
A Jewish community center in the U.S. isn’t responsible for Israel’s military operations in Gaza, just as an Ethiopian restaurant isn’t responsible for Ethiopia’s military killing tens of thousands of civilians. Americans aren’t responsible for what a foreign government does.
Yet anti-Israel protesters have frequently demonstrated outside, or even defaced or vandalized, synagogues and Jewish community centers in the U.S.
Joanne Jacobs writes about one recent protest:
On Friday, 60 Berkeley middle-school students, equipped with a bullhorn, shouted anti-Israel slogans outside a Jewish community center that houses a preschool, writes Thomas Lifson on American Thinker. They’d walked from nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, escorted by two vice principals.
Back at school, someone had left a message on a classroom whiteboard: “[Name redacted] hates Jews. We stand with [name redacted]” next to a Jewish star, reports Emilie Raguso in the Berkeley Scanner.
It’s not the first anti-Semitic incident at MLK Middle School. According to a civil rights complaint filed by Jewish groups, at an earlier demonstration at the school, students shouted “KKK,” “Kill Israel,” “Kill the Jews,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
“Throughout the district it became a trend to ask Jewish students if they have a ‘number,’ an allusion to tattoos given to Jewish concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust,” the complaint charges. And it’s not just one middle school.
“Kill the Jews” also was shouted at a Berkeley High School walk-out on Oct. 18, Ilana Pearlman told Jenny Jarvie of the Los Angeles Times. Her son, a ninth grader, is multiracial. He now hides his Jewish identity because it’s safer to be black.
When she went over his ancestry project for ethnic studies, the only part of his ancestry he included was his Black side. He didn’t mention he was Jewish or that his ancestors were Holocaust survivors. . . . “Eh, it’s not really the right climate for that,” Ezra said.
Berkeley Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel told a Congressional committee that “antisemitism is not pervasive” in the district. She admitted there had been nine formal antisemitism complaints filed with her school district’s civil rights office since Oct. 7, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Jewish parents worry the school district’s new ethnic studies curriculum, now being developed, will attack Israel as an apartheid state that has no right to exist, notes John Fensterwald on EdSource. The district hired the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium on a one-year $111,120 contract to serve as what Ford Morthel called “a thought partner.”
The Consortium peddles a very left-wing, very anti-Zionist alternative to the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum framework that the state Board of Education declined to adopt statewide. Its model curriculum focuses on “dismantling capitalism, systems of racism, and Zionism, which it equates to colonialism,” notes Fensterwald.
Such antiracist activists often harbor antisemitism. Antiracist activists have often engaged in antisemitic hate speech since the October 7 terror attacks.
The “antiracist” belief that groups should not have “disproportionate” representation in any field naturally leads to antisemitism. As a father notes, “Given what my daughter was taught in school (e.g., reading leftist [antiracist author] Ibram Kendi’s book), it’s sadly predictable that many her age view Jews as oppressors. Kendi teaches that all ethnic disparities” in achievement “are due to discrimination. Jews are statistically ‘overrepresented’ in many fields” that pay well, like law and medicine.
Kendi, the author of “How to Be An Antiracist,” is very influential among leftists. Even the New York Times has touted Kendi’s axiom that “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” If someone believes all ethnic disparities in outcomes are due to discrimination, as Kendi does, then they will naturally be suspicious of Jewish “overrepresentation” in law, medicine, and other lucrative fields. Antisemites such as the Nazis have long claimed Jews were unusually successful because they were clannish and discriminated in favor of fellow Jews. In reality, Jews’ success in those fields was the result of their hard work and intelligence, not discrimination in their favor. Ivy League universities and many major law firms used to discriminate specifically against Jews. Yet Jews managed to become statistically “overrepresented” in fields like law even at a time when discrimination against Jews was more common than it is today.