A Jewish member of Congress is calling on U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to hold schools accountable for creating hostile and unsafe environments for Jewish students by implementing anti-Semitic “ethnic studies” curricula in their district.
In a letter to Cardona late last week, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) said he was troubled by certain model ethnic-studies curricula that have been brought to his attention, which diverged from the widely accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the U.S. government.
“We must promote civil discourse and a high-quality, inclusive cultural education that lifts up marginalized communities rather than teaching antagonistic values in our public schools,” he wrote in a letter obtained by JNS. “Our civic education should be free of bias against any group. We need a united, all-of-government effort to combat rising anti-Semitism and bigotry, including ensuring that we do not fund this type of dangerous and exclusionary curricula in our schools.”
Gottheimer called for a bipartisan, national-level commitment to address the threat of anti-Semitism and bigotry, by encouraging school districts to develop model curricula that strengthen critical thinking and understanding.
Most recently, Jewish organizations in California joined together to successfully remove anti-Semitic parts of California’s statewide ethnic-studies curriculum proposal, but there are other ethnic studies programs are being developed throughout the United States.