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Updated: Feb. 27, 2021
American Jews recently discovered an indignity their California compatriots had long warned them about: Children in the state were about to be subjected to in-class lessons that demonized and belittled the Jewish people.
Sounding the alarm was veteran journalist Emily Benedek. In her Tablet Magazine article “California is Cleansing Jews from History” last month, she wrote how the state had mandated the establishment of a model ethnic studies curriculum, to be taught at all K-12 public schools.
The curriculum’s first draft, published in 2019, underwent a few different iterations since its release at the behest of Jewish groups who felt excluded from it. But Benedek wrote that even its latest version, published in December, describes Jews as uniquely “privileged,” goes to great lengths to never mention antisemitism in its over 300 pages, assails Israel at every opportunity and props up the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – of whi