Welcome to your page in The Jewish Journal. The last Friday of every month belongs to the kids of Jewish Los Angeles. In honor of the New Year and new look of this page, we want you to come up with a new name for it. Please send your ideas to kids@jewishjournal.com with the subject line New Name. We’ll pick the best one and make it the new name for the kids page (and you’ll get all the credit).
Kein v’ Lo
The Kein Side:
Many children use the evening to collect tzedakah for different charities instead of asking for candy — or they donate the candy to a food bank. For most people, the holiday has nothing to do with religion or real witches or saints. It’s more of a chance to go out with friends, have fun and decorate. Besides, it’s a great way to meet your neighbors.
The Lo Side:
It is a pagan holiday (a night when people believed the spirits of the dead would contact the living) and a Catholic holiday (candles are lit Nov. 1 on All Saints’ Day to honor the dead), but Jews are not supposed to celebrate non-Jewish holidays. Asking strangers for candy is rude; and tricks are mean. Jewish children have Purim as a day to dress up.
Kein V’Lo: Halloween. We’ll publish your opinions next month.
Stump Your Parents
Enjoy these facts about autumn — test your parents, grandparents and older siblings and see who gets the right answers first.
1) Which Hebrew month do we welcome in November?
2) How many weeks of autumn are there?
3) What is the full moon that follows the beginning of autumn?
4) What were the first jack-o-lanterns made from?
5) Who first suggested using Daylight Saving Time?
6) Why do the leaves change color?
7) In the Torah Portion Noach (which we read Nov. 5), God put up what object to show that everything was OK after the flood?
Answers: 1) Cheshvan; 2) Thirteen; 3) Harvest Moon; 4) Turnips; 5) Ben Franklin; 6) As the leaves lose chlorophyll (which makes them green) their other pigments
are exposed.; 7) A Rainbow
As a mother of two grown children, Morlie Hammer Levin knows the challenges of balancing family, career and spiritual life. But factor in the L.A. native’s recent New York move, a high-pressure job with a high-profile organization and finding a new religious community and you have the makings of what would be a well-deserved nervous breakdown for anyone else.
But Levin has taken it in stride. In September, the former Jewish Federation vice president became national executive director of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America — the largest Jewish membership organization in the United States.
As she settles into her new routines, she’s looking forward to what her future holds without forgetting her past.
“New Yorkers have been surprisingly and thankfully welcoming and encouraging,” she said. “I miss friends and family and being part of the L.A. Jewish world, but we’re settling in well.”
Levin grew up in Sherman Oaks. She graduated from Millikan High School in Long Beach, earning her bachelor’s degree from UCLA and receiving her master’s in public policy from Claremont Graduate University.
However, working in the Jewish community was not something Levin set out to do. She came into it along the way. Levin began her career as a policy analyst with the Rand Corp., where she worked for 21 years before starting her own consulting firm.
“My involvement in the professional Jewish community followed my personal path toward Judaism,” said Levin, whose 1991 visit to Israel inspired her to get actively involved in local Jewish activities.
Her foray into Jewish communal work began with a position as manager of operations and projects for the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles in 1998. By 2000, she had joined The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and worked her way up to vice president of strategic donor initiatives.
During her time at The Federation, Levin developed a keen appreciation for mentoring and came to understand the importance of guidance and support in the workplace.
“Success is about finding the right people and then aligning their skills with their responsibilities,” Levin said.
Of all her contributions to the Los Angeles Jewish community, Levin sites the 2002 launch of The Jewish Venture Philanthropy Fund among her favorites. The program makes targeted, significant investments in scalable and sustainable philanthropic ideas, which appealed to people who wanted to donate their skills and abilities, along with their money.
Levin may look to advocate similar hands-on programs while at Hadassah, but for now, she’s using the transition period to familiarize herself with the 93-year-old, 300,000-member organization. Founded in 1912, Hadassah supports medical care and research, education and youth programs, reforestation, social action and advocacy, volunteerism and connections with Israel. Most recently, Hadassah advocated for stem cell research, supported the Violence Against Women Act and was nominated for a 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
Levin understands that elements of Jewish professional work are often at odds with family life. Evening meetings and weekend events can make things difficult. Despite the challenges, Levin says there are unlimited career opportunities for women in the Jewish sector.
“People often talk about a glass ceiling in the Jewish world and in the federation world, but I never found one. I received guidance and training, learned a tremendous amount, and was able to advance quickly,” Levin said. “I think quality can win out in the workplace.”
Don’t call Nancy Sher Cohen at home after 8:30 p.m. “One of two things is usually true,” the 54-year-old-litigator said. “Either I am asleep, because I am exhausted [from all the work], or I am out because I am working.”
For other, less-energetic people, an 8:30 nightly collapse from exhaustion would be an indication to slow down. But the lively and assiduous Cohen, a classic rock lover and breast cancer survivor, who has made her professional name representing, among other things, Holocaust survivors cheated out of life insurance money, chemical manufacturers and even the mortgage lender on the Twin Towers after Sept. 11, is impervious to such signals.
“She never really gets overwhelmed,” said Robert Cohen, Nancy’s husband, and a work-from-home screenwriter. “She is the poster child for multitasking. She finds time for everything, and she is a master at getting a lot of things done in a little period of time.”
For Cohen, shareholding partner at Heller Ehrman — a law firm of more than 750 attorneys with offices in 13 cities — and a indefatigable community activist who sits of the board of Bet Tzedek Legal Services, Congregation Valley Beth Shalom and the California Women’s Law Center, practicing law is a vocational expression of her Judaism. She finds in the law a similar process of exegesis to Torah study. Further, using the law to help the less fortunate, and the “make-peace-first” approach that Cohen brings to all her cases, she attributes to her Jewish background.
“I grew up in a Modern Orthodox congregation, where the study of Torah was very important,” said Cohen, speaking to The Journal from her downtown office. “What you do in the study of Torah is that you take a story or a commentary on that story, and try to gather from that a rule of law. Then, if you play with the story a little bit, and tweak a few facts, it changes the way you think about the rule.”
“Civil law is the same, but the story is from a previous case,” she said. “You tweak the facts and you change the law that you follow, and that changes the rules that you would apply. It’s a chance to understand nuance.”
Cohen, who is being honored at the Four Seasons on Oct. 30 by the American Jewish Congress with its 2005 Louis D. Brandeis Award, sees litigation as a way to solve problems.
“Sometimes you have to use the court system to do it, but I never try a case without trying to settle it first,” she said. “It’s a very Jewish thing to do. It is not about the fight, it is about the solution.”
