In 2021, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed into law a bill mandating that all students take a semester of ethnic studies. At the time, Jews in California asserted that it would become a vehicle for antisemitism, but their concerns went unheeded. Those worried Jews were correct, though: the Santa Ana Unified School District (“SAUSD”) in California recommends that teachers for its 10th-grade ethnic studies class rely on a book that is not only intent on advancing Marxism, but that is also virulently antisemitic.

Santa Ana is within greater Los Angeles. The city has over 310,000 residents, 76% of whom are Hispanic. Only 8.5% of Santa Ana’s residents are white, so they lack any power to exert white privilege. The SAUSD, with more than 44,000 students, reflects the fact that the Hispanic population trends young, because 93% of the students are Hispanic and only 2.8% are white.

SAUSD is in the grip of leftism, something made obvious through the information it provides about its compliance with California’s ethnic studies requirement. According to its “Introduction to Ethnic Studies in SAUSD,”

Ethnic Studies is the study of U.S. history through the perspective of people of color, specifically Black, Asian Pacific Islander Americans, Chicano/a/Latinx, and Native Americans. It is a class that delves into the cultures, contributions, resistance, and resilience of these groups that addresses issues of race, ethnicity, and racism.  Students will obtain the skills necessary to analyze oppressive structures and systems. Students begin to recognize their power and are encouraged to use voices to challenge and dismantle the many forms of racism that exist today. (Emphasis mine.)

That is Critical Race Theory writ large, and CRT is the racist vehicle through which leftists hope to implement socialism in America. CRT’s role in the program appears again on the “vision and mission” page, where we learn that “SAUSD’s vision of Ethnic Studies is to empower students to dismantle systemic racism….”

Image: Students (edited) by rawpixel.

To understand more about the pure leftism seething underneath the “ethnic studies” program, follow this link to “The Ethnic Studies Six Guiding Pillars For Interdisciplinary Learning: A framework for course creation and implementation.” I truly cannot do justice to the turgid language that clogs up this homage to Marxism-through-racial-studies.

But what does this have to do with antisemitism? Everything.

Beginning with Marx himself, a genetically Jewish man whose father converted the whole family when Marx was a child, antisemitic self-loathing permeates his work. This article describes how, in everything he wrote, Marx denigrated Jews and interwove them into his theory about evil Jews exploiting the world’s pure, beleaguered, and downtrodden workers. He updates the medieval blood libels to function in his anti-capitalist universe.

The results of Marx’s toxic antisemitism became most obvious in the 20th century: Hitler was a socialist. That’s why his party was called the National Socialist Party. Hitler and his fellow socialists presided over the murder of 6 million Jews. Meanwhile, beginning under Stalin, the Soviet Union rigorously persecuted Jews, depriving them of civil rights, imprisoning them in gulags, and executing them as enemies of the state. And those are just the obvious examples. Marxism is antisemitism.

That the ethnic studies mandate would embrace antisemitism was evident early on. Those California Jews who saw what was coming fought valiantly against the law…and lost.

And that brings us to the curriculum for the SAUSD’s 10th grade Ethnic Studies class. On page 17, at the very top, we learn that one of the texts the teachers will use is Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Aside from the book’s apparent totalitarian bent, it contains a historically inaccurate and truly toxic statement of the situation in Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians:

Israel is the main contemporary example of settlor-conquerors. For half a century, Israelis have been cleansing the occupied territories of native Arabs, most murderously in the late 1940s, renewed against in the Jewish land-grabbing of the past few years.

Everything in that paragraph is wrong, as well as being evil. It is a complete whitewash of the greatest and very cruel colonizing force on earth: Islam.

Jews have lived in the Holy Land continuously for over 3,000 years. No matter who conquered the land, Jews have been there.

Thanks to Mohamed’s pique that the Jews refused to recognize his new religion (a brutal pastiche of the Bible and his own desires), Muslims have been hostile to the Jews since the 7th century A.D. But significantly, despite building the al-Aqsa mosque to announce their conquest of Jerusalem, those Muslims who arrived millennia after the Jews avoided the land that is now Israel. It was a swampy, malarial wasteland. It was only when the Jews made it fruitful that the Arabs wanted it back.

Moreover, Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, are an integral part of Israel, where they enjoy full civil rights. It is the Muslims who have made their towns, territories, and nations Judenrein (Jew-free).

And in terms of taking, the Jews returned the entire Gaza Strip to the Arabs, who promptly used it as a terrorist launch pad. But most significantly, there is no “ethnic cleansing” when the Arab population in and near Israel is growing by leaps and bounds.

The SAUSD is teaching its students Marxism and, as an inevitable part of that socialist swing, they’re bringing foul antisemitism into the classroom.