AMCHA vs. Gavin Newsom
David Shasha
Halting California’s Runaway ‘Liberated’ Ethnic Studies Train
By: Tammi Rossman-Benjamin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMCHA_Initiative
While California school districts are rushing to implement the state’s new ethnic studies “mandate,” what they do not realize is that the law requiring students to take these controversial courses faces significant funding hurdles and may well be inoperative. Those who are concerned about the rapid proliferation of antisemitic ethnic studies curricula should focus their attention on revealing this well-kept secret. Let me explain.
When California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill mandating ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement (AB 101) in October 2021, he was explicit about why he felt confident approving a bill that was almost identical to one he had vetoed the year before. Expressing his appreciation for augmented “guardrails” added to the bill to help ensure the courses would be “free from bias and bigotry,” Newsom singled out one guardrail in particular: “[I]t is the intent of the Legislature that local educational agencies not use portions of the first draft model curriculum that were not adopted by the Instructional Quality Commission due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination.”
The “first draft model curriculum” that he mentioned — “the first draft model curriculum” — was released for public review in May 2019 and immediately rejected by Governor Newsom and the State Board of Education (SBE) after widespread complaints, and after Jewish legislators, tens of thousands of Californians, and almost every Jewish organization in the state expressed outrage over the draft’s overtly anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist content. Although the SBE had approved a substantially revised final model curriculum in March 2021, this new guardrail signaled legislators’ concerns that local school districts, not obliged to consider the state-approved model curriculum, might instead choose the first draft’s “liberated ethnic studies” content that was vigorously marketed by the first-draft’s authors, who had gone on to establish a fee-for-service consulting group, Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC).
A month before legislators’ final votes were cast moving AB 101 to the Governor’s desk, LESMCC posted “Preparing to Teach Palestine: A Toolkit,” which included antisemitic tropes of Jewish wealth and power that were used to vilify Jews and Jewish organizations; smeared Israel with false charges of “settler colonialism” and “apartheid;” promoted the work of anti-Zionist organizations calling for dismantling the Jewish state and offering advice on how to launch campaigns to boycott Israel; and urged teachers to organize their schools and districts to fight “Zionist backlash.” This blatantly biased and bigoted display, even more explicitly anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist than the first model curriculum draft, may well be what convinced legislators to add language to the bill expressing the intent of the Legislature that school districts not adopt discriminatory curricula.
While legislative intent is not law, legislators — and the Governor — clearly felt that stating their intentions could influence local school districts’ selection of an ethnic studies curriculum. According to Jesse Gabriel, then chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, “my hope is that the guardrails are so unambiguous that any school board, or any teacher, looks at this and says, ‘we do not want to get close to that problematic curriculum.’”
So much for hope and good intentions.
Last month, despite opposition from members of the Jewish community, the Santa Ana Unified School District’s Board of Education voted in favor of adopting two ethnic studies curricula containing egregiously anti-Israel content for use in SAUSD’s 11 high schools. Similar scenarios had already played themselves out at school board meetings in Hayward and Castro Valley, where board members ignored strenuous community objections, and approved lucrative contracts with LESMCC.
There’s growing evidence that AB 101’s guardrails will not prevent school districts from adopting antisemitic curricula or contracting with educational consulting groups that promote these curricula.
This is of particular concern, considering that in the short time since its founding, LESMCC and mission-aligned consultants, with the support of powerful teachers’ unions and the state’s ethnic studies higher education community, have not only contracted with a growing number of school districts and county offices of education, but successfully lobbied California legislators to sponsor additional bills advancing their mission.
Given LESMCC’s success record to date, within a few years many school districts across the state will undoubtedly be spoon-feeding their students a liberated-style curriculum promoting the bias, bigotry and discrimination, including antisemitism, that the guardrail language explicitly prohibited.
There is, however, a way to bring this runaway train to a halt, or at least to slow it down considerably.
Fortunately, right after the “intent” guardrail was written into AB 101, the CA Legislature slipped in an “in-case-of-fire-break-glass” amendment: these provisions will become “operative only upon an appropriation of funds by the Legislature for the purposes of these amendments in the annual Budget Act or another statute.”