But sometimes, fighting is the only solution. Currently Cohen is representing a group of Holocaust survivors who are suing European insurance companies who failed to pay out life insurance policies that their relatives had purchased before the war. The case, a class-action suit which has been going on now for eight years and could potentially be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, is a thorny one.
“Developing the facts is a real challenge — how do you find out from insurers whether or not your client had an insurance policy?” Cohen said. “[The insurance companies] say things like, ‘But you don’t have a copy of the policy or the death certificate’ — well, people didn’t bring their insurance policies when they were going to Auschwitz.”
Some of Cohen’s other cases are less sensational. On several occasions, Cohen has represented chemical manufacturers against Erin Brockovich-type lawsuits, where certain illnesses are blamed on a town’s proximity to a chemical plant.
“It does not offend my sense of justice at all,” Cohen said. “Many times these cases involve tragic illnesses, but I don’t have a problem representing a company who says that illness was not caused by something they did. Some things are just wrong. It is wrong that a child will get sick and die, but it doesn’t mean that it was caused by something, and it doesn’t mean that someone has to pay for it.”
While trying such cases can be challenging, it is in her personal life that Cohen faced the biggest trial of all. In 1997, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and spent nine months going through chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery. Throughout it all, she kept working. At the time she was managing partner at Heller Ehrman. She set up her office at home, and she also didn’t stop the community work she was doing as president of Bet Tzedek.
“People would see me in various states of hair,” she said, referring to the hair loss that is a side effect of the chemotherapy. “But I was never depressed. I always believed I would survive. I got tremendous support from home, and tremendous support from my law firm. The support I got from the community is something that I take with me every day.”
“She wouldn’t let anything interfere with the focus she had for Bet Tzedek, even though she was extremely engaged with many other important things in her life,” said David Lash, who was the executive director of the organization at the time Cohen was president.
“She was an incredible president,” Lash said. “We raised more money her year than we ever had in the past, we improved the staff and we took on new and exciting litigation [representing Holocaust survivors] that she prompted us into. She was a role model in that she tackled so many things successfully without regard for what normal people would consider to be serious restraints of time and effort.”
“She is a hero,” he continued. “That is the best way to describe it.”
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas got a warm White House reception last week, but got a colder shoulder from Congress and few top items on his Washington wish list, starting with a commitment by President Bush to move forward aggressively with the stalled Mideast “road map” peace plan.
Although he told a French wire service that he had convinced the administration not to oppose Hamas participation in upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections, administration officials were deliberately vague on the subject.
“[Abbas] got a reaffirmation of the president’s commitment to Palestinian statehood, but no indication of a new U.S. diplomatic thrust,” said Edward Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel who currently heads the Middle East Institute. “The president didn’t respond to a number of critical issues for the Palestinians, including prisoners. And you didn’t get the sense of a U.S. commitment to a really robust Palestinian security force that could do the job.”
During a joint press availability, Bush appeared to reject timetables for Palestinian statehood. Asked about earlier promises to win statehood before the end of his term, Bush said, “Not true. I’d like to see two states. And if it happens before I get out of office, I’ll be there to witness the ceremony. And if it doesn’t, we will work hard to lay that foundation so that the process becomes irreversible.”
Instead, the president emphasized what many pro-Israel groups urged him to put at the top of his agenda for the meeting: the need for Abbas to directly confront terror groups like Hamas.
Bush referred to the need to rebuild the Palestinian economy, but offered no specifics. Palestinians took some solace from the President’s statement at a joint photo opportunity that Israel must “remove unauthorized outposts and stop settlement expansion,” and his insistence that Israel’s new security fence “must be a security barrier, rather than a political barrier.
But that was just “a restatement of a constant theme,” Walker said. “It’s important to the Palestinians, but for Abbas, probably less important than some of the things the president didn’t do, like help with prisoners, more concrete work on creating jobs. I don’t think the president was very helpful to him.”
Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum president, predicted a more fundamental shift in U.S. policy — but not now.
“It seems like the administration’s natural conclusion is, ‘The Gaza pullout went fine, so what are you going to do for us next,'” said Pipes, a strong critic of the Gaza disengagement. “But right now, it’s just rhetoric. U.S. policymakers are distracted elsewhere. There’s no real urgency to it. But in the long term, it could be the precursor to something more.”
On the question of Hamas participation in upcoming Palestinian elections, the results were cloudy. Sean McCormack, the state Department spokesman, said that “our position hasn’t changed; the position of the Quartet [those involved in the road map] hasn’t changed with regard to the question of armed groups, terrorist organizations operating outside of the rule of law. We have been very clear in our view that Hamas is a terrorist organization; that hasn’t changed.”
But he also said that “from our perspective, it is also the case that how the Palestinian political process unfolds and evolves is a question for the Palestinian people.”
Martin Raffel, director of the Israel Task Force of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that there is “no receptivity in the Jewish community to Abbas’ view that the election is a tool to use to disarm Hamas after the vote.”
Most Jewish groups, he said, will continue urging the administration to “unambiguously enforce the demand for disarming Hamas and rejecting racist rhetoric” as the price for participating in the election.
Stephen P. Cohen, national scholar for the Israel Policy Forum and president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, said Abbas was satisfied with the summit.
“He’s too mature to expect unrealistic outcomes,” said Cohen, who met twice with the Palestinian leader last week. “He knows what President Bush’s domestic situation is. He didn’t set himself up with false expectations.”
He said that administration officials did not chastise Abbas on the issue of Hamas as much as many expected, and that Bush reaffirmed his commitment to improving the Palestinian economy.
“And he acknowledged Abu Mazen [Abbas] as being an effective leader,” he said. “That was very important to the Palestinians.”
Last Friday, Abbas participated in a forum on the future of Jerusalem that included Jewish, Catholic and Muslim clergy organized by Cohen.
Abbas got the red carpet from administration officials, but officials on Capitol Hill were eager to show how tough they could be with the new Palestinian leader.
Rep. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) co-authored a congressional letter urging the Palestinian leader to cut Hamas out of electoral politics in advance of parliamentary elections scheduled for January. The other primary author of the letter — which Capitol Hill sources say was aggressively pushed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — was Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio).
In the letter, Menendez argued that “groups or individuals such as Hamas who espouse violence, racism, intolerance and hatred should have no right to participate in democratic elections.”
The letter was signed by a bipartisan group of House leaders that included Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). Absent were Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and International Relations chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) Also hammering Abbas was Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) who has moved up the House leadership ladder to take on much of Blunt’s role as majority whip.
“I hope that Mr. Abbas learned today that he must keep his word to stop the murderous tyranny of the radical terrorist groups that operate freely in Israel,” Cantor said in a statement. “If Mr. Abbas wants to be taken seriously, he must immediately begin disarming the terrorists, as well as ban them and their organizations, like Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, from participating in elections.”
