Gabriel Medina, a Pajaro Valley Unified School District board trustee, launched an unprovoked attack on my organization, JIMENA: Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, during a discussion of the district’s ethnic studies curriculum at a March 28 board meeting.
Medina used his platform to accuse us of “lobbying to Daddy Newsom” and mischaracterized our opposition back in 2019 to the first draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.
Our concerns about the model curriculum stemmed from its serious educational and ethical failings: It lacked any educational content on antisemitism. It failed to meet the State Board of Education’s statutory guidelines for the curriculum. And it included two contentious lesson plans on Arab studies, while completely excluding Jewish and other non-Muslim Middle Eastern voices. In doing so, the model curriculum perpetuated the same legacies of oppression and cultural erasure that many Middle Eastern minorities — including Jews, Assyrians, Yezidis, Kurds and Coptic Christians — fled.
Across California, school boards and district leaders like those in Pajaro Valley are often ill-equipped or unwilling to recognize and address antisemitism. Medina’s conspiratorial rhetoric about JIMENA using our lived experiences to push “right-wing talking points” and questioning “who is funding what” to control power echoed classic antisemitic tropes — rhetoric that has no place in public discourse, especially from civic leaders. Perhaps if California would formally adopt a definition of antisemitism — as more than 35 other U.S. states have done — school boards and public officials would be better prepared to recognize and confront this form of hate.
Medina’s comments also raise a broader and more urgent question: What has happened to public funds that were explicitly intended to prevent antisemitism? Specifically, what happened to California’s $20 million Antibias Education Grant program? This program was created by the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom to address hate with a clear mandate that funds be used to educate about antisemitism.
In 2023, JIMENA formally raised concerns with State Superintendent Tony Thurmond, warning that the program was not meeting the Legislature’s mandate to include antisemitism education. At the time, only four of 74 grantees had explicitly committed to addressing antisemitism.
The California Department of Education (CDE) has since awarded an antibias grant to Pajaro Valley Unified School District — $90,000 of which is being used to contract with Community Responsive Education. CRE is an ethnic studies consulting firm whose leader co-chaired the team responsible for the first, widely rejected draft of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Today, Community Responsive Education publicly partners with activists who celebrate the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel and proudly spread misinformation about Israel, the Jewish people and the broader Middle East.
The public deserves accountability. JIMENA calls on the state Department of Education to require the Pajaro Valley school district to produce detailed documentation showing how its antibias grant has been used to combat antisemitism. If such documentation cannot be produced, the funds should be refunded to the state or redirected to meet the program’s original intent of delivering on promises made in Newsom’s 2024 “Golden State Plan to Counter Antisemitism.”
Moving forward, superintendents should be encouraged to request discretionary funding for new antisemitism training initiatives that reflect current definitions of antisemitism and best practices for combating hate. The CDE must also require that unspent antibias grant funds in the Pajaro Valley school district — and in other districts embroiled in antisemitism controversies — be used to provide meaningful antisemitism training for district leadership, faculty and staff.
The Antibias Education Grant program presented a tremendous opportunity to train districts on antisemitism. However, the CDE has failed to use the funds to meet the program’s intended goals. This mistake can be corrected by renewing the grant program in the upcoming budget cycle and dedicating it exclusively to antisemitism training.
The time has come for the California Department of Education to uphold the original intent of the grant, intervene where necessary and stop the misuse of taxpayer dollars that were meant to protect against antisemitism — not perpetuate it.