“Isn’t it sad that the poor Palestinians had to leave their land because of Israel?”
That was my daughter’s response when I asked her what she talked about at Hebrew school. It was Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Remembrance Day, a time to remember fallen soldiers and victims of terror.
After picking my jaw up off the floor, I asked her to elaborate. Our Conservative synagogue apparently taught a lesson titled “Palestinian Perspectives,” inaccurately teaching my daughter and her Jewish classmates that Palestinian Arabs—not Jews—were indigenous to the land of Israel and that Jews stole Arab land.
I suddenly realized we are facing a new front in the war against Israel and the Jews: the infiltration of our synagogues. The message that Israel is a genocidal colonial project is now being taught in Hebrew school.
I asked the education director of our shul to provide the curriculum from that day, and it confirmed my worst fears. The lesson sounded as if it was written by the Palestinian Authority.
In an absurd inversion of reality, Palestinians are presented as innocents who suffer from intergenerational trauma caused by Jews. The Jews are presented as foreigners who appeared out of nowhere and took over. Worse yet, Israel is explicitly delegitimized in the text as “the land that Jews call Israel.” The fact that “Palestinians” only became a name used by the Arabs in the 1960s, or that it referred primarily to Jews before that time, is not mentioned.
While the curriculum that my synagogue used notes that 20% of Israel’s population today is Arab, it fails to inform students that countless Arabs are proud to be Israeli, and that they serve in the Israel Defense Forces and even sacrifice their lives for the Jewish state.
Instead of highlighting those Arab Israelis, the curriculum showcases a song by Mira Awad, one of the few Israeli Arabs who identifies as a Palestinian, and who, on social media, has falsely accused Israel of ethnic cleansing.
The lesson plan taught that day included a poem by Fady Joudah, born in Texas to Palestinian parents but who grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, returning to the United States for his academic degrees, where he now lives. His social-media posts glorify “Zionist and Western colonial defeat” and falsely accuse Israel of killing children “for the fun of it” and of committing a “holocaust” in the Gaza Strip.
My synagogue’s education director informed me that this curriculum came from an organization called Moving Traditions, which provides curricula to dozens of Reform and Conservative synagogues across the country.
Unsurprisingly, the Moving Traditions website indicates that they are supported by organizations like the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, a far-left syndicate that includes insidious anti-Israel groups like the New Israel Fund, Bend the Arc and JOIN, which receive funding from the same people behind B’Tselem, IfNotNow, CodePink and the phony Jewish Voice for Peace.
The chief of program and strategy for Moving Traditions is Rabbi Tamara Cohen, who participated in a Purim webinar this year with Israel-hating journalist Peter Beinart. They presented the Purim story with empathy for our enemies who failed to exterminate us, demonized the Jewish state for its justified response to the Oct. 7 atrocities, and asked participants to buy Beinart’s explicitly anti-Zionist new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.
The board of Moving Traditions includes Rabbi Noah Arnow, who absolves the Hamas terror organization, the United Nations and biased media sources of responsibility for the current war that started with the invasion of Israel’s borders on Oct. 7, 2023. He perpetuates Hamas’s lies about starvation in the Gaza Strip, writing that Israel should accept responsibility for all the loss of life in Gaza resulting from the war that its own rulers launched.
Moving Traditions has cultivated relationships with American synagogues for years and now uses these connections to insert anti-Israel invective into Hebrew-school curricula like a Trojan horse, validating the narrative of those who would destroy us; instilling guilt and shame in our kids for the success of Zionism; and attempting to break their connection to Israel.
There is only one “Palestinian Perspective” espoused by Palestinians and their leaders—that Israel and the Jews should be destroyed. We should not be teaching our kids to empathize with it.
These days, when you send your children to college, you expect that they will face anti-Jewish and anti-Israel invective. You may even be aware that this same strain of antisemitism is seeping into K-12 schools. But if you didn’t know that the war against Israel was being fought inside your own synagogue, then consider yourself warned.