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), chair of the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, said after a meeting with Abbas that “I reiterated that there is no justification for Hamas’ participation in the January elections, while that terrorist organization maintains large-scale operational capabilities outside of the Palestinian Authority’s required monopoly on power, espouses the destruction of Israel as a democratic Jewish state and continues to engage in behavior that is inherently undemocratic.”
P.A. Plans to Bring Terrorist Group Into Security Service
The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) appears to be on the verge of a long-awaited security reform in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But last week’s announcement of a plan to incorporate the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade into the Palestinian Authority security services falls far short of the comprehensive crackdown on terrorism required by the U.S.-led “road map” peace plan. With violence escalating between Israel and the Palestinians, hopes of Israel’s Gaza pullout spurring peacemaking could prove short-lived.
“We have agreed today to establish five new camps for training and hosting the ‘stragglers,'” P.A. Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei told reporters, referring to the fragmented forces of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Qurei said the effort would begin in Ramallah and Nablus, among the most volatile West Bank cities. P.A. officials said the brigade, the terrorist wing of the P.A.’s dominant Fatah faction, would be reined in within weeks.
However, it was unclear whether Abbas will be able to carry out the plan, which makes no provision for disarming and dismantling far more powerful terrorist groups such as Hamas. Israel took a wait-and-see attitude.
“We have heard this sort of declaration before,” one Israeli official said. “The time has come for action.”
Bush Adviser Nominated as Federal Reserve Chairman
President Bush nominated Ben Bernanke to be the next Federal Reserve Board chairman. Bernanke, whose full name is Ben Shalom Bernanke, would succeed Alan Greenspan. The nomination of Bernanke, announced Monday, now goes to the Senate.
Bernanke, who has served on Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, was previously on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. He is a Harvard graduate and has a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
AIPAC Case Prosecutor Named to Higher Post
President Bush nominated the prosecutor in the AIPAC classified documents case to be deputy attorney general. Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, obtained indictments this year against a former Pentagon analyst and two former senior staffers at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, pleaded guilty earlier this month and the two AIPAC staffers, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, will go to trial on Jan. 2. McNulty is well known for handling a number of terrorism-related cases in his district. Bush nominated McNulty for the post last Friday, after another nominee, Timothy Flanigan, withdrew because of questions over Flanigan’s ties with scandal-tinged lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
McNulty, 47, will begin serving immediately as acting deputy attorney general, pending his approval by the Senate, and will also continue for the time being as U.S. attorney in eastern Virginia.
Briefs courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Jewish Agency Aids Arab Victims in Shooting by Jew
The Jewish Agency for Israel has compensated the Israeli Arab victims of an August terror attack by a Jew. Zeev Bielski, the Jewish Agency’s chairman, met Sunday with four families who lost relatives in a gun attack by an extremist ex-soldier in the Arab town of Shfaram. He gave each family a check for $5,000.
It was the first time the Jewish Agency’s Fund for the Victims of Terror has provided compensation to Arabs.
Iranian Selling Anti-Semtic Books at Frankfurt Fair
Anti-Semitic tracts are on sale at the Frankfurt Book Fair again this year. English copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” were displayed on the shelves of one of the Iranian booksellers at the fair, according to German political scientist Matthias Kuentzel, who purchased the books there last week.
Fair organizers said they could take no action unless an official complaint was lodged. Last year, the book fair, one of the world’s largest gatherings of publishers, was criticized for allowing Arabic book publishers to display Arabic versions of Holocaust denial and other anti-Semitic texts. Kuentzel, an author and educator specializing in anti-Semitism and Islam, said that this year, the books were available in English.
Bills Would Aid Parochial Schools in Katrina Crisis
Legislators in Congress introduced bipartisan bills that would compensate parochial schools for taking in students displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The Orthodox Union welcomed the bills, presented in both houses of Congress, but suggested a preference for the House version.
The Senate version allocates $6,000 per student and includes provisions to ensure that the money is not spent directly on religious studies. The House version allocates $6,700 per student, with no such restriction.
The O.U. called the House version “most efficient.”
With the school year back in full swing, do you know what your children are learning?
In thousands of public school districts across the United States, without ever knowing it, taxpayers pay to disseminate pro-Islamic materials that are anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.
Often bypassing school boards and nudging aside approved curricula, teaching programs funded by Saudi Arabia make their way into elementary and secondary school classrooms.
These teachings enter school systems with the help of a federal program, Title VI of the Higher Education Act, which is now up for renewal.
Expert analyses of these materials have found them to be full of inaccuracies, bias and proselytizing. They also have found that many of the major history and social studies textbooks used in schools across the country are highly critical of democratic institutions and forgiving of repressive ones. These materials praise and sometimes promote Islam, but criticize Judaism and Christianity and are filled with false assertions.
Most taxpayers don’t know they’re paying — at the federal, state and local levels — for the public schools to advance these materials.
Much has been written about the anti-Israel, anti-American bias found at many university Middle East studies departments, some of which receive Saudi funding. Critics have also probed the export of Saudi teachings to American mosques and Islamic schools.
A special yearlong investigation by JTA reveals for the first time how Saudi influence is penetrating the American classrooms of young children.
The investigation uncovers the complex path by which biased textbooks and supplementary teaching materials creep into U.S. public schools. It reveals who creates these materials and how some of America’s most prestigious universities — with the use of federal funds — become involved in disseminating them.
Saudi influence enters the classrooms in three different ways. The first is through teacher-training seminars that provide teachers with graduate or continuing-education credits.
The second is through the dissemination of supplementary teaching materials designed and distributed with Saudi support. Such materials flood the educational system and are available online.
The third is through school textbooks paid for by taxpayers, some of them vetted by activists with Saudi ties, who advise and influence major textbook companies about the books’ Islamic, Arab, Palestinian, Israeli and Middle Eastern content.
Ironically, what gives credibility to the dissemination of these distorted materials is Title VI of the Higher Education Act, a federal program enacted in 1958, in part to train international experts to meet the nation’s security needs.
Under Title VI, select universities get federal funding and prestigious designation as national resource centers for the study of places and languages the government deems vital for meeting global challenges.
Eighteen of these centers are for the study of the Middle East; each receives an average of about $500,000 per year. The taxpayer-supported grants are worth at least 10 times that amount in their ability to garner university support and attract outside funding, proponents of Title VI say.
As part of its federal mandate, each center assigns an outreach coordinator to extend its expertise to the community and to school-age children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Outreach usually includes workshops, guest speakers, books, pamphlets and whole syllabuses and curricula broken down into teaching modules, with instruction booklets for teachers and sometimes visual aids such as films.
