Kindergarten Intifada: Reading It Like A Realist

Abigail Shrier's article on the supposed rise of antisemitism indoctrination in public schools tells a very different tale if read with understanding.

In late October, The Free Press published Abigail Shrier’s¹ article Kindergarten Intifada. Shrier’s charge that “[t]here is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel” would benefit much from a better understanding of important issues in education. ²

So I thought I’d explain how to read the article like an, er, education realist.

Activist Organizations Pushing Curriculum

Shrier accuses schools, teachers, and advocacy groups of formulating “anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight”.

I am unclear why she finds this fact newsworthy. School districts are inundated with curriculum offerings of various activist groups. Getting special interest lessons for free is business as usual in American education. Likeminded people form groups, raise money, create lessons, and push their wares on busy teachers. Better yet, they push politicians to require curriculum on given ethnic groups, which vary by location. With a few simple googles you can find a picture book on Carter Woodson³ Anne Frank lesson plans. Welcome to Argentina booklets for Hispanic Heritage Month. American Muslim teens talking about the immigrant experience. Post Schindler Viewing Discussion: The Persecution of the Rohingya and the Persistence of Genocide. As you might tell from the list, Jewish advocacy groups consistute a major chunk of the curriculum donators.

But of course, the gravamen of Shrier’s charge is that this curriculum offends Jewish parents. To which the pro-Palestinian groups would say “backatcha”, pointing to the legislation to redefine antisemitism and control how it’s covered in k-12 curriculum.

Examples abound of Jewish advocacy groups building and pushing curriculum that could easily offend immigrants of other countries. Burmese⁴ aren’t thrilled with curriculum linking Rohingya policy with the Holocaust, and various Rwandans might object to the USC Shoah Foundation’s lessons on their civil war as a genocide.

Given this context, it’s hard to see any basis for dismay at what Shrier terms a “conspiracy”. States, districts, and individual schools accept curriculum created by well-meaning activist groups seeking to affect American children’s values and beliefs every day.

There’s probably not any unique attribute of the pro-Palestinian curriculum that couldn’t be used to characterize some other advocacy group’s lesson plans. Dull? Check. One-sided? Check. Offensive to other American communities, immigrant or native? Check. Including information that other American communities find false or offensive or both? Check, check, check.

Want to ban advocacy groups distributing curriculum? Passionate, dedicated, committed Jewish advocacy groups with all the good will in the world will be hit first and hardest.

Jewish parents are extremely pissed off about teachers using Palestinian-sponsored curriculum. They would probably support distribution of lessons favoring the Israeli and Jewish viewpoint.

Ox, meet gore.

Never Forget the First Variable

Ed’s Rule of Education: education in America has everything to do with race, so any discussion of school has to include some scrutiny of that difficult topic. This rule was recently reaffirmed during and after the pandemic.⁵

But living in high diversity areas tends to change your perspective in ways that aren’t transferable. For example my first thought upon reading Kindergarten Intifada was to wonder what was the race of all those students who were singing “From the river to the sea” and donning those keffiyahs and Palestinian flags, or wearing those FREE PALESTINE teeshirts, or shrieking “ISRAEL SUCKS!” at the top of their sixth grade voices.

Were those mean, misbehaving students all white? Maybe a black student wrote that ‘white ass privileged boy’ text? The girls in headdresses might be Middle Eastern Muslims. But mostly white?

Because Shrier is using stories mostly from court cases and complaints involving six high schools in California’s Bay Area to declare a public school conspiracy to indoctrinate students with antisemitism⁶, and Bay Area high schools are very rarely majority white.

Shrier doesn’t mention the schools’ demographic profiles, but they are instructive.⁷

Three of the schools are 40% white, but Woodside and Menlo Atherton have as many or more Hispanics as whites. Fremont High is in Sunnyvale, a lesser known Silicon Valley suburb three times the size of and far more diverse (read lots more Hispanics) than Cupertino High, which is over 70% Asian, most of it Chinese. University Preparatory Academy is the charter Shrier doesn’t mention by name (the court case is easy to find): 50% Asian with the rest split mostly between Hispanics and blacks at 19% and 18%.

Shrier also includes a recording from a United Teachers of Los Angeles conference (more on this later) that she asserts is evidence of teachers unions “pushing”anti-Israel activism⁸. All the teachers presenting⁹ work at majority Hispanic schools.

This demographic data provided as context for a serious question: is Shrier contending that every racial group of school kids in America are being indoctrinated into antisemitism by progressive teachers? Or did Shrier, like most people, read the court cases and just assume that the bullying students were all white?

