On the docket at the New Jersey Education Association’s annual convention, which tends to draw as many as 20,000 teachers and school administrators, is a workshop titled “Teaching Palestine,” scheduled for Nov. 7.
Held in Atlantic City, N.J., the convention began on Thursday.
The workshop’s lead presenter, Adam Sanchez, is affiliated with the Racial Justice and Organizing Committee (RJOC), whose members, Gottheimer noted, have described the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when 1,200 men, women and children were slaughtered and 251 others kidnapped, “resistance.”
In a letter to Steve Beatty, a social studies teacher and president of the NJEA, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) accused the organization of inviting instructors with “a clear bias against our key democratic ally, Israel and the Jewish people.”
The congressman said the program’s source material, a book called Teaching Palestine, “reads less like an educational resource and more like an extremist political agenda.” The book urges educators to promote the BDS campaign against Israel, and accuses the Jewish state of “settler-colonialism.”
He noted that Keziah Ridgeway, co-author of the book, “was suspended by the School District of Philadelphia following social-media posts that alluded to violence against Jewish parents, including asking in one post where she could find a gun shop.”
Gottheimer pointed out that a section of the book “directly attacks” the Antisemitism Awareness Act—“bipartisan legislation that I have led.”
“Classrooms should be places of learning—not platforms for political propaganda,” Gottheimer concluded in his letter.
