California's New Law: ADL Genocide Deniers to Train Teachers on Genocide
California's New Law: ADL Genocide Deniers to Train Teachers on Genocide
Marcy Winograd
Not long after Wikipedia’s volunteer editors rejected the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a credible source on Israel/Palestine and antisemitism, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1277 into law to empower the ADL and their allies to actively suppress discussion of Palestinians as victims of genocide and occupation.
The law–promoted by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus–establishes the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education as the provider of middle and high school teacher professional development on genocide studies for school districts, charter schools and county offices of education throughout California. Established in 2021, the Collaborative intends to train 8,500 teachers and educate over one million California students by 2029.
The text of SB 1277 (D-Stern-Calabasas) speaks in generalities about the Collaborative while failing to reveal its composition of 14 organizations, over half of which are supporters of Israel, including the powerful Anti-Defamation League that often works under the name of one of its co-constructed thematic units: Echoes & Reflections.
ADL’s agenda
The ADL agenda, however, is clear–deny Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accuse those who argue otherwise of siding with terrorists. On October 25, 2023, the ADL sent a threatening letter to nearly 200 college presidents pressing for an investigation of the non-violent Students for Justice in Palestine for “potential violations of the prohibition against materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”
In short, a US lobby group with a liaison office in Israel that claims to be a credible provider of education about genocide leveled an accusation without foundation against a student organization for leading nationwide protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In a further attempt to silence and punish support for Palestinian human rights, the ADL filed a slew of complaints against schools and universities across the country, including a lawsuit against California’s Santa Ana School District, the effect of which was to shut down criticism of Israel and block the inclusion of Palestine in high school ethnic studies curriculum.
"The ADL's politicized attacks on schools should be enough to disqualify it as a member of any educational body," said Nora Lester Murad, a member of the organizing team of the new campaign to Drop the ADL from Schools. "The ADL inflicts reputational and mental health damage when it falsely accuses teachers of antisemitism for including Palestinians in their work," Murad said. "They also use right-wing lawfare tactics when they submit Title VI complaints accusing schools of enabling a hostile environment for Jewish students by allowing criticism of Israel. Schools are a place where open discussion of ideas, including diverse and critical views, must be protected."
According to CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), over 60 Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and allied organizations have denounced the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its “pattern of enabling anti-Palestinian hate.” The organizations called for the firing of ADL executive Jonathan Greenblatt after he compared the Palestinian keffiyeh scarf to a Nazi swastika during an appearance on MSNBC.
Despite widespread criticism, as well as Wikipedia’s accusation that the ADL“has repeatedly published false and misleading statements,” Newsom quietly codified SB 1277 on a Saturday while kids played soccer, parents cheered from stands and few knew anything about the Collaborative that would train their children’s teachers.
Who’s in & who’s out
In addition to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Collaborative includes other pro-Israel/anti-Palestinian Holocaust-focused organizations, including: The Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) Holocaust Center; Avenues for Change: Holocaust and Genocide Education; Central Valley Holocaust Educators Network (CVHEN); Holocaust Museum LA; Museum of Tolerance; ISC Shoah Foundation for Visual History and Education.
A deeper dive reveals the following examples of how they leverage their reputations as Holocaust experts to promote Israel and shield it from criticism:
The JFCS partners with the ADL to encourage college students to report chants of “From the river to the sea” as antisemitic incidents to be logged into the ADL’s database for reports shared with press, law enforcement and Capitol Hill.
The Holocaust Museum LA recently featured an event on “How to Speak about Israel to Children of All Ages,” which emphasized “finding nuanced and sophisticated ways to connect and learn about Israel.”
The Museum of Tolerance is the educational arm of the Simon Wiesenthal Center that promotes Israel as “the Middle East’s only democracy” despite Israel subjecting 5-million Palestinians to occupation in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza; the Museum of Tolerance includes an edifice built atop a centuries-old Muslim burial site in downtown Jerusalem.
Central Valley Holocaust Educators Network (CVHEN) partners with the Mosaic Law Congregation whose website reads, “WE STAND WITH ISRAEL.”
