West Ed & the Israel Lobby

Marcy Winograd

CA Gov. Newsom on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025, releasing findings of West Ed's report on Holocaust and Genocide Education.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and the Israel lobby have enlisted another partner in the frenzy to promote Holocaust education during nationwide protests over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In San Francisco’s industrial-chic south of Market neighborhood, a data research and education policy firm named West Ed has released a report lamenting that county offices of education are not offering adequate Holocaust and genocide education (HGE) programs.

West Ed acknowledges that since 1985 California has required HGE as part of the school curriculum. Eighth-grade English students read and discuss Anne Frank’s, “The Diary of a Young Girl. Tenth-grade history standards require students to analyze the “Nazi policy of racial purity, its evolution into the ‘Final Solution,’ and the resulting murder of six million Jewish civilians.” Forty years after the state-mandated HGE, West Ed argues there’s a problem – not the failure to teach Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine but the uneven presentation across the state of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Timing

West Ed published its report on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a few months before the California Senate’s first hearing in April 2025, on SB 472 (D-Stern-Calabasas), a bill to provide the infrastructure for direct state funding to school districts for additional HGE curriculum and teacher training. The bill –opposed by Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP-Action), CAIR, the Arab Resource Organizing Committee, and Liberated Ethnic Studies–would also require county offices of education to submit annual reports on school district implementation of HGE.

In opposing SB 472, JVP Action charges, “The bill’s supporters are determined never to allow teachers to talk about the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since 1948) and the genocide in Gaza, and they want stronger policing tools.”

According to West Ed, the state has spent $34 million since 2019 to fund Holocaust-centered organizations promoting more HGE in K-12.

Overview

West Ed’s 195-page report entitled, “Holocaust and Genocide Education in California: A Study of Statewide Context and Local Implementation” bases its conclusion on responses from less than a third of local education agencies (LEAs) who completed West Ed’s questionnaire about HGE implementation in local school districts. West Ed reports that of the 29% who responded only 26% “have systematic HGE in place, signaling a need for greater systemic support to teach these sensitive topics in more school districts statewide.” The Anti-Defamation League, the subject of a nationwide Drop the ADL from Schools campaign, was listed among the top three curriculum resources used by survey respondents. The topics most widely taught were the Holocaust and the Native American and Armenian genocides.

To correct inconsistencies in professional development, curriculum, and resources, West Ed recommended additional HGE standards, more state-recommended HGE books, articles, lesson plans, and HGE teacher training to “help develop a more empathetic and morally courageous next generation and a more unified, socially responsible society.”

West Ed report fails to mention Gaza

Despite the emphasis on developing an “empathic society,” school policy researchers at West Ed fail to include a survey question or resource on the current US-backed Israel genocide in Gaza or the crackdown on anti-genocide activists chaining themselves to universities invested in contractors sending Israel 2,000 pound bombs to blow up hospitals in Gaza. What’s the point of genocide education that ignores the horror streaming live on cell phones? Why teach about resistance to the Nazi’s “final solution” if it’s off-limits to examine the Palestine solidarity movement’s resistance to genocide?

West Ed describes itself as “a joint-powers agency governed by multiple states.” Operating in California, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah, West Ed says it is committed to partnering with “policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities, and others” to provide “a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation …” West Ed publishes documents on analyzing outcomes for English learners and students in foster care, and hosts webinars on child development and behavioral interventions for students with special needs.

In a departure from its focus on improving student outcomes, West Ed has produced research the Israel lobby can employ to justify more Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism lessons from the Anti-Defamation League, during what the ADL describes as a record-high number of 9,934 antisemitic incidents nationwide last year. In its latest audit, however, the ADL says that 58% of the incidents were related to speeches, signs, and chants criticizing Israel during its war on Gaza. Pro-Palestine activists describe the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” as liberatory. The ADL considers the slogan antisemitic and counts its utterance as an antisemitic incident.

The Governor’s Council led by Zionists

West Ed prepared its HGE report for the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education and collaborated with the Council to construct surveys and teacher interviews.

The Council is co-chaired by Israel loyalists such as State Senator Henry Stern, a member of the Legislative Jewish Caucus and the author of SB 472; State Attorney General Rob Bonta, who expressed solidarity with the Jewish Public Affairs Committee (JPAC) at its 2024 conference; State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, head of the California Department of Education, which ordered anti-bias training for a northern California school district in which a student delivered a presentation on the Gaza genocide; and Dr. Anita Friedman, Jewish Family and Children’s Services Northern California-Holocaust Center, chairperson of the World International Zionist Organization (WIZO) and former board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

While the West Ed report references a list of genocides–the Holocaust, Cambodian, Rwandan, Native American, Bosnian, Armenian–not a single word is written about Gaza, where Israel has obliterated the educational system, destroyed 90% of its schools and leveled every university in a crime called “scholasticide.” A student reading the West Ed report would never know that prominent human rights organizations–Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch–have labeled Gaza a genocide, nor that the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest judicial body of the United Nations, issued a preliminary ruling (1/26/24) concluding Israel had committed a “plausible genocide” under the UN Convention on Genocide.

West Ed’s recommendations

What the West Ed report recommends, however, is the need to further support the California Teachers Collaborative on Holocaust and Genocide Education, which has received 4.5 million in seed money since 2021, with part of the money earmarked for the West Ed report that supports the Collaborative.

The Collaborative –the brainchild of the 18-member Legislative Jewish Caucus–includes organizations representing Armenians, Bosnians, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Native Americans and Uyghurs, though a majority of the partners are Holocaust-centered, and five are explicitly Zionist: ADL, Shoah, YadVashem, Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles); Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center.

There are no organizations representing Palestinians in the Collaborative.

