ICYMI: JIMENA vs. Gavin Newsom
David Shasha
Attacking the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum: Ashkenazi Front JIMENA and the White Jewish Supremacy
We have long commented on the Ashkenazi-founded and funded JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) and its HASBARAH dominance, as can be seen from Tom Pessah’s 2016 exposé:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/pessah/davidshasha/u8KXBiFOLRU/WeiaSW1FAgAJ
It is fully aligned with the White Jewish institutional world:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/UvSLxcVs_NI/XG202VjzBgAJ
It is all in with John Hagee and his Supersessionist Anti-Semitism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/7jB01Xs8JWM/nh2HKjbnDAAJ
We have long been tracking the movement of JIMENA mainstay Rachel Wahba and her profoundly confusing self-hatred, which the Ashkenazim are happy to deploy for their HASBARAH purposes:
Here are two recent examples from The Times of Israel, which has her as a blogger:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-arabic-jews/
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-are-not-white/
She is all in with the Lyn Julius version of the Farhud:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/farhud-day-remembering-the-screams/
And she is not at all happy with Peter Beinart!
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wandered-jews/
Indeed, as we can see from her article “We Are Not White,” she is adding her voice to Dani Ishay Behan to make the HASBARAH point of Jews not being White:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/IDAJgK7PSBI/OchmUPfXCQAJ
Of late we have been reading a good deal about JIMENA director Sarah Levin in the HASBARAH press:
The key here, as always, is Zionism and Anti-Semitism:
California’s Department of Education released its recommendations to revise the state’s proposed ethnic-studies model curriculum at the end of July, as the original draft curriculum had come under fire for containing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel content, in addition to not addressing issues of anti-Semitism or including Jewish Americans.
Sarah Levin, executive director of JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement that while CDE’s new version “is an improvement over past versions, some of the supplemental materials that have been included are deeply problematic and exclusionary.”
When Arabs and Muslims are involved, JIMENA is always on the case:
“These supplemental materials ignore the stories of all our coalition members—who together represent an estimated 60 [percent] of Californians who hail from the Middle East and North Africa—while portraying the Arab American experience as a monolith to represent the region,” she continued.
The attack on the California curriculum lines up with radical extremists like Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, leader of the AMCHA Initiative, a Zionist witch-hunt group:
Naturally, she also blogs for The Times of Israel.
AMCHA is part of the McCarthyite triumvirate with both Canary Mission and Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch:
https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/
JIMENA shows us that it is all in the MISHPOCHEH!
One hand washes the other.
As we can clearly see, Rossman-Benjamin is full on with the standard HASBARAH, with all the usual anti-PC caveats:
AMCHA Initiative director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin said that “the curriculum remains incredibly problematic and concerning.”
“The ethnic-studies movement, known as ‘critical ethnic studies,’ which is what this curriculum is a product of, is based on an ‘us vs them’ model,” she told JNS. “It views Jews as white and privileged, and not part of the ‘us,’ and is blatantly anti-Zionist.”
Rossman-Benjamin went on to say that “the goal of ‘critical ethnic studies’ is not to educate, but to indoctrinate students into adopting certain political views and engaging in specific forms of political activism, including those that vilify and harm Jewish students. Even more concerning is that right now, a California bill is moving through the legislature that will require all California high school students to take one of these classes, which, given that there are no safeguards against it, could easily become political and divisive at the sole discretion of the teacher.”
She called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom to not sign AB-331 into law “until safeguards are put into place to ensure any ethnic-studies required classes be based on pedagogically sound principles, not ones that push a specific political agenda and could easily lead to ethnic bigotry, including anti-Semitism.”
