Legislators Should Vote No on SB1277

My children are six and two years old, so they’re too young to understand the complexities of an ongoing debate in the Jewish community; our community. The debate stems from the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust, the painful and devastating history of people being slaughtered for being just like us, and the fear that it could happen again.

On one side of the debate, some Jews want to raise unfounded fears of another genocide of Jews and prevent another specifically Jewish genocide, purporting the Holocaust to have been exceptional in history. On the other side of the debate, other Jews want to prevent a genocide from happening to any people, recognizing the Holocaust to sadly be only one of many catastrophic destructions of ethnic, religious, national, and racial groups.

I’m not sure whether the more difficult part of this conversation to convey to my children when they’re ready to hear it will be the horrors committed against Jews and other oppressed communities or the attempt by fellow Jews and Jewish organizations to privilege Jewish suffering over that of other persecuted groups.

My older child recently started first grade at a Berkeley public school, and my younger kid will follow in a few years. California has a rich history of ethnic studies in public schools, thanks to courageous and determined students and teachers of color. As a former public school teacher myself, I trust my children’s teachers to support them in learning these difficult histories.

California Senate Bill (SB) 1277, proposed during the current Israeli invasion of Gaza, which many experts are calling a genocide, is headed to the assembly floor this month. If passed, this bill would limit teachers’ abilities to provide accurate and appropriate genocide education by privileging the Jewish Holocaust as the primary subject of genocide education and listing a total of only seven genocides. Wikipedia, in contrast, lists 51. Particularly notable absences from the list are the Maafa or Black Holocaust and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, funded in large part by the US government.

The bill assigns the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education, led by Israel-aligned Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center in collaboration with 13 other organizations, the role of training California’s teachers in genocide education, presumably in this flawed method of highlighting Jewish genocide over all others. What’s more is that a number of the collaborative partners are explicit in their pro-Israel bias and regularly use Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

We barely need to read between the lines to perceive that the goal of the bill is not about promoting or supporting genocide education, but rather about limiting education about Palestinian history and current events.

Here in the Berkeley Unified School District, our ethnic studies curriculum has come under criticism by a small group of vocal parents who claim to support ethnic studies in theory, but object specifically to the Liberated Ethnic Studies program that works with local teachers to address the particular needs of their students.

In part, what they’re objecting to is that there aren’t pre-prepared lesson plans that can be reviewed by parents ahead of being taught in order to avoid challenging families’ political beliefs. I can relate to the feeling of wanting to know everything my children are being taught all those hours they’re away from me, but legislating curriculum as a solution is misguided.

When I was a young teacher, I remember thinking that the first year teaching would be the most difficult because I had to write all my lesson plans for the first time. I imagined that the following year, I’d be able to use all those lesson plans with my new class. But what I learned is that it’s not actually possible to use the same lesson plans for a new group of students. They need to be adapted from year to year and even tweaked from day to day.

If today a significant number of students struggle with a math concept, a skilled teacher will delay tomorrow’s lesson in order to spend more time reviewing. Likewise if today a student shares a tearful personal story, an effective social studies teacher won’t simply move on to tomorrow’s lesson without reflection. This flexibility to adapt to students as they are grappling with the curriculum (and with an unpredictable and scary world) is invaluable, and it’s not possible with top-down legislation that stands in for teachers’ expertise.

Raising my young, Jewish kids to see the humanity in all peoples and to see their roles as preventing and combatting racism and genocide in all its forms feels more possible today, with a growing number of American Jews breaking from support of Israel’s policies of apartheid and oppression of Palestians and other minorities. Given the visible activism of so many American Jews to end Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza and uphold human rights, it’s no longer possible to pretend that bills like SB 1277 represent the will of a monolithic Jewish community.

I want my kids to be raised with the Jewish value of tikkun olam, repairing the world, seeing themselves part of a global community and developing empathy for all oppressed groups, and I urge California legislators not to stand in the way of that goal.