In other words, unless and until legislators allocate funds to cover AB 101’s costs, which the California Department of Education anticipates will be $276 million annually, its graduation requirement is not in play.
Legislators did appropriate one-time funds “to support the creation or expansion of ethnic studies course offerings,” but that appropriation, a small fraction of AB 101’s price tag, was part of a bill signed into law more than two months before the “break-glass” clause was added to AB 101, indicating that these funds were not the ones intended by legislators to serve as the trigger for operationalizing the graduation requirement. Another law paying for AB 101 would be needed to do that.
Neither the governor nor legislators have signaled that they will fund AB 101. Given California’s enormous $31.5 billion shortfall, announced in Governor Newsom’s May 12th State Budget for the upcoming fiscal year, it is extremely doubtful that the Legislature will be able to find, let alone decide to fund, a quarter billion dollars a year for ethnic studies courses that are quite likely to teach content the Legislature has explicitly rejected.
Uncertainty about the status of the new graduation requirement puts local school districts in a bind. According to AB 101’s timetable, high schools would offer an ethnic studies course by Fall 2025. School districts are gearing up soon to be ready, each incurring tens of thousands of dollars in expenses with the hope, but not the certainty, that they will be reimbursed by the state. If the legislature doesn’t fund AB 101, districts that don’t wait to find out if the State will pay for Ethnic Studies could be left holding the bill on an expensive new course that isn’t required after all.
What does this mean for Californians who are deeply concerned about the proliferation of biased, bigoted, and discriminatory ethnic studies curricula in required high school classes? Instead of looking to the guardrails, which are ill-equipped to keep such content out of the classroom, Californians should urge their local school boards to wait until legislators decide — fund or not fund, now or ever.
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin is the director of AMCHA Initiative, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to combating antisemitism at colleges and universities in the United States. She was a faculty member at the University of California for 20 years.
From The Algemeiner, May 17, 2023
Jewish Professors Hit Back Against Pro-Israel Campus 'Blacklist'
By: Paul Berger
A Jewish advocacy group is warning students about 218 Middle East studies professors in colleges and universities across the country whose classes might contain “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”
The AMCHA Initiative singled out the professors because, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas this past summer, they signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel.
“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative.
Now, 40 of America’s leading Jewish studies professors, including Hasia Diner of New York University and Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, have signed a statement calling AMCHA’s actions “deplorable” and a threat to academic freedom. Bernard Avishai, a business professor who splits his time between Dartmouth College and Hebrew University and who has written extensively on Jewish matters, also signed the statement, which said, “We find it regrettable that AMCHA, so intent on combating the boycott of Israel, has launched a boycott initiative of its own.”
The Jewish studies professors say their worries go beyond AMCHA’s list of Middle East professors.
AMCHA, which means ‘your people’ in Hebrew, was founded in 2012. It investigates and monitors alleged anti-Semitism on more than 300 campuses across America. In the past couple of months, AMCHA has joined other Jewish advocacy groups to call on Congress to withhold federal funds from Middle Eastern studies programs that show an anti-Israeli bias. In September, AMCHA published a 100-page report claiming rampant anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitic activity during the past three years at UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies.
AMCHA defends its methodology. Rossman-Benjamin, who is on leave from her post as a lecturer at University of California, Santa Cruz, said she and her co-researchers analyzed recordings of lectures and conferences posted to UCLA’s website.
But the Jewish studies professors say AMCHA’s monitoring of lectures and conferences “strains the basic principle of academic freedom.”
David Myers, a co-author of the Jewish studies statement and a professor of Jewish history at UCLA, said AMCHA’s research is neither objective nor balanced. “I think they have a very clear idea of what they think they will find and they find it, and it confirms what they knew in advance,” Myers said.
He added that AMCHA’s definition of anti-Israel is so broad that it sweeps up many academics with strong connections to Israel.
Steven Zipperstein, the other co-author of the Jewish studies statement, acknowledged that there is a problem on. campuses in the United States regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The presumption that there is something fundamentally wrong with the State of Israel has become part and parcel of the cultural code of many faculty in the humanities and the arts,” Zipperstein said.
