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Ignoring the ongoing marginalization of Jews is one of the most insidious forms of antisemitism. The Jewish community makes up just 2% of America but is subject to 15% of all hate crimes and 68% of religious-based hate crimes – and those numbers are increasing.
Amid this backdrop, it is essential that Jews retain the right afforded to every other vulnerable minority: defining what prejudice against us looks like.
Articles like “Controversial consultant among vendors up for PVUSD ethnic studies contract” deny us that right by elevating counterclaims above our own.
It wasn’t just a few community members and trustees who said California’s 2019 model ethnic studies curriculum draft, prepared in part by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, was antisemitic. The president of the California Board of Education, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, the Anti-Defamation League, the Israeli-American Council, the American Jewish Committee, the AMCHA Initiative, the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California and many others recognized the curriculum’s bias and called for major revisions.
When overwhelming numbers of Jews, their allies and huge Jewish advocacy organizations say that something is antisemitic, it is – and it’s not up to non-Jews to contradict us.
Ironically, organizations like the University of California Ethnic Studies Council and the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium – where Tintiangco-Cubales holds a leadership position – characterize some of those Jewish organizations as “white supremacist.”
Finally, it’s not for lack of trying that we don’t know what’s in Pajaro Valley’s ethnic studies courses – the district has not released detailed lesson plans. We need transparency and fairness in ethnic studies, not “community responsive education” that ignores an entire community.
Rosalind Shorenstein
Watsonville