt and corrupting ideology that stands against the most basic liberal values?
We need not push ourselves into organizations whose ideology denies our equal rights and moral worth. And we must not abandon our Zionism or deny our identity in order to fight for a better future, because this so-called better future will then be rotten from the core.
Instead, we should carry on our own traditions with pride. Jews have a noble history of fighting against racism and injustice. In continuing to do so, without compromising who we are, we will find our true allies.
Now more than ever, Jews must both embrace our unique mission and reaffirm core liberal values. Without the former, we have lost our compass, our reason to carry on as a people. Without the latter, no one—not only Jews, but all individuals and minority groups—will be safe from the destructive effects of totalizing ideologies and the wishful thinkers who support them.
However, the rabbis and Jewish organizations who at best stood silent and at worst gave a platform for people calling for the destruction of Israel also bear partial responsibility for today’s explosion of vile antisemitism. The same holds true for Jewish institutions that refused to recognize anti-Zionism as antisemitism.How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism
Numerous Jewish organizations partnered with groups such as Black Lives Matter, which from its earliest days perpetuated the falsehood that Israel is an apartheid state. Others, like J Street, consistently hosted anti-Zionist speakers who advocated for boycotting Israel; last week, the organization “demanded” that Israel change its conduct in the war against Hamas.
If all Jewish organizations, rabbis, and community leaders had taken a stronger stand against the delegitimization of Israel—by condemning groups like JVP, IfNotNow, Bend the Arc, and other organizations that claim to be “Jewish” yet ignore history and promote anti-Israel vitriol—then perhaps such lies and disinformation would not have spread among some in our community, let alone in our country.
Today, the chickens have come home to roost. Young people are aligning with Hamas, and even Jewish students are comparing Hamas’ murderous attacks to the Jewish freedom fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Holocaust survivors, whose tormentors I helped to track down, have tragically lived to see young people, including their own descendants, tweeting—from the safety of some coffee shop in Brooklyn—Hamas propaganda against Israel. These young people didn’t simply absorb these dangerous ideas from the ether. In addition to hearing it at their universities and in the general interest media, some heard it in their synagogues and in their Jewish community centers and from Jewish organizations—so eager to appear fashionable and progressive that they legitimized people calling for their own destruction.
To reverse the growing movement to destroy the one and only Jewish state, the rabbis and Jewish leaders who allowed BDS and anti-Israelism into the “Jewish tent” must take responsibility for this misjudgment, and change course—with conviction and principle. We could not afford to make this mistake last time. We certainly cannot afford to do it again.
Ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protests have swept U.S. colleges, leading to charges of Jew-hatred and a disastrous congressional hearing where three college presidents failed to offer a clear moral condemnation of rising antisemitism.
But the ideology fueling these demonstrations isn’t limited to the college campus. It now begins in public high schools and even elementary schools as early as pre-K, according to more than 30 public school teachers, administrators, and parents across four states who spoke to The Free Press.
American youths aren’t just encountering the views on TikTok; they’re learning them from teachers and, in some cases, from the mandatory public school curriculum itself. Take California, where a 10th grade history course, approved by the Santa Ana Unified School District, includes readings that call Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and accuses the country of “ethnic cleansing.” Or the Jefferson Union High School District near San Francisco, which teaches about the “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.”
The root of these lessons stems from California’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC), which passed in 2021 and mandates lessons on the marginalization of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples, emphasizing how they are oppressed by a white oppressor, says Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and community engagement for the Jewish Institute of Liberal Values.
“It’s a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools,” Shufutinsky said.
Meanwhile, more than one million secondary school students in all 50 states are learning about history and the Middle East from the Brown University Choices Program, which openly accepts funding from Qatar, the wealthy Arab state now harboring leaders of Hamas. A strong pro-Palestinian bias shines through in Brown’s teaching materials. Israel, according to multiple lessons, is a “Zionist enterprise in Palestine,” an “apartheid state,” a “settler colony,” and “a military occupier.”
These ideas have profound consequences. A Harvard Harris poll from this month found that 67 percent of people aged 18 to 24 believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors,” compared to 44 percent of people aged 25 to 34; 24 percent of those aged 45 to 54; 15 percent of those 55 to 64; and 9 percent over 65 years who say the same.
In the New York City public school system, which educates more than one million students, the indoctrination began as far back as 2018, when it was codified in a new curriculum called the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework (CRSE), sources said. The CRSE seeks to mold students into citizens who “have a critical lens through which they challenge inequitable systems of access, power, and privilege.”
While New York City’s CRSE does not explicitly refer to Jews or antisemitism, its teachings have led to a belief that “Jews have to be categorized as white and oppressors,” said Shufutinsky.
According to the oppressor vs. oppressed narrative, “the only reason Jews as a minority could be overrepresented in positions of prestige is because they must have oppressed somebody,” Shufutinsky said. “And if you accept that people who’ve achieved success only got it through ill gain, then of course, it’s going to fuel Jew-hatred.”
That hatred was on full display in the hallways of Hillcrest High School in Queens on the morning of November 20.
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