And of course, many of my own readers might be thinking what the hell? What does it matter what the race of the kids is? I’ve been discussing this article with a friend of mine who is Jewish and lives in a high diversity area but with lots more white folks than my region of the world. He says it’d be totally normal and unsurprising if Hispanics and Asian kids bought into "Israel is colonizing Palestine” storyline and consequently hate Jews. I’m like….what? Really? Like, you wouldn’t even stop to wonder if the same story line convinced whites as blacks as Hispanics and so on?

He explained that Orthodox Jews, for example, look different. As a highly visible group, it’s easy to slip them into a different narrative. I’m like wait, routine exposure to Sikh turbans, Muslim burqas, and Norteno red dress and tattoos wouldn’t numb the distinctive impact of payot and yarmulkes? They don’t have that where he lives?

It was a terrific and enlightening conversation. I still think he is confused about my argument. I’m not denying that Hispanic and Asian kids living in cocoons might be swayed by an antisemitic or even pro-Israel doctrine. Nor am I denying that some kids of all races buy into progressive dogma. I personally would bet against the prospect of progressive teachers showing slides and talking smack about Israel persuading kids of any race living in a high diversity area being particularly convincing. But I could be wrong, and I have no energy vested in arguing that.

What I am arguing is that education stories centered in highly diverse, majority non-white regions like California’s Bay Area and Los Angeles need to mention race.

If all these teachers are convincing Chinese and Dominican kids to taunt Jewish kids wearing the Star of David, I’m ready to read that story. But *that’s* the story. Some focus needs to be on how the indoctrination intersects with the race of children in an area where there’s already no common cultural touchstones.

So give me a story like: “Surprising surge of antisemitism among Dominicans” or “Chinese immigrant students have suddenly become pro-Palestine—is this a function of their education or influence from back home?” Or even “White kids sink into antisemitism, but Hispanic and Asian kids have other concerns”.

But none of that’s in the article. And without that specificity, I advise caution and suspicion in accepting the story at face value.

Israeli vs Jewish

Not only is this issue fraught with the race question, but also the immigration question. An education realist two-fer.

Many of the students in these complaints Israeli immigrants. Turns out Sunnyvale, home of Fremont High School, has the largest cluster of Israeli emigrants in the Bay Area. So all the Fremont High School students mentioned in Kindergarten Intifada are Israeli. The Cupertino High School and University Preparatory students are both Israeli.

At least one of the families in the Sequoia Union High School lawsuit¹⁰ is Israeli¹¹ and, as the recording of the tense January 17 board meeting on the offensive curriculum reveals, a lot of the parents who complained are Israeli.

Ella Hassner, profiled in Kindergarten Intifada, has Israeli citizenship and while at Fremont High put up posters of missing children. She sang a song in support of Israel in the student talent show. She was passionately committed to identifying and purging what she saw to be antisemitism in her four years at Fremont. She is, in short, an Israeli activist deeply committed to representing Israel’s interests.

Ellie Miller, the middle schooler at University Preparatory Academy referenced int he article, has cousins in the IDF who have lost dozens of friends in the fighting and says she experienced a lot of bullying from Muslim students. Her mother, Elisa provided the principal “with a letter from the Jewish Community Relations Council… which offered many suggestions as to how educators could help combat antisemitism, as well as ways to talk to children who are affected by war.”¹²

There’s a huge and understandable difference, it seems to me, between “I am a Jewish American appalled by the 10/7 atrocities and feeling somewhat attacked by all these demonstrations supporting the other side” and “those motherfucking monsters killed my cousin and how dare you express even the faintest tangential support for their cause?”

But how do schools handle their demands? For example, one of the teachers identified is Hadi Kaddoura, a Palestinian Muslim. The filing makes several complaints about him that strike me as very not-credible.¹³ He is also charged with appearing in video where he “claimed to have been discriminated against due to his Palestinian Muslim identity and criticized diaspora Jews who claim a right to return to Israel”. If Jewish teachers and students can put up posters of missing children from October 7, shouldn’t Palestinian students and teachers be able to talk about their experience?

While both lawsuits are filled with hearsay horror stories with no documentation, it seems to me the real impetus of the cases are a demand for civil rights, either federal or state.

In the Sequoia Union High School court filing, the plaintiffs assert the school district “violated Plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment rights through a widespread or longstanding practice or custom that discriminates against Plaintiffs and their children based on their ethnic and religious identity as Jews, and their belief in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation, which they consider a fundamental aspect of their shared Jewish heritage.”

In the UPA case, the school, district, board, and every education official up the line “allowed Ella to be subject to the intimidation of her classmates because of her Israeli-American, Jewish and perceived Zionist identities in violation of the Ralph Civil Rights Act” and the Fourteenth Amendment.¹⁴ I’m skeptical those claims will work.

