The New Antisemitic Curriculum in America’s Public Schools

The hijacking of the American school system has begun, with Jews as the first target.

illustration by Future of Jewish

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There is a great deal of attention being focused on college-level antisemitic movements.

In fact, the more attention the media and others eagerly lend to groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, the more widespread the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatreds become.

Yet, what is perhaps just as important — but drastically less well-known — is the prevalence of these same sentiments and sympathies in U.S. public schools at the K-12 levels. Despite the incomparable reporting from a small number of journalists, disturbingly (and problematically), very little is known about, or even acknowledged, regarding the profound levels of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and antisemitic “teaching” of the West’s younger students.

I, and fellow members of my community on Long Island, have similarly been shocked to realize what has been unfolding in our schools, in many instances for years. We were slow, detrimentally slow, to be alerted to the manifold ways in which these insidious lessons were being injected into our local schools. It was only after a combination of the events beginning on October 8, 2023 and the increased boldness of those antagonistic to Israel and Jews generally that we began to ask the questions and make the other inquiries that we should have, in hindsight, been undertaking for years.

It is my most sincere and unfortunately now-experienced belief that Jews across the West must be much more vigilant about these events in our schools and how they are surreptitiously brainwashing our youth to breathe new life into millennia’s old bigotry. Only by taking action and doing so in concert can we hope to put an end to this latest incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.

For the better part of the last half century, our community in Long Island has been fortunate to have a substantial Jewish presence. Unfortunately, for a multitude of reasons (some innocent and others not), the numbers of Jews, and certainly the corresponding community voice, has appreciably dissipated.

Furthermore, even if the actual decline in numbers of those who identify in some way as Jewish has not been as acute as we fear, the connectedness of the community has nonetheless suffered with fewer Jews affiliating in any meaningful manner with our heritage.

At the same time as our numbers and influence have been waning, other demographic groups have greatly increased their presence in our community, perhaps in large part due to the strong school systems that Jews helped develop and support. And some of these other groups have worked in concert and with dogged purpose.

As a result that, upon reflection, seems impossible to have overlooked, teachers, administrators and school board members have responded to these other groups and their agendas with seemingly no regard for the impact on the Constitutionally-enshrined secularism of our public schools.

The first outward manifestation of anti-Israel sentiment in our own elementary, middle, and high schools did not reveal itself until the commencement of the 2024-2025 academic year. As has been customary at one of our district’s two high schools, certain senior student leaders are allowed the privilege of painting their parking spots to reflect their interests, identities and so forth.

One such senior student painted, among other images, a watermelon with a keffiyeh pattern and her name in Arabic. The student, who is the sister of a well-known leader of anti-Israel activity at a college in New York City and who is thinly disguised in court documents as “Jane Khan” (yes, of course, there is a lawsuit involved), is of Pakistani descent but seemingly has, as is so very often the case, adopted the Israeli-Arab conflict as a large portion of her raison d’etre.

Given the significant number of Jewish students who also attend the high school and would be forced to bear witness to Khan’s expression of her sentiments about the Jewish homeland, the school administrators decided to cover up the watermelon. Predictably, at the next school Board of Education meeting, numerous members of the community — from both sides of the controversy — expressed their deep-seated concerns about the entire episode.

As was also foreseeable to seemingly everyone other than school officials, who failed to provide any additional security, the atmosphere turned quite emotional, and members of the Jewish community were verbally assaulted and threatened in the parking lot after the meeting with degrading and vulgar obscenities including shouts of “whore” and “you should have died in the Holocaust.” Some of the accosters mocked the Jewish community members while filming the assault on their phones, presumably to share with their antisemitic friends and followers far and wide.

After the traumatizing event, members of the Jewish community were aghast at what had transpired. Although it is generally believed (or maybe just hoped) that the most aggressive assailants were agitators from outside our community, those accosted chose not to involve the local police. It was felt by many within our ranks that the best course of action was to not further the public discord that had been unleashed.

In hindsight, it is possible that such restraint may have been a mistake on our part. As we have of course seen countless times in the months since October 7th, and indeed for the last two millennia, our passiveness has often been interpreted as an unwillingness to take action or even our weakness. Nonetheless, at the time, a more restrained initial course of action seemed appropriate.

At the same time, the Jewish community was certainly not merely wishing the gathering clouds would simply blow over. With help from fellow Jews in a nearby school district that had unfortunately had similar highly-troubling issues, leaders of our community set about to organize the concerned members of the Jewish community.

As part of those efforts, meetings were held with the long-serving superintendent of schools. Despite whatever reassurances that the superintendent proffered, it became apparent that they would be of no value as he abruptly and mysteriously resigned soon thereafter with substantial time remaining on his significant contract.

A short time later, the now-former superintendent accepted a lesser position at a smaller school district for a salary that was approximately half of what our district had been paying him. Despite the fact that no one has publicly stated why the superintendent so suddenly resigned, there is a widely held belief that he had been receiving various threats, including death, from certain quarters. (Hint: It probably was not from the Jews.)

In the wake of these developments, the Jewish community became even further alarmed at the state of affairs in our schools. At a subsequent meeting of our newly coalesced organization of concerned Jewish community members, a number of other disturbing revelations were brought to light.

Among the first of these was the report that high schools in the district had “prayer rooms” or what may have officially been diplomatically termed “non-denominational meditation spaces.” Seemingly not a single Jewish parent in the community — nor any members of any religion outside of Islam — had any knowledge of the existence of these “spaces.

Whether the existence of these prayer spaces raises legal or constitutional issues may well be a moot point. Nonetheless, the fact that the practice of religion (and communication of a place to do so) was only shared with members of one faith was naturally highly troubling.