The UC Santa Cruz lecturer has long been known as a radical flamethrower:
Pace Bari Weiss and The David Project, Rossman-Benjamin was Cancel Culture before there was Cancel Culture:
In February 2012 the Amcha Initiative tried and failed to shut down Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s speaking tour at CSU campuses, falsely claiming that he was “anti-Semitic” and supportive of terror. Tammi Benjamin was also behind a federal complaint alleging that campus political and academic speech critical of Israel creates a hostile environment for Jewish students at UC Santa Cruz, resulting in an ongoing Department of Education investigation into the school. The ACLU recently condemned the federal investigation into UC Santa Cruz as “disturbing” and having “a chilling effect” on student organizing in a letter criticizing a similar investigation at UC Berkeley.
Indeed, the following article provides a very detailed picture of her connection to many of the usual Islamophobe suspects, people like Dennis Prager, Nonie Darwish, and Rachel Fish of The David Project:
We will recall that Bari Weiss was a Columbia undergrad who was part of The David Project and its “Columbia Unbecoming” conference, which was also designed to stifle free speech on campus, and get professors fired:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GQ1T91xG72SCnuUwl7WQwGYGZk95Dg65zRphnSZxPWg/edit
JIMENA is indeed quite consistent when it comes to ignoring White Jewish Supremacy, saving its critical advocacy for non-Jews:
https://www.jimena.org/jewish-day-school-program/
As we can see from their very exotic Orientalist “Bourekas and Haminados” Jewish Day School program, funded by prominent White Jewish Supremacist groups lie The Koret Foundation and the Jewish Community Federation Endowment:
Around the Middle Eastern Jewish World
Provides students with an overview of Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewry. Students will understand how Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews came to exist as groups and will learn cultural and ethnic indicators of these groups.
Celebrating Sephardic Clothing
Introduces students to Sephardic rituals where special clothing is worn. Students will be able to articulate the values that inspire these clothing traditions and be given the opportunity to try on a kaftan.
Forgotten Refugees
Students will learn the term “refugee” by being introduced to the individual stories of Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East. Students celebrate the lives and contributions of former Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Henna Party
An Immersive mock henna ceremony provides students the opportunity to learn about North African and Yemenite henna traditions.
Open Your Hand – HAMSA
Primer into Sephardic and Mizrahi symbolism and values by focusing on the open hand. Students will create their own Hamsa to take home.
Middle Eastern Jewish Cuisine
In this session students will learn about Sephardic and Mizrahi food and will ask the question: What makes food Jewish? What Jewish foods do we know and which foods are new to us?
Hafla! The Roots of Mizrahi Music
Introduces students to the origins of Mizrahi music. Students will listen to several songs and will learn how to sing a classic Piyut or Jewish liturgical song according to the Yemenite tradition.
Oral Histories
Presents the stories of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees and introduces students to the benefit and techniques of collecting and preserving family stories.
Photomapping
A school-wide map activity introduces students to their classmates’ countries of origin.
Sephardic Storyteller
Students will experience the beauty and wealth of Sephardic and Mizrahi folktales and will get to
Our Names, Our Identity
In this session students will learn about the meaning of names in the creation of identity and will participate in activity to honor their family names and the family names of those different from them.
My Heart is the in East: Mizrahi Museum
An exploration of student family heirlooms and on opportunity for students to present their family’s culture to the student body. Students will create an exhibit of their family heritage.
It is not necessary to analyze what is a deeply shallow presentation of Sephardim as exotica, without any intellectual culture.
But of course, we have the HAMSA!
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/hamsa/
Where we would we be without it?
And the HASBARAH mainstay “The Forgotten Refugees” that once again brings us back to The David Project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forgotten_Refugees
It is all perfectly consistent with the White Jewish Supremacy I discussed in my recent article on Modern Jewish Philosophy:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/PIQl0sj5em8
Indeed, it explains to us why someone like Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute can publish a book called The New Jewish Canon which completely lacks any Sephardic intellectual content:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/ytx5ztODWRA
You can search through the contents of both the Kurtzer book and the Leonard Levin workbook and connect it to the JIMENA “curriculum” and easily see how it is all united to promote White Jewish Supremacy and deny Sephardim a seat at the Adult Jewish Table.
It is what the Ashkenazim demand.
And you can be sure that JIMENA will remain silent about it!