In partnering with the ADL, the Collaborative platforms an organization lobbying for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples that conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism to, in other words, equate criticism of Israel as a racist state with discrimination and persecution of Jews. Seven of the 11 IHRA examples of antisemitism revolve around Israel, further cementing the conflation of Israel and Judaism, even though one of the IHRA examples of antisemitism is “Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” The Israel lobby wants it both ways—to define Judaism as Israel-centered but not to blame Jews for Israel’s conduct.

It’s worth noting that Robert J. Williams, a representative of the IHRA, is an advisor to the Governor’s Council on Holocaust and Genocide Education, which commissioned the West Ed report and promotes the Collaborative. The Council also includes member Seth Brysk, the ADL’s chief officer of external affairs and partnerships.

West Ed recommends the State of California continue to build the Collaborative’s digital library, which includes Echoes & Reflections, a Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism curriculum co-constructed by the Anti-Defamation League, Shoah Foundation, and YadVashem.

A closer look at Echoes & Reflections

Although this curriculum is largely focused on video testimonials, podcasts, timelines, and vocabulary related to the Holocaust, it also includes a unit on Contemporary Antisemitism sure to win a standing ovation from JPAC and AIPAC for its devotion to Israel.

For starters, the unit features a slick video, “What Does it Mean to be Jewish?” in which a young woman explains 4,000 years of history in four minutes to celebrate the return of Jews to their biblical homeland in Israel. Of Jews the world over, the narrator tells us, “No matter where they live or how religious they are, a strong aspect of their identity is their connection to the State of Israel, the only Jewish state in the whole world.”

A student viewing this video would never know that Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians also trace their ancestry to historic Palestine or that Palestinians must now live as second-class citizens within Israel’s ‘67 borders and as targets of the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Moreover, a student would never learn of the anti-Zionist Jews who have long opposed the establishment of a Jewish state that rests on the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians.

“Zionism is an ideology of Jewish supremacy that has resulted in a genocidal settler-colonial state,” says David Klein, a Jewish member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.” Klein adds, “It is deeply antisemitic to conflate Zionism with Judaism because that conflation associates apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide with Judaism.”

The Contemporary Antisemitism unit also includes a hand-out “A Brief History of Israel” that presents a skewed version of events that conveniently leaves out the ‘47-48 Zionist massacres and erasure of Palestinian villages burned to the ground to make way for the state of Israel. In still another student handout, “The New Antisemitism and the Three D’s,” students are taught not to question Israel’s establishment as a state that privileges one ethnicity over another and to remember to dodge the three D’s-Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization–if students want to prove to the world they are not antisemites but loyal supporters of Israel.

This conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism misrepresents the Jewish people, who hardly constitute a monolith in their thinking. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), with a million followers on social media, occupies state capitols and subway stations to disrupt what West Ed, the Legislative Jewish Caucus, and the Governor’s Council refuse to acknowledge:

People of conscience across the country are organizing in unprecedented numbers to demand divestment from Israeli apartheid and genocide. Our elected officials and the U.S. media, desperate to maintain unquestioning support for the Israeli war machine in service of their own interests, have responded by exploiting fears of rising antisemitism and smearing peaceful, anti-war protests as dangerous, anti-semitic mobs. (JVP-” We’re fighting to stop a genocide.”)

Holocaust education as Israel indoctrination

The West Ed reports allots 30 pages, considerable real estate, to analysis of HGE across the US to “identify patterns, trends and notable practices that can inform California’s approach.”

West Ed reports that 25 states, including California, have legislative mandates requiring Holocaust and genocide education, while a total of 38 states provide some level of state support for such curriculum.

The report’s support for increased state implementation of Holocaust education raises concerns among anti-Zionists who suspect a political agenda. “The Israel lobby exploits the pain and trauma of the Holocaust to shield Israel from criticism during its ongoing genocide,” says Seth Morrison, board member, of Jewish Voice for Peace-Action. Morrison adds, “In some cases, proponents of Holocaust education even use it to justify Israel’s slaughter in Gaza by arguing that unless Israel bombs Gaza to rubble another Jewish holocaust will ensue. This kind of thinking normalizes state-sponsored genocide.”

On weaponization of the Holocaust, Peter Beinart, editor of Jewish Currents and author of the book “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza,” says, “How do we face up to the fact that Israel has invoked the Holocaust to shatter the legal order put into place to prevent a repetition of this “crime of crimes”?

If West Ed’s voluminous report served to highlight the importance of trials to prosecute accused war criminals like Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu –or uplift Columbia University students demanding an end to university complicity in Israel’s genocide, then surely a convincing argument could be made for increased genocide education (GE), albeit one that recognizes the horror of the Holocaust but does not exceptionalize it to place the Holocaust at the top of a genocide hierarchy, as in the term Holocaust and Genocide Education.

This, however, is not the case.

To shield Israel from accountability, an HGE political ecosystem necessitates multiple partners: an opportunistic Governor with naked political ambitions, Zionist lawmakers who misrepresent Judaism as Zionism, researchers for hire to make the Israel lobby’s case for more HGE instruction, and professional development partners to train teachers to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

There is hope for change, though.

The West Ed HGE report also recommends updating the state’s 2003 Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide. The curriculum, which discusses the Holocaust, Bosnian, Cambodia, and Rwandan genocides, could be updated to include Israel’s bombardment and forced starvation of Gaza, where rescue workers have coined a new acronym-WCNSF: Wounded Child, No Surviving Family. To ensure this happens, educators and those outraged at the US-Israel genocide in Gaza must demand a seat at the table in Sacramento.

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Marcy Winograd, a retired public high school teacher, organizes CODEPINK’s Expel the ADL campaign.