At this stage, we had no grasp on whether the various events we were uncovering were part of a concerted effort to de-secularize our public schools or merely ad hoc accommodations being offered to certain groups possibly consistent with existing legal requirements.

At approximately the same time as we learned of the “meditation spaces,” the Jewish community uncovered the existence of a “pilot program” to provide Halal meals at one of the district’s elementary schools. As with the prayer spaces, no one in the broader community was alerted to this practice. There are no similar programs for members of any other group, religious or otherwise. There is no Kosher food program. Nor is there a robust vegetarian meal program that would appeal to many students across backgrounds, religious and otherwise.

At first we were told that the Halal program was funded by members of the Muslim community. Later we learned that was not the case; it was paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Although neither the prayer/meditation spaces nor the provision of Halal meals may raise legal concerns, the discovery of these actions was soon overshadowed by the events of a faculty training program. It remains unclear as to whom requested this “anti-bias” training, but despite previous, well-received trainings from recognized experts including the Anti-Defamation League, a previously little-known group, the Asian American Institute for Research and Engagement, was brought in.

The Asian American Institute for Research and Engagement has allegedly had ties to, and clearly uses “resources” from, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group with numerous leaders who, according to the Anti-Defamation League, have engaged in such behaviors as meetings with the Muslim Brotherhood and eulogized an individual, Majid al-Zindani, designated by both the United States and the United Nations as a fundraiser and recruiter for Al-Qaeda, and who the New York Times described a “one-time mentor of Osama bin Laden.”

Another high-ranking Council on American-Islamic Relations official, Zahra Billoo, has declared that “Zionists” are “your enemies.” Billoo warned followers to “pay attention” to “Zionist synagogues,” Hillels, and Jewish Federations, and Council on American-Islamic Relations’ national organization released a statement in support of these heinous comments.

Prior to the actual presentation to our school staff, a number of educators had raised concerns about the presentation and the organization’s competency to provide anti-bias training. Ultimately, the presentation went ahead notwithstanding these concerns. In fact, one Jewish teacher who expressed objections to the presentation materials was ordered to get out by a high-ranking district official. A second Jewish teacher left the training in tears.

Raising the concerns with the teachers union representative produced no helpful suggestions much less resolution. Instead, the union representative told this teacher he could not stop the presentation because he feared it would be plastered all over the news about aggressions toward Muslims.

With respect to the “substance” of the presentation, it was unsurprisingly one-sided: Labeled the “Asian American diaspora,” the presentation was largely (nearly exclusively) focused on Muslims. Very little mention of East Asians of other religions, for example, nor of course any discussion of Israelis or Jews from other Asian countries, was included within the presentation.

To the contrary, as one teacher later documented in her notes about the experience, “It felt like it was an entire presentation devoted to discussing how October 7th affected Muslim students … with not one word or regard for Jewish students or staff. I will never forget the slides, in huge letters … October 7th with arrows pointing away from those words, about how it impacted Muslim students, how they felt, what they experienced. I got the distinct feeling from this meeting that the suffering of the Jewish people did not matter at all. … That the effects of October 7th on [our] Jewish community were trivial enough to be ignored completely.”

In response, over 100 teachers submitted a letter expressing their dissatisfaction with the training, highlighting the growing concern among educators about the direction of the curriculum. To date, seven months later, there has been no official response from administrators or board members.

Now in a state of heightened alert, parents began to much more diligently review the materials being distributed to their children by teachers and inquire about lessons taught in the classrooms. It did not take long before we discovered the use of a book, as mandatory supplementary reading for an honors high school social studies course, that, among other issues, stated, in the author’s own words that the book “is neither a textbook nor a scholarly thesis. … Although I am not a scholar … [m]y aim is mainly to convey what Muslims think happened.”

A book that offers what one think happens is hard to classify into any known genre. Fiction? Historical fiction? Fantasy? Worse still, the book falsely promotes a classic libel against the Jewish people that the Jews of Arabia conspired to kill Mohammad. Just like we have been falsely accused for centuries of killing Jesus, some in the Muslim world apparently would like to think that the Jews tried to kill the founder of their religion as well.

Contemporaneously with these discoveries, we began to hear disturbing accounts from parents (and teachers) at our elementary schools. In the pre-kindergarten program, parents of Muslim students were allowed to come in and teach about certain Muslim observances. No Jewish, Christian, or other religions were afforded the same opportunity.

Candidly, as Jews, we did not wish to engage in that behavior, since we fully respect the separation of church and state. But merely cherry-picking which religions would be taught to children clearly flies in the face of that long-cherished and long-established constitutional norm. In addition, and even more egregious, were the repeated directives issued from certain administrators mandating the teaching of select “Asian” faiths, including Islam. When teachers balked, they were instructed to teach these matters nonetheless.

As we near the end of the academic year, it should come as no surprise that in global history courses at the high school level we are approaching the events of the 20th and 21st centuries. Of course, that translates into discussion about the creation of the State of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Fortunately, given all of the unfortunate developments discussed above, parents and students have become quite vigilant as to the materials being used. Thus, when a teacher distributed handouts (some of which were literally pulled off of Wikipedia, which besides for being unreliable from an academic standpoint has been roundly criticized for its treatment of Israel) that, among other biased positions included a map entitled “Palestine: West Bank & Gaza,” labeled Israelis living in Judea and Samaria as “settlers” and stated “[the Jews] made their homes in the West Bank and Gaza whether the Palestinians wanted them or not.”

Outraged, members of the Jewish community sent a barrage of emails to all members of the board and the superintendents. Although discussion of the district’s responses to our concerns will be fully addressed in part two of this series, I can leave off with the reply that members of the community received from the superintendent and the head of the social studies department: “The page you shared is from a packet … outlining tensions and conflict between Israel and Palestine.”

Little did we know the worst was yet to come.

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