American schools have a long history of teaching “civil rights” as a tale of good guys and bad guys, going back to the 60s. Many teachers have used examples of American and foreign repression (as they see it) to draw parallels with our own history in lessons often describe as “critical thinking”. Increasingly progressive teachers have strayed further and further into opining

This has created tension as black and Hispanic civil rights activisms offends conservative communities, and vice versa. If a powerful ethnic community joining forces with a small but related immigrant community with demands to get equal treatment—well, I’m just not sure how it works.

I am all for American teachers being prohibited from promoting their own political views during history lessons. But the Israeli/Jewish lawsuits want *their* political views promoted within the school system, while squelching those they find offensive.

What should American schools do when serving immigrant populations whose countries of origin are at war with each other? How is a public school system going to privilege Israeli immigrants over Palestinian immigrants?

Which ones do we keep? Which ones do we leave out? Americans can’t even agree nationally on the curriculum topics for our own history. Now schools have to run their Holocaust curriculum by the Burmese and the Hutus. Maybe the Pakistanis will start demanding we rip down those Gandhi posters.

Both parties here, whether Israeli or Palestinian, are best-served by treating this as a Fourteenth Amendment case. It’s not the best time to remind Americans about the tensions created with increased immigration.

But that’s what this tension is about.

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Reading this like a realist is why I suspect that, like Shrier’s other foray into educational reporting, this story and these cases don’t go far. Israeli/Jewish factions do have this in their favor: courts *hate* public schools. Left and right, judges could give a shit about the practicality of running a wildly diverse education system under rules designed for a world of majority whites with a smaller black community that had endured under slavery. So sure, they could make some impossible decree to complicate schools lives.

But everything else about the story suggests they’ll lose, or the issue will fade out. We ain’t called The Blob for nothing, people.

Studying all this has given me new appreciation for the many immigrant communities that show up here and don’t make a fuss about the wars of their home countries. Mad props, for example, to the millions of Indians and Pakistanis living here who don’t torment public schools with lawsuits.

I actually began this writing effort to discuss the genuine problem with Shrier’s article—one that factcheckers should have caught. That’s my next piece. I hope.

1. While I just wrote 1500 words on Abigail Shrier’s lack of bio, I’m totally over that. I’ve got other issues to be irritated about. Also, while I think this article is weak and distorted, the problems lie in common views that Shrier and her profiled individuals share, so this is not really focused on her journalistic sins.

2. I tend to stay away from any issues involving either the Jewish faith or Israel’s existence. But once again, she has invaded my turf and talked about schools. So please keep in mind as I am addressing these issues as a matter of education policy, without much brief for one side or the other. It won’t feel that way, I know. Sorry about that.

3. Irony alert: Carter Woodson was the father of curriculum by advocacy groups movement, inventing Negro History Week.

4. Myanmar (terrible name) isn’t even thrilled at anyone using the word Rohingya.

5. For data on this, see The Real Reason for School Closures and my many other pandemic pieces.

6. Which is odd, given that the title of the piece implies this is an elementary school phenomenon.

7. Fremont High School: 43% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 17% white, 1% black
Cupertino High School: 71% Asian, 10% Hispanic, 10% white, 1% black
University Preparatory Academy: 49% Asian, 19% Hispanic, 18% black
Berkeley High School: 41% white, 22% Hispanic, 12% black, 8% Asian
Menlo Atherton High School: 39% white, 39% Hispanic, 9% Asian, 4% black
Woodside High School, 51% Hispanic, 40% white, 5% Asian, 1% black

8. UTLA is the Los Angeles Unified School District union.

9. David Feldman, Santee Education Complex Ron Gochez, Maya Angelou Community High School, Guadalupe Carasco Cardona, Roybal Learning Center, Will Shattuc, John Adams Middle School, and Ingrid Villeda, 93rd Street Elementary School.

10. I mention a few aspects of this and the University Preparatory Academy lawsuits, but I don’t go into them in detail. Most of the charges are sstudent claims. Others may differ, but it is probably unwise to accept any of these claims on their face. I very much doubt the schools and districts are allowing rampant racial abuse to occur. But if they are, that’s a separate issue from the curriculum and conspiracy charges and thus not what I’m addressing here.

11. I wouldn’t know a “Jewish” name, but Igor Bershteyn sounds non-American.

12. Irony alert: the mother was offering the school curriculum that promoted her point of view.

13. “On the same day the video aired, S.B. was waiting outside a classroom when Kaddoura approached her and asked why she was there. When S.B. replied that she was “waiting for friends,” Kaddoura responded with a sneer, “You have friends?” He then asked S.B. if she was Jewish, claiming that he could tell by her nose. The interaction left S.B. feeling humiliated and publicly shamed."

Claims like this need video evidence. I’m not defending the guy. But he’s a math teacher by examination, by which logic dictates he’s not a moron, and “he’s a moron” is the only way this story is credible on its face.

14. and so she should be reimbursed for private school hahahaha good luck with that.