The nonprofit Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa and the Education Policy Project, a consultancy, are asking the House Education and Workforce Committee and the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor and Justice to investigate and suspend federal funding for a University of California program that trains K-12 teachers over alleged bias against Israel.
“Educators are being trained on materials that erase and rewrite Jewish history, teaching that Jewish life in Israel only began in the 1880s and that Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews rejected Zionism rather than inspiring it,” Sarah Levin, executive director of the nonprofit, told JNS.
“For our communities, this is not a matter of competing historical interpretations. It is the falsification of our identity and our lived history,” she said. “Federal education dollars must never be used to erase well-documented historical fact or advance virulent anti-Zionist bias.”
The two groups wrote to the House panel and the three U.S. federal agencies on April 30 that the public university system’s California Subject Matter Project includes materials related to the Middle East and North Africa that have “a discriminatory and politically contested interpretive framework.”
The framework “erases and misrepresents core aspects of Jewish history, current events, identity and indigeneity,” the groups wrote. (JNS sought comment from the university system.)
The project operates at more than 90 regional sites and provides instructional materials and training to some 40,000 K-12 teachers in 1,000 school districts, with a combined nearly 6 million students, as of 2022, per the letter.
“JIMENA filed this complaint because we will not stand by while our history is distorted in taxpayer-funded programs meant to train the teachers of California’s 6 million public school children,” Levin told JNS.
The letter contains examples of alleged bias in work from university project centers, including the University of California, Los Angeles’s history and geography project’s ethnic studies certificate program, which teaches “the occupation of Palestine and genocide of Palestinians.”
Material from the University of California, Davis history-social science project describes the movement of Jews from countries like Iraq and Egypt as “emigration,” without mentioning the “documented expulsions, detention and confiscation of property that accompanied the forced departure of nearly 1 million Jewish refugees from those countries in the 20th century,” the groups wrote.
The UC Davis project has also directed students to read a speech from Ruhollah Khomeini, in which the former Iranian regime leader stated that the 1979 Iranian Revolution was necessary to cut off the hands of the United States and that “the path to Islam” was through “fighting oppressive powers,” according to the letter.
Students were not provided context about how the Khomeini regime fomented terror and oppressed Jews, women and gay people, according to the letter.
The House committee hasn’t received the letter, JNS was told. JNS shared a copy of the letter with a committee spokesman.
The spokesman told JNS that “we are reviewing the issues raised as part of our ongoing investigations and oversight efforts and will take the information they submitted into consideration as that work proceeds.”
The Labor Department referred JNS to the Education Department. Natalie Baldassarre, senior media affairs manager for the Justice Department, told JNS that the department “received the letter and will decline to comment further.”
