The Ethnic Studies to Antisemitism Pipeline: Pajaro Valley Edition

On Wednesday night, often to cheers and applause, school board members of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), in Santa Cruz County California, berated and accused the Jewish community of using its wealth and privilege to maintain power at the expense of black and Hispanic communities.

The comments were made during a PVUSD meeting centered on whether to renew its contract with Community Responsive Education (CRE), an organization led by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, to provide professional development for Ethnic Studies. Tintiangco-Cubales is a member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC) and an original author of the California State of Education’s model Ethnic Studies curriculum. The curriculum had to be revised after widespread concerns over antisemitic content. As a result of those changes, Tintiangco-Cubales subsequently removed her name from the finished product.

PVUSD had a previous working relationship with CRE when they developed PVUSD’s Ethnic Studies framework and helped with curriculum development and teacher training. This relationship was severed after Tintiangco-Cubales’ public rejection of California’s model ethnic studies curriculum. Since then, activists have fought for PVUSD to reinstate its contract with CRE.

Thanks to California’s AB 101 legislation, Ethnic Studies will soon become a graduation requirement for California’s high schoolers. As activists were quick to point out in last night’s meeting, Ethnic Studies is not Multicultural Studies; it is not the study of different communities and their contributions to the United States. As it is written and applied, Ethnic Studies is about identifying systems of power and oppression and learning how to dismantle them.

Systems do not materialize out of thin air. They are built. They are designed. If our liberal society is a “system of oppression” then it must have been purposefully designed by oppressors to maintain power.

Ethnic Studies teaches a Manichean worldview of good and bad, oppressor against oppressed, powerful and powerless. That kind of simplistic thinking has always been a happy hunting ground for the antisemite and the conspiracist. It is no surprise, then, that as Ethnic Studies gets adopted in K-12, there is a rise of antisemitism in schools. And this was perfectly displayed by the school board members who voted to approve the CRE contract last night.

Trustee Joy Flynn, for example, assured the Jewish community that there was no hint of antisemitism in CRE’s work while simultaneously claiming that the Jewish community has economic power and white privilege that they are not using to benefit the wider community. Trustee Gabriel Medina went further, addressing Jewish community members in the audience: “You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are…the lies that you spewed here tonight were insane … if you want to continue to be segregationists like you have in the past …”  

A teacher in PVUSD said, in regard to antisemitism in the CRE curriculum, “It would be disrespectful to me, to every teacher who has been in this training, to every student, if you were to say ‘We don’t believe you, we believe this one minority’ and maybe the fact they gave money to certain campaigns helps.” He went on to say “Turns out I’m part Ashkenazi Jew, so if that ups my favoritism, please renew CRE.” This last remark was met with jovial laughter. 

This wasn’t just offensive — it was revealing. Open antisemitism like this may shock, but it shouldn’t surprise. The ideological lens of Ethnic Studies, with its obsession over systems of power and its binary moral structure, aligns all too easily with antisemitic conspiracism. Tragically, it seems that PVUSD has adopted this worldview wholesale.

Let’s hope other districts don’t follow their lead.

Dr Mika Hackner is Senior Research Associate at the North American Values Institute. She has been published in Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, the Washington Post, Quillette and the Jewish Journal.