Even though the Collaborative centers its lessons on the Holocaust, it also includes lessons on the Armenian, Bosnian, Cambodian, Guatemalan, Indigenous American, Rwandan, and other genocides. Note, the ADL only started acknowledging the Armenian genocide in 2016 after a multi-year campaign by Armenians who exposed the ADL’s genocide denialism as a function of Israel’s close relationship with Turkey, which has long denied it committed genocide against the Armenians.
“The Collaborative wants it to seem they’re unbiased, but when it it comes to Israel-Palestine what they are teaching is that the Holocaust justifies the horrors, the genocide, the apartheid that we are seeing from the State of Israel,” said Seth Morrison, board member of JVP-Action, a sister organization to Jewish Voice for Peace. In fact, Holocaust and Jewish Studies scholars critical of Israel have long decried the politicization of the Holocaust and Jewish victimhood.
While Collaborative member Redbud Resources Group offers lessons on the settler-colonial annihilation of Native Americans, none of the Collaborative’s members discuss the claim that Israel is a settler colonial project. Facing History and Ourselves, a genocide education organization participating in the Collaborative, claims to “use lessons of the past to help us create a better future,” but like the other members has completely ignored the findings of the International Court of Justice and human rights experts that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.
Jewish anti-Zionist organizations are conveniently not included in the Collaborative that, according to the new law, is to include “leading genocide and Holocaust education organizations and institutions …genocide survivors, educators and community leaders.”
Left out, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, JVP-Action, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC) have organized under the umbrella of the California Palestine Solidarity Network to challenge the biased nature of the Collaborative and other legislation introduced by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus to propagandize for the State of Israel. “The Coalition focuses on ensuring that legislation relating to Palestine, and critical issues affecting anti semitism and the Palestinian and Arab communities is “fair, balanced, and constitutional,” reads the solidarity network’s press release following Newsom’s signing of SB-1277 and other legislation to suppress voices for Palestinian rights.
A genocide collaborative ignores the current genocide
Still, one might applaud the new legislation in light of antisemitism on the ascendant Right, as evidenced by the 2018 assassinations of 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, the 2017 night-time “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville when torch-carrying white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and the vile antisemitic tropes that continue to vilify Jews as devils or bankers.
Chilling, indeed.
The problem, however, is that the Collaborative’s conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism eclipses concerns over real antisemitism while chilling speech on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine.
Although SB 1277 amends the California Education Code to adopt the UN Convention definition of genocide – the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group– the Collaborative ironically ignores the fact that the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest UN judicial body, sided with South Africa in a preliminary ruling on 1/26/24 to conclude Israel committed a plausible case of genocide in Gaza, thus breaching Israel’s obligations as a ratifier of the Genocide Convention.
None of the Collaborative’s lesson plans–such as this one on “contemporary antisemitism”–make mention of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza that has left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed or wounded, leveled every university in the crime of “scholasticide,” bombed hospitals and refugee centers to rubble and traumatized a generation of orphaned children, many of them now amputees. The curriculum also fails to note US complicity for greenlighting attack jets, 2,000 pound bunker buster bombs and ammunition as Israel blocks water, food and medicine to 2.3 million starving Gazans.
Lessons lack rigor
If the Collaborative were committed to inquiry, a guiding principle of the C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards, it would develop rigorous lesson plans requiring students to develop “deep and enduring understandings, concepts, and skills” emphasizing “skills and practices as preparation for democratic decision-making.” Perhaps students would engage with primary sources from diverse historical examples or host debates or write persuasive essays on whether the current slaughter in Gaza meets the criteria set forth in the UN Genocide Convention. Such lessons would send students back to multiple sources, including the ICJ preliminary ruling and testimony from claimant South Africa and defendant Israel for evidence to support arguments and address counter-arguments.