But he added that the best way to confront such ideas is through intellectual debate, not by “blacklisting” academics. “It’s the blacklisting of my Israeli colleagues that I so abhor,” Zipperstein said. “And I’m not going to support the blacklisting of people with whom I disagree on Israel and Palestine.”
Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University, said that by singling out faculty, AMCHA stifles professors who might think twice in the future before introducing certain materials into their courses out of fear of being added to a list of anti-Israel or anti-Semitic academics. Zipperstein said he specifically asked senior figures in Jewish studies to sign the statement so that younger, “more vulnerable” professors could continue to teach “without outside interference.”
Among the professors on AMCHA’s list are the following directors of programs that receive federal funding: Lila Abu-Lughod director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University; Miriam Cooke, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Duke University; Osama Abi-Mershed, chair of the Middle East and North Africa program at Georgetown University; and Sondra Hale and Gabriel Piterberg co-directors of the Center for Near Eastern Studies at UCLA.
AMCHA’s Rossman-Benjamin said the Jewish Studies statement misunderstands and distorts her organization’s work. Professors are free to espouse their views outside of the university, she said. But since the professors who signed the boycott petition did so specifically in their capacity as scholars of the Middle East, Jewish students should know who they are.
“We weren’t asking students to boycott those professors,” Benjamin said. “We are just asking them to make informed choices” when they choose their professors.
She added: “I don’t understand why a professor has freedom of expression to sign a boycott petition and I don’t have freedom to say, look who signed the boycott petition.”
But Eric Alterman, one of the founders of The Third Narrative, a group of academics opposed to both the occupation of the West Bank and to the boycott campaign against Israel, said AMCHA’s list is an inappropriate attempt to stifle debate.
“It’s always inappropriate when outside forces seek to attach their political judgments to academic matters and its deeply disturbing that in this case a Jewish organization would do it while so many on the other side are seeking to do the same thing to Israeli professors and scholars,” he said.
Alterman, a distinguished professor of English and journalism at City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, said he was impressed that Jewish Studies professors, many of whose departments are likely funded by people sympathetic to AMCHA’s position, would take a stand on this issue. “These are all the big guns,” he said.
Alterman sees this initiative as part of a growing trend in Jewish activism to silence criticism of Israel.
“What could be more un-Jewish than trying to shut down debate?” Alterman asked. “The whole purpose of Judaism is debate, that’s what the Talmud is, and yet these people don’t think students can handle criticism of Israel.”
But Rossman-Benjamin says her group is not trying to shut down speech. She said she is trying to advocate on behalf of Jewish students who suffer intellectual and emotional harassment because of what AMCHA sees as a pervasive atmosphere of anti-Israel sentiment on campus.
According to AMCHA’s first and only publicly available tax statement, the group raised $200,000 in contributions and spent just $100,000 in its first year. It boasts an interactive website listing the names of professors who have signed at least one of a number of statements advocating an academic boycott of Israel superimposed on a map of the United States.
A full text of the Jewish Studies professors’ statements was released to the Forward and is available here
Contact Paul Berger at ber...@forward.com or on Twitter @pdberger
Paul Berger was a staff writer at the Forward from 2011-2016, covering crime and healthcare issues, such as sex abuse, circumcision, and fraud. He is a fluent Russian speaker and has reported from Russia and Ukraine. He also likes digging into historical mysteries.
From The Forward, October 1, 2014
Not just Canary Mission: SF Jewish Federation bankrolls these hate groups
By: Mairav Zonszein
Following the revelation last week in The Forward that the San Francisco Jewish Federation gave $100,000 to Canary Mission, the shadowy website that blacklists and intimidates students and professors who criticize Israel, the Federation assured its constituents that it was a “one-time grant” that would never happen again. But Canary Mission is just the tip of the iceberg.
An extensive review by +972 of the Federation’s tax filings shows that the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco and the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which the former controls and which it used to fund Canary Mission, have bankrolled an extensive list of extremist, far-right, anti-Muslim organizations in recent years.
