California's new ethnic studies curriculum, rather than being the "we all love each other, kumbaya" programs nice middle-class progressives imagined, is incorporating hardcore anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, along with all the other racially divisive, anti-American, pro-socialist material we've come to expect from the left.  This has come as a shock to Democrat party Jews who supported "woke" politics.

The Jews I knew in California were nice, caring, people, who were all Democrats.  They loathed Trump, believed in the Russia hoax, supported both impeachments, adored Gavin Newsom, were out there protesting with Black Lives Matter, kvelled over Kamala Harris and her secular Jewish husband, and celebrated hard when Biden won the presidency.

They tutted about, but never took seriously, the rise of anti-Semitism within the Democrat party.  They weren't pleased when the Women's March took on a strong anti-Semitic tone, but they assured themselves that the real anti-Semitism in America was among those right-wing Trump-supporters.

They couldn't understand how Trump, whom they viewed as a leader of white supremacists, was the strongest ally Israel has ever had in the White House.  The same cognitive struggle occurred when Trump started making peace in the Middle East — even as they celebrated it, they lambasted Trump and Jared Kushner and assured each other that Biden would do better.

Things hit close to home, though, when they realized that California is lining up the most openly anti-Semitic effort in America since Father Coughlin and Henry Ford put their heads together back in the 1920s and 1930s.  This vile push started in 2016 when then-governor Jerry Brown signed a law mandating an ethnic studies curriculum for California high schools.  In California, the fact that students can't read or do math is infinitely less important than making sure that they get racially indoctrinated.

Instead of being like our old 1960s social studies classes, which took us on a cheery voyage introducing us to children around the world (they're just like us only with quaint cultural customs!), the new curriculum is a woke mess of micro-labels, intersectionality, socialism, and hardcore Jew-hatred.  In a must-read article, Tablet sums it up:

In one sample lesson, [Kaplan] saw that a list of historic U.S. social movements — ones like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Criminal Justice Reform — also included the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS), described as a "global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions." Kaplan wondered why a foreign movement, whose target was another country, would be mischaracterized as a domestic social movement, and she was shocked that in a curriculum that would be taught to millions of students, BDS's primary goal — the elimination of Israel — was not mentioned. Kaplan also saw that the 1948 Israel War of Independence was only referred to as the "Nakba" — "catastrophe" in Arabic — and Arabic verses included in the sample lessons were insulting and provocative to Jews.

Kaplan, 53, a Bay Area mother of two grown children who describes herself as a lifelong Democrat, was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.

Kaplan began calling friends. "Have you read this?" she asked, urging them to plow through the 600-page document. The language was bewildering. "Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations. …" This was the telltale jargon of critical race theory, a radical doctrine that has swept through academic disciplines during the last few decades.

The new curriculum, which will eventually be promulgated throughout the California school system of 6 million children, would "critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism … and other forms of power and oppression," according to the proposal. It would "build new possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance."

Capitalism was classified as a form of "power and oppression," and although "classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia" were also listed as forms of oppression, anti-Semitism was not. Jewish Americans were not even mentioned as a minority group.

(Please read the whole important article.)

My Jewish friends wanted Democrat party governance, and they're about to get it good and hard.  As California goes, so goes America.  And while I'd love to revel in schadenfreude, I can't.  We all need to fight it because anti-Semitism always comes as part of a package of hatred and tyranny.  Going back millennia, it's always the canary in the coalmine for the worst that any culture has to offer.