While some school district officials are completely unaware of the material reaching their teachers and classrooms, others welcome it: Believing they’re importing the wisdom of places like Harvard or Georgetown, they actually are inviting into their schools whole curricula and syllabuses developed with the support of Riyadh.
The “Arab World Studies Notebook” is one such example. Billed by its creators as an important tool to correct misperceptions about Islam and the Arab world, the manual for secondary schools has been blasted by critics for distorting history and propagating bias.
First published in 1990 as the “Arab World Notebook,” the manual was updated to its current form in 1998. The newer publication was created as the joint project of two organizations — both of which receive Saudi funding.
Some of the references are subtle, critics say, making them all the more harmful. For example, the manual:
• Denigrates the Jews’ historical connection to Jerusalem. One passage, describing the Old City, says: “The Jerusalem that most people envisage when they think of the ancient city, is Arab. Surrounding it are ubiquitous high rises built for Israeli settlers to strengthen Israeli control over the holy city.”
• Suggests that Jews have undue influence on U.S. foreign policy. Referring to Harry Truman’s support of the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Palestine, separating it into Jewish and Arab states, it says: “Truman’s decision to push the U.N. decision to partition Palestine ended in the creation of Israel. The questions of Jewish lobbying and its impact on Truman’s decision with regard to American recognition — and indeed, the whole question of defining American interests and concerns — is well worth exploring.”
• Suggests that the Quran “synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations,” meaning those ascribed to by Christians and Jews.
• Leaves out any facts and figures about the State of Israel in its country-by-country section, but refers instead only to Palestine.
One of the groups involved in the publication is the Berkeley- based Arab World and Islamic Resources, or AWAIR (www.awaironline.org), founded in 1990 with funding from organizations that include Saudi Aramco, a Saudi government-owned oil company.
The editor of the notebook is Audrey Shabbas, AWAIR’s founder. Saudi Aramco World, the publication of Saudi Aramco, features pieces praising Shabbas and her teacher-training materials.
The second organization involved in the manual is the Middle East Policy Council of Washington, which helps print and disseminate the 500-page manual of essays, lesson plans and primary sources.
The council lists the manual as the primary resource material for its teacher-training program. It employs Shabbas to conduct its training and seminars. According to the group’s Web site (www.mepc.org), more than 16,000 educators have attended its workshops in 175 cities in 43 states. The manual itself claims to have reached 25 million students.
The council, which is headed by Charles Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, gets direct funding from Saudi Arabia.
In an interview, the council’s acting director, Jon Roth, declined to specify how much money his group gets from Riyadh, but made clear that he is seeking much more.
In September, Roth visited Saudi Arabia to meet with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, a member of the royal family who owns Kingdom Holding Co., one of the world’s wealthiest companies.
“We have been trying to cultivate the relationship with the prince for a long time, because he has lots of money,” Roth said after his trip.
“Our hope and expectation is millions” from the Saudi prince, who initiated the meeting after hearing about the teaching program, Roth said. He said his group operates on an annual budget of $750,000.
The council’s board of directors includes executives from companies with huge financial stakes in Saudi Arabia, including Boeing, ExxonMobil Saudi Arabia, the Carlyle Group and the Saudi Binladin Group.
Roth said that funding to the organization “has no strings attached.”
Sandra Stotsky, a former senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, is one of a growing number of critics of the “Arab World Studies Notebook.” It is one of the examples she cites in a study, “The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers,” in which she examines supplemental teaching materials.
The problem with many of the supplemental materials, which are most often distributed through teacher-training workshops, “is the ideological mission of the organizations that create them,” she said in her study, published last year by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based think tank on education.
“They embed their political agendas in the instructional materials they create so subtly that apolitical teachers are unlikely to spot them.”
In an interview with JTA, Stotsky called the notebook “a piece of propaganda” rather than scholarly work.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) issued a scathing report on the manual earlier this year, titled, “Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Public Education: A Critique of the Arab World Studies Notebook.”
The report said that the publication, while “attempting to redress a perceived deficit in sympathetic views of the Arabs and Muslim religion in the American classroom, veers in the opposite direction — toward historical distortion as well as uncritical praise, whitewashing and practically proselytizing.”
The result, the AJC report said, “is a text that appears largely designed to advance the anti-Israel and propagandistic views of the notebook’s sponsors, the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) and Arab World and Islamic Resources (AWAIR), to an audience of teachers who may not have the resources and knowledge to assess this text critically.”
David Harris, the AJC’s executive director, said upon issuing the report in February: “Educating American children about the Middle East and about different religions is vitally important, but the notebook is precisely the wrong way to go about it.”
Shabbas, in the introduction to the manual, says that AWAIR’s mission is to counter the “rampant negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims held by most Americans.”
“Recognizing that no work is of greater importance than the preparation of our young people for their roles as thoughtful and informed citizens of the 21st century, and recognizing, too, that U.S. involvement with the Arab World and with the wider world of Islam is certain to remain close for many years, AWAIR’s goal is to increase awareness and understanding of this world region and this world faith through educational outreach at the pre-collegiate level,” she writes.
In an interview with JTA, Shabbas said the goal of the notebook is “to establish a basis for understanding the Middle East” by examining the largest of the groups that live there — the Arabs.
Responding to criticism specifically about the effect of Jewish lobbying, she said everything in the manual comes from the Arab and Muslim point of view: “The notebook is what it is. If you go out anywhere in the Arab world, you’re likely to hear that view” of the U.N. partition and Jewish influence.
“Most textbooks merely tell people the U.N. voted for partition and the Arabs rejected it,” she said, adding that American students need to “delve into why people do what they do; what are their values.”
She also noted that the publication directs students to solicit other perspectives from various groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the AJC.
Roth of the Middle East Policy Council dismissed the critics of the notebook as “cranks.” His council touts the manual as an important resource for educators.
The manual is “of such high standards that the Middle East Policy Council believes it should be in the hands of every educator,” the group’s Web site says.
In an interview, Roth said Israel is “a big topic” for the council, but added, “The council does not take a position on Israel’s existence. The council does not take positions at all.”
Criticism also has come lately from parents offended by what their children are learning. Parental pressure led to the manual being banned in school districts in Tulsa, Okla., and Anchorage.
The AJC took the unusual step of issuing a public warning “urging school districts across the nation” not to use the manual.
Still, Shabbas and her publication are welcomed by outreach coordinators to some of the nation’s key national resource centers, including those at Georgetown, Harvard and Yale, from where she said in the interview that she had just returned from conducting a teacher-training session.
Many of the principal players involved in disseminating pro-Islamic, anti-American and anti-Israel materials to the public school system have links, direct or indirect, to a little-known place called Dar al Islam.