Instead, the ADL’s unit “Echoes & Reflections” developed in conjunction with the USC Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem, “the World Holocaust Remembrance Center,” adopts discredited examples of antisemitism to mischaracterize Israel’s critics and shut down learning. Hotly contested examples are those developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental governmental organization with 35 member countries formed in 1998 to “combat growing Holocaust distortion and antisemitism ….”
In distributing the IHRA’s hand-out, “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism,” the Collaborative stresses not only the IHRA definition” “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” but also false “examples” of antisemitism such as “targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” and denying “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.” Such agenda-driven examples wrongfully suggest criticism of an ethno-state reflects an antisemitic bias.
The Collaborative’s Echoes & Reflections unit also includes a hand-out attacking the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched by Palestinian civil society against corporations and institutions complicit in Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The hand-out acknowledges that Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return to their former homes in Israel, but justifies this violation of international law by saying that Palestinian rights would end Israel as a Jewish ethno-state.
In the Echoes & Reflections lesson on contemporary antisemitism, the Jewish Family and Children's Services Holocaust Center instructs teachers to share a slideshow equating student protests against Israel’s occupation and genocide with hatred of Jews. Slide #6 features a photo of activists holding a poster that reads, “I do not NOT recognize Israel”and identifies markers of antisemitism as anti-Israel bias involving “Demonization” which they explain as “... when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion–“Double Standards” – “when criticism of Israel is applied selectively and in a grossly unfair manner” and “Delegitimization”-- “...when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied.”
Consequently, the Collaborative trains teachers to censor criticism of Israel as a Jewish state, even though the creation of Israel rests on a myth, “Israel is a land without a people for a people without a land.” This myth negates the existence of over a million Palestinians who lived in Israel in 1948 when Zionist militias destroyed 500 Palestinian villages and expelled 750,000 Palestinians to make way for the State of Israel as an ethno-state for Jews.
The new California law, according to SB 1277, is to serve as a model for “setting a national standard for Holocaust and genocide education that other states can follow.”
Organizers in Massachusetts identify a similar pattern: Israel-aligned advocacy groups lobbied for a statewide commission on antisemitism and got themselves appointed to it, according to organizer Sana Fadel, a member of Sawa: Newton Alliance for Peace and Justice. Fadel served on the steering committee representing 60 organizations that opposed the back-door establishment of the commission. "Our groups firmly believe that antisemitism must be tackled within a framework of liberation and antiracism," Fadel said. "But this constellation of groups, including the ADL, Jewish Community Relations Council, American Jewish Committee, the Israeli-American Council and others, considers expressions of Palestinian history, rights and firsthand experiences as antisemitic. Their goal of censoring education and stifling political debate is to suppress the critical exploration of these issues upholding a one-sided narrative."
ADL lesson plans target anti-Israel protesters
In empowering the Anti-Defamation League to distribute lesson plans to California’s three million secondary teachers in public schools, the state has ceded authority to an organization with no public accountability and a free reign to impugn the reputation of human rights activists.
Click on a lesson on how to talk about the “Israel-Hamas conflict” and up pops the ADL’s “Stay Informed Page,” which paints anti-genocide protesters as antisemitic. Additionally, the page links to an ADL college campus report card that awards higher grades to colleges that have passed student senate resolutions against boycotts of Israel and where administrators work collaboratively with Hillel, a controversial campus organization that recruits students for free “Birthright Israel” propaganda trips in which Jews 18-32 years old are invited to visit Israel even as Israel denies expelled Palestinians and their descendants the right to return to their homeland.
Lack of transparency in state legislation
In reference to the new law, Rick Chertoff, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace in Los Angeles says, “This is McCarthyism and it’s being accomplished by ramming through stealth legislation that empowers an unelected outside group hand-picked by Zionists to police what is and is not acceptable to teach or discuss in classrooms.”
Chertoff has a point.
The text of SB1277 fails to state who appoints or removes member organizations from the Collaborative or how long the members participate or who hires the staff to oversee curriculum development or whether the Collaborative is subject to the Brown Act’s open meeting law and the California Public Records Act. In reading the legislation’s three pages, it’s difficult to imagine lawmakers considered themselves public servants when they voted for a bill that outsources genocide education to a collaborative whose governance structure is shrouded in secrecy, assuming there is a governance structure and not just the invisible hand of the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education.