The systematic pattern of financially supporting hate groups appears to also violate the SF Federation’s own guidelines, which specify that it will not fund organizations that “endorse or promote anti-Semitism, other forms of bigotry, violence or other extremist views.”
Among the extremist, radical right-wing, and anti-Muslim groups that received funds from the SF Federation, both directly and through the Diller Foundation, and some of which have received substantial and repeated grants over the years, include: Project Veritas, The AMCHA Initiative, The American Freedom Law Center, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, The David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the work of Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders (through the International Freedom Alliance Foundation). Others include the Clarion Fund, the Center for Security Policy (Frank Gaffney), the Middle East Forum (Daniel Pipes), the Tea Party Patriots Foundation, and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Project Veritas, which the Federation gave $100,000 in 2016, is responsible for falsifying sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore last year to The Washington Post in hopes of entrapping the liberal mainstream media
The AMCHA Initiative, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the SF Federation and the Diller Foundation in recent years, operates similarly to Canary Mission, except that it primarily goes after faculty, not students.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years, has been condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as promoting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attitudes.
The American Freedom Law Center and Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative both target Islam as a threat to Western civilization. The former advances “anti-Sharia” legislation and filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s Muslim ban. The latter, which has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim hate group, was responsible for Islamophobic bus campaigns in several cities, and has been represented by the American Freedom Law Center.
+972 Magazine asked the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation about these grants and others that appear to violate its own guidelines against promoting bigotry, violence, and extremist views. The SF Federation’s senior director of communications, Kerry Philp, responded by email:
We review each grant recommendation at the time that it is submitted to the Federation, to determine if the organization adheres to the Federation’s granting guidelines. This applies to organizations across the political spectrum. We aim to make the best decisions with the information that we have at the time. Because organizations are dynamic, an organization that previously received a grant from the Federation may not be in compliance with the Federation’s grantmaking guidelines today, and vice versa. Also, per our statement, we strengthened the implementation of our review process in 2017 and continue to be committed to executing our grant review with a standard of care in regard to our guidelines.
Philp added that the Federation does indeed deny grants when they violate its guidelines but would not address any of the grants to the organizations listed in this article or why they were approved.
The San Francisco Jewish Community Federation is one of the largest Jewish charities in the United States with a budget of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Furthermore, it is located in, and presumably represents, one of the most progressive cities and communities in the United States. Whether the SF Federation’s financial support of radical, right-wing, Islamophobic, bigoted, and McCarthyite groups aligns with that community’s values is ultimately up to its members.
From +972 magazine, October 10, 2018
University of California Adopts Policy Linking Anti-Zionism to Anti-Semitism
By: Robert Mackey
The regents of the University of California unanimously adopted a new policy on discrimination on Wednesday that links anti-Semitism to opposition to Zionism, the ideology asserting that the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in historic Palestine.
At a meeting in San Francisco, the UC Board of Regents approved a working group’s recommendation for a set of “Principles Against Intolerance” that accepts the argument that “manifestations of anti-Semitism have changed” as a result of debates over Israel on college campuses and “expressions of anti-Semitism are more coded and difficult to identify.”
“In particular,” the report stated, “opposition to Zionism often is expressed in ways that are not simply statements of disagreement over politics and policy, but also assertions of prejudice and intolerance toward Jewish people and culture.”
To address the concerns of pro-Israel students and faculty, who claimed that supporters of Palestinian rights who disagreed with them were practicing a form of discrimination, the working group was formed in September to expand on a draft statement that had said, “Intolerance has no place at the University of California.” In January, the working group proposed that the declaration should read instead: “Anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”
But that proposed language was criticized — by, among others, the ACLU, the Middle East Studies Association of North America, student activists and faculty members like Michael Meranze, Saree Makdisi and Judith Butler — for erasing the line between legitimate criticism of the state of Israel and hate speech aimed at Jewish students and faculty. Just before the regents voted on the policy on Wednesday, a member of the working group, Norman Pattiz, further amended the reference to anti-Zionism so that it now condemns “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism.”