Located in Abiquiu, N.M., Dar al Islam (www.daralislam.org), which means “abode of Islam” in Arabic, is an Islamic enclave registered with the state as a nonprofit in 1979.
Situated in the remote mountainous desert of northern New Mexico, near the Ghost Ranch where Georgia O’Keefe lived, the massive complex is accessible only by an unpaved, dirt road.
It was created with direct financing from the late Saudi monarch, King Khaled ibn Aziz, and from five princesses in the Royal House of Saud, according to Saudi Aramco World.
A 1988 article in Saudi Aramco World detailed the saga of the royal family’s purchase of 8,500 acres of land and construction of a mosque and other buildings to form Dar al Islam.
According to the enclave’s Web site, the original intent was to establish a “Muslim village as a showcase for Islam in America.” When that became too difficult, the vision changed to an educational conference and retreat center.
Those buildings sit on 1,600 of the original acres; the rest was sold and invested to help finance its operation, Dar al Islam officials say.
In addition to the mosque, the enclave has a madrassa, or religious school, summer camp and teacher-training institute. It runs speakers bureaus and programs and maintains a Web site.
Dar al Islam spokesman Abdur Ra’uf Walter Declerck acknowledges some minor participation in the creation of Dar al Islam by a Saudi princess, but he disputes most of the funding history of Dar al Islam as recounted in the Saudi Aramco World article.
“It was not purchased by the royal family,” he said. Funding then and now “comes from Muslims all over,” he said, but would not elaborate.
Many of the individuals and groups involved in promoting education about Islam and the Arab world in American schools have ties to Dar al Islam.
Some are educators such as Shabbas, whose work is promoted by outreach coordinators at the national resource centers, and some are outreach coordinators themselves.
Shabbas, the lecturer and editor of “The Arab World Studies Notebook,” was director of Dar al Islam’s summer teacher-training program in 1994 and 1995, according to Declerck and Shabbas.
Others with connections to Dar al Islam include:
• Zeina Azzam Seikaly, outreach coordinator at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center on the Middle East. For several years, she was assistant director of Dar al Islam’s teacher-training institute, according to Dar al Islam’s Declerck.
Seikaly promotes many associates of Dar al Islam, printing their writings and inviting them to lecture. Shabbas has been involved in teacher training at Georgetown. Asked about Dar al Islam, Seikaly at first refused to discuss it, then admitted working there, but only for two weeks.
• The Council on Islamic Education. The group until recently was listed as an associate of Dar al Islam, under the heading of secondary schools. Independent textbook review organizations describe the council as one of the most powerful groups in the country, influencing the content of textbooks. Critics say that it distorts history in its effort to promote a positive view of Islam.
The group’s director, Shabbir Mansuri, says his organization is a “nonadvocacy research organization.”
Criticism that his group exerts undue influence on textbook publishers “comes from people who have no idea what we do,” he said.
“The Constitution allows us all a place at the table, without leaving our heritage at the door,” he told JTA. “I can lobby, I can demand and I can contribute.”
In initial interviews, Dar al Islam officials said the council has multiple roles there, including helping to create and evaluate content for its teachers.
After those interviews, the Dar al Islam site was changed to eliminate any mention of the council.
Asked to explain, Declerck said it was taken down to “avoid confusion. We know each other but we are independent organizations, we are not connected.”
• Susan Douglass. An associate of Dar al Islam’s Teachers Institute, she also is the curriculum specialist for the Council on Islamic Education.
She is a former teacher at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Virginia, a Saudi government-supported school, and she consults on textbooks and curriculum by major publishers. She has written a series of books on Islam for K-6 students at Islamic and public schools.
One of Dar al Islam’s Web sites, islamamerica.org, posts articles defending Palestinians and their supporters, while excoriating democracies, including America and Israel.
Some Saudi watchers say Saudi Arabia’s goal is to export the most rigid brand of Islam: Wahhabi Islam, which in contrast to other forms of Islam, is intolerant of other religions, according to experts.
It’s an agenda “more dangerous than communism” ever was, according to Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a Washington-based pro-democracy think tank, because it targets all nonbelievers, including Christians, Jews and most Muslims.
Such apostates have only three choices, he said: “Convert, be subjugated or die.”
The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to several requests for comment.
Declerck of Dar al Islam said the kind of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is “not what we transmit. Dar al Islam communicates much more of a mainstream Islam.”
But Al-Ahmed was adamant. In American public schools, he said, the Saudis are carrying out “a deliberate program to spread their version of Islam everywhere.”
“Their job is to give money to certain groups of Islamic organizations, to fund certain people, and those people they fund are people who they believe will further their goal of spreading Wahhabi Islam,” he said.
JTA Editor Lisa Hostein and correspondent Sue Fishkoff in California were among the contributors to this report.
U.S. lawmakers and academics are engaged in fierce debate over the renewal of Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
Under Title VI, select universities get federal funding and prestigious designation as national resource centers for the study of places and languages the government deems vital for meeting global challenges.
The legislation was first enacted in 1958, during the height of the Cold War, as part of the National Defense Education Act. Its purpose, according to its framers, was to ensure “trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.”
National defense, according to current Department of Education publications, “remains central to the programs 40 years after their inception.”
Critics seeking to amend the legislation contend that universities often promote anti-American and anti-Israel biases and do not merit federal funds that were intended to serve American interests.
Many academics worry that restrictions will violate academic freedoms.
While Title VI may have had a noble purpose, it does not work in practice, according to Middle East scholar Martin Kramer. He analyzed Middle East studies centers and the work of the Title VI national resource centers in his 2001 book, “Ivory Towers on Sand — The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.”
Kramer was the first to charge that using Title VI monies as a base, many Middle East studies departments pushed an anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian agenda on students and faculty.
This “group think” required obeisance, Kramer said, to what he described as the anti-Western “post-colonialist” beliefs of people like Edward Said, the late Palestinian activist and Columbia University professor of comparative literature.
At the same time, these academics denigrated the work of prominent mainstream Middle East scholars, such as Bernard Lewis, the Princeton University professor emeritus, as too pro-Western.
Kramer wrote that these departments encouraged a worldview in which instruction about Israel is twisted and degraded, while instruction about the United States eliminates positive and patriotic references.
The negative emphasis often found in these departments is like “teaching about the United States through the lens of what happened at Abu Ghraib prison” in Baghdad, said Sarah Stern, director of the Washington office for governmental and public affairs of the American Jewish Congress, which formally protested Title VI educational practices to the U.S. Department of Education.
“And it’s teaching about Israel through the lens of Deir Yassin,” she said, referring to an infamous battle during Israel’s War of Independence in which Jewish militias allegedly murdered Arab civilians.