Established in 2021, the Council’s mission was to provide students with resources about The Holocaust and “tools necessary to recognize and respond to on-campus instances of anti-Semitism and bigotry,” according to the Governor’s office. In case there was any doubt about the council’s political agenda, the following year Newsom appointed Seth Brysk, the S.F.-based regional director for the Anti-Defamation League, to join Senator Scott Weiner (D-SF), co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, on the council. This council is co-chaired by Senator Henry Stern, the author of SB 1277, Attorney General Rob Bonta, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and Executive Director of JFCS Anita Friedman. The state legislature granted the Council $1.4 million in the 2022-2023 state budget.
Next steps
Kathleen Hernandez is a member of the Human Rights Committee of the 35,000 strong United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), the second largest teachers union behind New York City’s United Federation of Teachers. As a Palestinian rights activist, Hernandez has called on California teachers to demand school districts and county offices of education refrain from contracting with the Collaborative until it clarifies its governance structure, expels the ADL and aligned partners and includes organizations, leaders and scholars on Palestine.
“Educating students on holocaust and genocide studies is a worthy and commendable pursuit,” said Hernandez, “but one that should be approached with an anti-colonial, anti-racist lens, not with the intent to insulate Israel from criticism or prosecution in the court of public opinion.”
Since the law does not state that school districts are required to contract with the Collaborative and the state’s appropriation of $5 million from the upcoming budget is not enough to train California’sl 130,000 secondary teachers on genocide education, Hernandez believes districts can dissent.
“My reading of this law suggests schools are free to steer clear of professional development contracts with this politically-driven collaborative,” said Hernandez, a retired elementary school teacher and legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild. “If a school or district does, however, contract with the Collaborative, teachers might ask, “Why is the Anti-Defamation League training us to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism while the World Court prosecutes Israel for genocide? What is going on here?”
Alternative resources
Teachers searching for other curriculum and professional development options can turn to PARCEO’S Project 48 Nakba curriculum that centers Palestinian voices in themed modules on settler colonialism, refugees rights, Zionism and resistance.
After educators at five San Francisco area high schools were ordered this fall to take virtual training from the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee, PARCEO offered an alternative workshop for teachers who objected to what some described as AJC’s “smear of peace activists.” AROC’s newsletter reads,“This offensive and racist professional development was met with massive community outrage.”
Donna Nevel, co-director of PARCEO, said, “PARCEO’S program on antisemitism was developed from a framework of collective liberation, adding the curriculum clarifies what antisemitism is and is not and “how false charges of antisemitism have been used to serve an anti-liberatory agenda.”
Another alternative is this bank of resources assembled by the Drop the ADL campaign, which has published an open letter to educators suggesting that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is not the a social justice partner it claims to be.
Other educator resources include CAIR’s “Guidance for K-12 Administrators on the One Year Mark of October 7th,” the Zinn Education Project’s, “Teaching About Palestine-Israel and the Unfolding Genocide in Gaza, CODEPINK’s narratives of Palestinians living under occupation and recommended films and videos, as well as the “Teach Palestine” project from The Middle East Children’s Alliance which offers a lesson plan on teaching Gaza through essential questions:
Should what is happening in Gaza be considered a global humanitarian crisis? To what extent do we have a responsibility to do something about it? What is your responsibility?
Do current events in Gaza meet the definition of genocide based on the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide?
Said Morrison of JVP-Action, “Educators must challenge Zionist hijacking of holocaust and genocide professional development. Otherwise a generation of children in California and other states could become captives of the Anti-Defamation League and its supporters in their campaign to deny Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Palestine.”
Marcy Winograd is a retired public high school teacher and literacy coach who taught English and social studies in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She is also the coordinator of CODEPINK Congress and co-chair of the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition based in Santa Barbara, California.