Before the vote on Wednesday, Bonnie Reiss, the vice chairwoman of the Board of Regents, argued that students opposed to Israeli policies, and those questioning the state’s unequal treatment of non-Jews, had fostered a dangerous environment for Jewish students by supporting the effort to pressure Israel to change its policies through a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions, known as BDS.
It was necessary for the university to address anti-Semitism, Resiss said, because “members of the Muslim Student Association or Palestinians for Justice groups… that are anti-Israel have brought BDS resolutions” which have “created emotional debates.”
“Anti-Semitic acts against many in our Jewish community have resulted from the emotions over the debates over the BDS-Israel resolutions,” she insisted, without citing evidence of the linkage.
As my colleague Alex Emmons reported, that view was endorsed earlier this week by Hillary Clinton, who called the Israel boycott movement “alarming” in her speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee this week, and accused activists of anti-Semitic “bullying” of Jewish students on college campuses.
Later the same night, Bernie Sanders, who has been critical of Israeli policy, told Chris Hayes on MSNBC that he agreed with Clinton that “there is some level of anti-Semitism” in the BDS movement.
Supporters of the BDS movement, including those who call for Israel to grant full civil rights to Arab citizens of East Jerusalem and the millions of Palestinians who have lived under Israeli military control for nearly half a century in the West Bank and Gaza, strongly reject the claim that opposition to a state that privileges Jews is in any way anti-Semitic.
That the backlash against Israel on college campuses might be caused not by unreasoning hatred but by Israeli actions — like the ongoing blockade of Gaza, punctuated by three rounds of punishing airstrikes in the past seven years, the building of illegal, Jewish-only settlements across the occupied West Bank, or the refusal to recognize the rights of Palestinians driven from their homes in 1948 to ever return — seems not to have occurred to students, faculty or politicians whose support for the Jewish state is unquestioning.
As Omar Zahzah, a Palestinian-American graduate student at UCLA who spoke against the proposed policy before the regents voted on Wednesday, observed later:
We all agree that anti-Semitism and racism must be combated on campus. Where we disagree is in the claim that anti-Zionism is bigotry. Palestinian and Jewish students alike should have the right to say that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was morally wrong and that Palestinian refugees should have the right to return home to a state where Palestinians and Jews live in equality rather than in a discriminatory Jewish state.
Butler, who teaches at UC Berkeley and spoke against the policy before the vote, said later that the amended language was still problematic. “If we think that we solve the problem by identifying forms of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism, then we are left with the question of who identifies such a position, and what are their operative definitions,” she wrote. “These terms are vague and overbroad and run the risk of suppressing speech and violating principles of academic freedom.”
In 2003, after the then-president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, argued that academics who held “profoundly anti-Israel views” were “advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent,” Butler responded in the London Review of Books:
…it is important to distinguish between anti-Semitic speech which, say, produces a hostile and threatening environment for Jewish students – racist speech which any university administrator would be obliged to oppose and regulate – and speech which makes a student uncomfortable because it opposes a particular state or set of state policies that he or she may defend. The latter is a political debate, and if we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of ‘effective’ censorship.
The vote in favor of the policy was celebrated by supporters like Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz whose AMCHA Initiative led the campaign to have the university specifically condemn expressions of anti-Zionist activism, calling it “the driving force behind the alarming rise in anti-Semitism” on campuses.
But as the Los Angeles Times reporter Teresa Watanabe noted, “both the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office and a federal judge have dismissed complaints by UC Jewish students that such activities have created a hostile climate and violated their educational rights.”
The policy was also welcomed by Avi Oved, the student representative on the board of regents, who spoke from behind a laptop with a heart-shaped pro-Israel sticker that is used by the Israel advocacy group Stand With Us. Oved said the policy was necessary to defend pro-Israel students who have been subjected to abusive language, like being called “Zionist pigs,” or told that “Zionists should be sent back to the gas chambers.”
The chief executive of Stand With Us, Roz Rothstein, thanked the regents for endorsing her view that “denying Israel’s right to exist and opposing the rights of the Jewish people to self-determination in their homeland is racism, pure and simple.”
From The Intercept, March 23, 2016