In written testimony submitted to Congress in 2003, the then-director of Georgetown’s national resource center on the Middle East, Barbara Stowasser, and a colleague, defended the work of Georgetown’s national resource centers.
“We have had scholars working at our centers who have come to differing conclusions on an array of issues, as one would expect in an academic setting which is premised on the principle of academic freedom and the belief that rigorous research and serious intellectual discussion are important to informing both our students and others who benefit from contact with the work of our centers.
“We would make the point, however, that in the process, our centers’ work has been balanced and reflective of diverse views,” they wrote.
Legislation introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives this session by Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio) would create an advisory board to observe the workings of Title VI and report to Congress. Academic associations oppose the legislation as an attack on free speech and academic freedom.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce recently passed the legislation as part of the Higher Education reauthorization bill, but it has yet to pass the full House.
In the Senate, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) attached a different version of the legislation to the Higher Education reauthorization bill. The Senate version does not include an advisory board provision, but it does require a survey of national and defense agencies to determine what they most need from the university community, with the assumption being that it is Arabic speakers.
The Senate version also requires an objective grievance procedure if university students feel they’re being discriminated against. And it requires schools to show how many students who have studied in these resource centers actually go into national security and defense fields.
The House and the Senate are now slated to try to resolve the different versions of the legislation.
The state of California is on the brink of a major election that involves neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Clint Eastwood.
The candidates are textbooks and other teaching materials that will influence what schoolchildren across the state — and across the United States — will learn for more than a decade.
California is in the final stages of the “adoption process” for history and social studies materials in kindergarten through eighth grade. The process, which takes place every seven years, determines which books make the mark, enabling local school districts to use state funds to purchase them.
With the political, educational and financial stakes so high, publishers, special interest groups and educators take the process as seriously as any political campaign.
Among the contenders is “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,” a seventh-grade textbook, with other course materials, published by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute.
The course was piloted in Scottsdale, Ariz., earlier this year. But after a series of protests from parents — who objected to what they saw as distortions of Christianity and Judaism, with an overarching positive spin on Islam — the publisher decided to stop the trial.
“There was a lot of objection to the amount of coverage of Islam,” said Liz Russell, the development director of the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, which is based in Rancho Cordova, Calif.
The book was developed to meet California standards, which require “a lot more on religion in general” than most other states, she said.
California has mandated the study of religion since 1987. Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism are studied in sixth grade, and Islam is covered in seventh grade.
Meanwhile, the institute has pulled “The Modern Middle East,” a package of supplemental materials deemed so objectionable that a report by the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) said it creates a hostile environment for Jewish students.
The material is still for sale, however, and copies already in circulation likely will sit on classroom shelves for years to come, according to educational experts.
Both “The Modern Middle East” and “History Alive!” have hit the market since the early 1990s, a period that began what one reviewer has termed “the Islamization of the textbooks.”
Analysts say today’s history and social studies textbooks, and supplementary materials, sow positive propaganda about Islam, the Palestinians and the Arab world, while denigrating — in subtle and not so subtle ways — America, Israel, Judaism and democracy.
Distributed in public elementary, middle and high schools, the materials are paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
At least one Jewish parent, Dr. Murray Zucker, found “The Modern Middle East” so troubling that he withdrew his son from the public high school in Santa Rosa, Calif., and sent him to Jewish day school.
His son, David, was 14 when he was subjected to the materials and a teacher who endorsed every word of them, Zucker said.
Among other things, “The Modern Middle East” includes an exercise that has teachers divide the class into “Jeds” and “Pads,” representing Jews and Palestinians. The Pads are grouped inside a central area, meant to represent Palestine, while the Jeds are dispersed around the room.
Students then debate whether the Jeds should immigrate to the “Land of Pad.” Teachers are directed to show favoritism toward the Jeds, guiding the class to see the Jews as both victims and aggressors who succeed in taking over land that belongs to others.
The four Jewish students in a ninth-grade class of 30 pupils felt “powerless and marginalized and unrepresented,” said Zucker, whose son is now a freshman at Brandeis University.
Parents’ complaints in Northern California led to a published analysis of the material by a team headed by Jackie Berman, an educational consultant at the San Francisco JCRC.
The report, issued two years ago, concluded that “historical distortion and factual misrepresentations woven throughout the ‘Case Study of the Arab-Israeli Conflict’ render it unacceptable for classroom use.”
“As a result of the bias, a potential exists for the creation of a hostile environment in the classroom against Jewish students,” the report says.
The report says the teaching materials are studded with “misinformation, manipulation, omissions of key facts, oversimplification of complex issues, historical inaccuracy and lack of context.”
Tax money actually pays for these materials twice — once at the state or local level, where the materials are purchased, and again at the federal level, where some universities with federally funded Title VI national resource centers focusing on the Middle East help produce, promote and endorse such materials.
For example, at Ohio State University’s Middle East Studies Center, a Title VI national resource center, “The Modern Middle East” is recommended as one of many resources for educators.
As a result of parental intervention and the JCRC report, officials of the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute met with community members and agreed to rewrite the section in “The Modern Middle East” that dealt with Jews and Palestinians vying for one land.
That never happened, but the institute now says the material is no longer on the market.
“It’s quite dated. It was time for it to die,” the institute’s Russell said.
However, a sales representative for the institute said that even though the publication recently was pulled from the group’s Web site, it is still available for sale. And experts say teaching material can stay on school shelves for years even after it is no longer being published.
Alarm about the penetration of problematic teaching materials in America’s schools is growing.
Sandra Alfonsi, head of Hadassah’s Curriculum Watch, has focused on the issue for years.
“We believe that we can no longer ignore the pattern of Islamist revisionism that leads us from the K-12 textbooks to university courses and demonstrations on the college campuses and to the issue of the infusion of Arab petrol dollars that have funded and continue to fund American education,” she said.
In 2003, Gilbert Sewall of the American Textbook Council published “Islam and the Textbooks,” an analysis of some widely circulated social studies and history textbooks.
In their quest to expand coverage of Islam and non-Western civilizations — laudable, given 21st century geopolitics — textbook publishers have distorted history, wrote Sewall, the former education editor of Newsweek.
At the end of September, he reiterated his concerns in a letter to the California Curriculum Commission in advance of its public hearings on teaching materials by 12 publishers for grades K-8.
“It is not accidental that world history texts submitted to California read alike when they present Islam or that coverage of Islam in these books is lyrical and uncritical,” Sewall wrote. “Islamic pressure groups have been working energetically for 15 years to scrub the past in instructional materials. Textbooks either gloss over jihad, sharia (Islamic law), Muslim slavery, the status of women and Islamic terrorism — or omit the subject altogether.”