We thus see how the pushback against the California Ethnic Studies curriculum links the HASBARAH Islamophobe radicals and the Self-Hating Sephardim in a union that serves to further marginalize us and erase our history and culture.
David Shasha
From SHU 969, October 21, 2020
JIMENA: Halt School Grants Until Antisemitism Ed is Included in Plans
By: Leslie Isley-Greene
A Bay Area-based Jewish group wants the California Department of Education to suspend its Antibias Education Grant Program, which combats racism and bias in public schools, until grantees promise to educate their students against antisemitism.
Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), an organization that advocates for Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, spearheaded a letter on March 6 to State Superintendent of Public Education Tony Thurmond alleging that the department he leads showed “disregard of antisemitism education” by conferring some of the $20 million in anti-bias program grants to California schools that did not include mention of antisemitism in their proposals.
Copied on the letter were Gov. Gavin Newsom, Bay Area state Sens. Josh Becker and Scott Wiener, state Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel of Southern California and other state officials. Becker, Wiener and Gabriel co-lead the California Legislative Jewish Caucus.
Sarah Levin, executive director of JIMENA, said that only four of the CDE’s 75 grantees budgeted money to address antisemitism. And, according to JIMENA’s letter, 46 of the grantees did not mention the word “antisemitism” in their proposals. The proposals, which were reviewed by J., did mention other forms of bias such as hate against LGBTQ and Asian American individuals.
JIMENA has received no official response to its complaints, Levin said on April 24.
“We see this as a missed opportunity,” Levin said. “We believe that [antisemitism] should be included because the Legislature was clear that that was the intention of the grant.”
Established in 2021 as part of the state’s plan to address an increase in hate incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the Antibias Education Grant Program awards money to California schools to establish anti-bias training programs and resources for students and teachers. According to Assembly Bill 130, which established the grant, such programs should place emphasis on “preventing anti-Semitism and bias or prejudice toward groups, including, but not limited to, African Americans, Asian-Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning youth.” Between AB130 and a second bill in the 2022-2023 legislative session, the program received $20 million in one-time funds to distribute. Schools or districts can each receive up to $200,000.
On Feb. 1, the Education Department announced that it had awarded about $14 million to 75 schools and districts across the state. The remaining $6 million has yet to be awarded.
Several Bay Area education agencies received grants. The Marin County Office of Education, San Mateo–Foster City School District, Piedmont Unified School District and Hayward Unified School District, all of which have dealt with antisemitic events at their schools in recent years, received the maximum grant amount of $200,000. Although each of those districts’ grant proposals outlined their intention to address antisemitism, only Marin specifically set aside grant funds for this work, noting that the district plans to work with Jewish Family and Children’s Services to create professional development plans for its educators.
A statewide solution, proposed by JIMENA and several other Jewish groups that signed the March 6 letter, is to suspend grant disbursal until grantees submit revised proposals that address antisemitism.
“What we would like to see is those types of interventions, which were already outlined, be implemented by the schools,” Levin said. “There are a lot of organizations who can do that work.”
In a May 1 statement to J., deputy superintendent Malia Vella said the Education Department administered the Antibias Education Grant Program in accordance with legislative requirements.
“It is a priority of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to address racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of bias in our schools; the money that has been allocated through this program is just the tip of the iceberg to making this happen,” Vella said in the statement. “Our schools would all benefit from more resources and funding for this important work.”
JIMENA’s letter was co-signed by the American Jewish Committee, StandWithUs, the Karaite Jews of America and other California-based Jewish organizations. KJA president David Ovadia said he supports JIMENA’s efforts because of his experiences with antisemitism growing up Jewish in Cairo. Ovadia, along with many other Karaite Jews, fled Egypt in the late 1960s due to the oppression of Jews in reaction to the Six-Day War.
“I don’t want my grandchildren to grow up in an environment of fear and hate as I did 60 years ago,” Ovadia said. “It’s important to really educate people, because that’s the only way in my mind that you can solve that problem.”
From Jewish News of Northern California, May 8, 2023