Earlier this month, the California legislature passed a bill – AB 101 – that would require all public school students to take a semester of ethnic studies in order to graduate high school. The bill is now in Governor Gavin Newsom’s hands; he must decide whether to sign the bill or veto it. If the Governor signs AB 101 into law, California school districts would be permitted to use the ethnic studies curriculum of their choosing – and the current options are dangerous. Two of the curriculums developed so far are antisemitic and anti-Israel. Another, approved by the state, is an improvement, but it is still deeply problematic, failing, for example, to recognize that anti-Israelism can be a mask for antisemitism.
AB 101 should concern us all. If Governor Newsom signs it, California would become the first state in the U.S. to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement. Other states may follow suit.
Particularly troubling is that influential teachers’ unions and California college professors are supporting an ethnic studies curriculum created by an organization that calls itself the “Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute.” Among its many problems, the “Liberated” curriculum falsely describes Zionism – the expression of the Jewish people’s right to live in their religious and ancestral homeland – as “a nationalist, colonial ideology” and it falsely and absurdly accuses Israel of “apartheid.”