Sewall, who has testified in Congress on the issue, has said that the shrinking industry has come to be dominated by four main publishing companies — Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt and McGraw-Hill — with an estimated 80 percent of the textbook market.
In his recent letter, Sewall said that starting in the early 1990s, the publishers “allowed Islamic organizations — notably the Council on Islamic Education — to strong-arm them and in effect act as censors.”
The council’s executive director, Shabbir Mansuri, rejects these charges, insisting that his group is a “nonadvocacy research organization.”
At the same time, he said in an interview with JTA at the hearings in Sacramento last month, “The Constitution allows us all a place at the table, without leaving our heritage at the door. I can lobby, I can demand, and I can contribute.”
The council’s contributions to the process are clear: It is listed as a content consultant to three of the 12 publishers submitting programs — the term used for textbooks plus other teaching materials — for adoption. It also submitted a lengthy report to the curriculum commission commenting in detail on all the religions described in the teaching materials.
Mansuri testified at the hearings, as did representatives of other religions, including Jews, and appeared well-acquainted with many of the publishers’ representatives present.
The Council on Islamic Education was one of many groups that consulted on the “History Alive!” course, even though it is not listed as such, said Russell of the Teachers’ Curriculum.
Beyond the council, another scholar who consulted on “History Alive!” is Ayad Al-Qazzaz, a sociology professor at California State University at Sacramento, who was co-editor of the “Arab World Notebook.” That’s the predecessor of the “Arab World Studies Notebook,” a widely used teaching manual that has been banned in at least two school districts because of what critics say is pro-Islamic propaganda and anti-Israel distortions.
Many states have a textbook-adoption process, but those in California and Texas are the most important since those states have huge populations. In fact, some school districts in California buy more books than entire states.
“Texas and California are the states in which publishers introduce new textbooks,” Sewall said. “By looking at what’s available in California today, we will know what’s going to be available in the nation tomorrow.”
“History Alive!” and “World History” were among the nine programs that California’s curriculum commission recommended to the state Board of Education after its public hearings last month. The board is slated to make its final selection Nov. 3.
Berman of the San Francisco JCRC said she believes the Council on Islamic Education has been so influential because it has been pro-active in getting its views across, especially when it matters most — as a book is being compiled.
“It’s perfectly legitimate” for the council to want American students to have a positive view of Islam, she said. “If you look at the textbooks, you see they have been very effective.”
The Jewish community, in contrast, “hasn’t been at the table. The publishers have not been getting a unified, well-articulated point of view” from the Jews, she said.
Berman and her team recently created the Institute for Curriculum Services to serve as a resource center for Jewish subject matter in school curricula.
Their review of some sixth-grade books that California is considering for adoption turned up inaccuracies and troubling depictions of Jews and Judaism.
In their reviews, the institute cites as an example “the depiction of Passover as a celebration of the deaths of the Egyptian firstborn instead of a celebration of the Jews’ escape from Egyptian slavery.”
Their reviews say that “many of the texts contain narrations of the Crucifixion that blame or clearly implicate the Jews, presentations of the parable of the Good Samaritan that identify uncaring passers-by as Jews, and Paul as a persecutor of Christians when he was the Jewish Saul — all of these have been used throughout history as a means of implanting anti-Semitism in young minds.”
In a surprise move, the curriculum commission, during its Sept. 29-30 hearings, rejected an Oxford University Press sixth-grade history program that Jewish and Hindu groups had blasted as biased, erroneous and culturally derogatory.
The commission also passed a motion requiring publishers to make changes requested by the Institute for Curriculum Services before their programs can be adopted by the state board.
While buoyed by that decision, Berman said that being involved in the review process is not enough.
“We need to be involved while books are being conceived,” she said, just like the Council on Islamic Education.
Chairs are lined up in neat rows. Coffee is brewing, muffins arrayed. The table is thick with handouts.
One of them is Saudi Aramco World, a magazine published by Aramco, the Saudi government-owned outfit that is the largest oil company in the world.
“The Arab World in the Classroom,” published by Georgetown University, thanks Saudi Aramco on its back cover. Alongside it is the brochure of The Mosaic Foundation, an organization of spouses of Arab ambassadors in America, whose chairwoman and president of the board of trustees is Her Royal Highness Princess Haifa Al-Faisal of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.
If you think this is a meeting of Saudi oil executives or Middle Eastern exporters or Saudi government officials, you are wrong: It’s a social studies training seminar for American elementary and secondary teachers, held last year at Georgetown University.
It’s paid for by U.S. tax dollars, as the organizer points out in her introduction.
“We are grateful to the grant we have under Title VI of the Department of Education that underwrites these programs,” Zeina Azzam Seikaly, outreach coordinator of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, tells the more than three dozen current and former teachers at the seminar.
Georgetown’s Middle East outreach program is one of 18 affiliated with federally designated national resource centers, each of which receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
Much has been written about the biased nature of Middle East studies programs at universities around the country.
Less known is that with public money and the designation as a national resource center, universities such as Georgetown, Harvard and Columbia are dramatically influencing the study of Islam, Israel and the Middle East far beyond the college campus.
As a condition of their funding, these centers are also required to engage in public outreach, which includes schoolchildren in Grades K-12. Through professional development workshops for teachers and resource libraries, they spread teaching materials that analysts say promote Islam and are critical of Israel and the West.
Georgetown’s outreach and the materials it disseminates are singled out for special praise by Dar al Islam.
Its Web site lists four other outreach centers it admires: the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
Professional development workshops like the one at Georgetown provide the most frequent paths for the dissemination of supplementary materials to history and social studies teachers, according to education expert Sandra Stotsky’s “The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers.”
The problems with many of the supplemental materials, Stotsky said in her report, stem from “the ideological mission of the organizations that create them.
“Their ostensible goal is to combat intolerance, expand students’ knowledge of other cultures, give them other ‘points of view’ on commonly studied historical phenomena and/or promote ‘critical thinking,'” she wrote.
But an analysis of the materials convinced her that their real goal “is to influence how children come to understand and think about current social and political issues by bending historical content to those ends.
“They embed their political agendas in the instructional materials they create so subtly that apolitical teachers are unlikely to spot them.”
Among the materials Stotsky cites is “The Arab World Studies Notebook,” which has been widely criticized for bias, inaccuracies and proselytizing.
Two school districts have banned the book, and the AJC has urged others to follow suit.
“Notebook” editor Audrey Shabbas rejects the criticism.
“We’re providing the Arab point of view,” she said.
Responding to criticism that the material paints an overly rosy picture of Islam, she said, “My task is not to defend what Muslims do in the world” but to focus on the “difference between what people call themselves and what they do.”
Experts say the materials are popular because they’re recommended by the national resource centers of prestigious universities.
In an interview with JTA, Stotsky recounted that in the summer of 2002, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Massachusetts Department of Education decided to offer a seminar on Islam and the Middle East for area teachers. They accepted a proposal from Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies that “looked very promising.” One of the organizers of the seminar was Barbara Petzen, the center’s outreach coordinator.
But when Stotsky and other officials saw the syllabus, which included the “Arab World Studies Notebook,” they requested that the course present a more balanced view of Islam. Officials wanted at least to include a book by Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor emeritus who is considered one of the pre-eminent authorities on Islam.
But Petzen and her colleague “ducked recent history” by agreeing only to include one of Lewis’ older books from the 1970s, rather than one of his more recent critical perspectives on Islam, Stotsky said.
Petzen could not be reached for comment.
Stotsky was further shocked when she saw the lesson plans created by some of the seminar participants. One, which required the students to learn an Islamic prayer and design a prayer rug to simulate a mosque in the classroom, crossed the line. “It’s really indoctrination to have students do such religious things,” she said.
While there is no way to know the extent to which the teachers from 20 Massachusetts schools ultimately incorporated their proposed lessons into the classroom, the assumption of the Education Department, which paid for the seminar, “is that the teachers use the material they learned,” Stotsky said.
In New York City, meanwhile, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has barred the head of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute from lecturing to city teachers enrolled in professional development courses on the Middle East.
Klein’s move in February against Rashid Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said Chair at Columbia, was in response to “a number of things he’s said in the past,” said Michael Best, the department’s general counsel, according to The New York Times.
Khalidi declined to comment on the issue.
A spokesman for Klein said last week that “nothing has changed” in Khalidi’s status, meaning that he still is barred from lecturing at teacher-training seminars.
For Stotsky, a major problem with the teacher-training seminars is the lack of oversight.
“What teacher or principal is going to challenge [material that comes] “with the sterling credentials of Harvard?” she said.
While she doesn’t claim to have all the answers, Stotsky recommends halting public funding for professional development until there is “strong evidence that most history teachers learn something useful from a majority of workshops they attend.”
Boutiques lined the halls leading to the dining room at the Four Seasons recently, where a crowd shopped before the Women of Achievement Awards event at the Friends of Sheba luncheon. This year’s awards honored two distinguished community leaders: Dr. Ellen Klapper and Janice Kamenir-Reznik.
Klapper is a physician and co-director of transfusion medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She is also an associate clinical professor of pathology at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
Kamenir-Reznik is an attorney specializing in environmental real estate law for the firm of Reznik & Reznik. She serves in a variety of Jewish community leadership roles.
Serving as mistress of ceremonies was the Rhea Kohan, comedy writer, raconteur and author of everyone’s favorite girlfriend tome, “Save Me a Seat.” A special tribute, the Queen of Sheba Award, was presented to Beverly Cohen for her devoted service as president of the Women of Sheba for five years. Making the presentation in song were luncheon co-chairs Judy Shapiro and DeeDee Sussman.
Event proceeds will help fund the Center for Newborn Screening at Sheba Medical Center, which will test every baby born in Israel (approximately 150,000 annually) for more than 20 genetic diseases. Major gifts for the project come from special donors to the Sponsor-a-Child Campaign.
Professor Mordechai Shani, director general emeritus of Sheba Medical Center, the largest, most comprehensive hospital in the Middle East., reported on the progress of the newborn screening fundraising at the hospital.
For information about Friends of Sheba, call associate director Pam Blattner at (310) 843-0100.
PRO-CHOICE BACKERS
The Bel Air home of Bronya and Andrew Galef was filled with NARAL Pro Choice America supporters and stars recently, when the group held a fundraiser and awareness evening to support efforts to retain women’s right to choose.
Reacting to the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, Christine Lahti, Diane English, Amy Madigan and Ed Harris joined community activists to solicit funding and spread the word about protecting women’s rights.
Award-winning journalist and best-selling author of “The Price of Motherhood,” Anne Crittenden, addressed the small but involved group. She vowed to continue the battle to keep pro-choice an option for women.
Amy Everitt, state director of NARAL Pro Choice California, urged the attendees to vote against Proposition 73, which, if passed, would require a physician to notify a parent or guardian 48 hours before performing an abortion on a female younger than 18. It exempts young women who obtain a judicial waiver or face a medical emergency.
“This is an end run to abolish an existing law, which will greatly weaken Roe v. Wade,” Everitt said.
A PLACE CALLED HOME
Philanthropist Dawn Ostroff, Grammy Award-winning recording artist LL Cool J and private investor Bruce Newberg were honored by A Place Called Home (APCH), the groundbreaking youth enrichment center for at-risk kids in South Central Los Angeles, at its 12th annual Gala for the Children on Oct. 25, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
Ostroff, the president of UPN, was honored with the Humanitarian Award presented by supermodel and television talk-show host, Tyra Banks.
Newberg received the Angel of the Children Award, and LL Cool J was presented with the Children’s Inspiration Award.
“These are three individuals whose generosity has really helped make a difference in the lives of at-risk youth,” said Robert Israel, gala chair and head of the board of APCH, which was founded by Debrah Constance in 1993. “LL Cool J, Dawn Ostroff and Bruce Newberg continually strive to impact the community and its children.”
Ostroff is responsible for all creative aspects of UPN’s operations and has been listed among the 100 most powerful women in entertainment by The Hollywood Reporter for two consecutive years. Prior to her position at UPN, Ostroff served as president of development for 20th Century Fox, and under her leadership, she raised Lifetime, the sixth-highest-rated cable television network, to No. 1 in primetime.
In addition, she has devoted herself to numerous philanthropic organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, which brings international relief to victims of hate and bias.
Newberg and his wife, Nancy, established the Bruce and Nancy Newberg Fund, administered by the Jewish Community Foundation for charitable giving. He serves on the boards of the Independent School Alliance for Minority Affairs, Phase One, and A Place Called Home.
A MUSICAL SEASON
“Seasons of Songs” celebrated Cantor Ilan Davidson’s 10th anniversary at Temple Beth El in San Pedro. The evening featured Jewish music, opera and Broadway tunes.
Participating were the cantor and his friends. Dr. Noreen Green, musical director of the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony, led the Kohelet Choir and Orchestra in the anniversary celebration. Joining them were Cantor Sam Radwine of Ner Tamid, Palos Verdes; Cantor Patti Linsky of Temple Ahavat Shalom, Northridge; and Cantor Jonathan Grant of Temple Bat Yahm, Newport Beach.
