A Central Coast school board already accused of antisemitism in its ranks rejected a contract this week with Facing History & Ourselves, a globally recognized anti-bias training organization that began in the mid-1970s with a focus on the Holocaust but has since expanded its scope.
Wednesday’s vote at a Pajaro Valley Unified School District board meeting came after sharp criticism from anti-Zionist activists who accused the nonprofit of supporting Zionism and ignoring Palestinians. The measure’s failure deeply disappointed Jewish attendees at the meeting.
“It’s a recognized, recommended group,” said Roz Shorenstein, a retired physician who has grandchildren in the district, adding that the rejection of the Facing History contract was due to “misinformation” from opponents.
She called the meeting “deeply distressing” and “very hard to take.”
The board’s decision comes amid increasing opposition to conventional Holocaust education and antisemitism training in California due to complaints that such trainings bolster Israel, raising questions about the future of antisemitism education on the political left.
At the state level, anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, the Council on American Islamic Relations-CA and the S.F.-based Arab Resource and Organizing Center opposed last year’s Senate Bill 1277, which established the California Teachers Collaborative for Holocaust and Genocide Education. They opposed it on the grounds that the collaborative includes pro-Israel groups, or “organizations that deny the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” according to an Oct. 3, 2024, press release. The bill passed the state Senate and Assembly unanimously in August and was signed into law by the governor in late September.
Last year, scores of San Francisco teachers interrupted and then walked out of an antisemitism training led by the American Jewish Committee, claiming that AJC is a Zionist organization. They instead joined an antisemitism training facilitated by anti-Zionists affiliated with PARCEO, a left-wing group.
At this week’s Pajaro Valley school board meeting in Watsonville, a number of public commenters in masks decried Facing History & Ourselves (FHO). Many were affiliated with the strident anti-Zionist activist group Jews Against White Supremacy at UC Santa Cruz, who throughout the evening snapped their fingers and applauded at comments they approved, while voicing disapproval of pro-Israel comments.
A young woman named Caroline identified herself as a member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
“Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. And I believe that Facing History is going to say that anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” she said. “Palestine has been erased in history.”
The proposed contract with FHO, at a cost of roughly $5,000, failed 4-2.
FHO is generally considered a progressive group. It has received major support from Mackenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It has also gotten large donations from the Boston-based Klarman Family Foundation. Seth Klarman, foundation co-chair, is a longtime supporter of Israel and co-founded the Times of Israel newspaper, something opponents of the contract have pointed out.
The proposed contract with FHO covered teacher training on “fostering civil discourse,” “creating reflective and brave learning spaces,” “the history and legacy of racial ideologies in the U.S. education system” and “ethnic studies as historical memory, legacy, and justice.”
Neither the Holocaust nor the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were mentioned in the four-page proposal.
Though widely used in school districts across North America, FHO has at times come under fire from multiple directions. Some Holocaust scholars have criticized FHO for treating the Shoah as one of many injustices rather than a uniquely horrifying event in world history, echoing a long-running debate in Holocaust studies. Facing History “elides the differences between the Holocaust and all manner of inhumanities and injustices,” the author and former U.S. antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt wrote in an essay in 1995, when the group was less than 20 years old. She noted, for example, that FHO drew an equivalence between the Holocaust and injustices in contemporary America.
More recently, FHO has come under attack from anti-Zionists, including some of its own employees, for taking a both-sides approach to teaching about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre and the war it sparked. They also say FHO’s criticism of Israel is insufficient, according to Jewish Currents.
Pajaro Valley school board member Gabriel Medina delivered a sharp critique of the nonprofit and explained during the meeting why he opposed the contract.
He said that an FHO lesson plan on Islamophobia he reviewed does not discuss the current war in Gaza, but rather focuses “on the U.K. and certain Western policies.” It leaves out “realities our own students and families are witnessing on the news, on social media, and through personal connections,” he said.
“What message are we sending when we teach about religious-based discrimination but skip over [an] entire group currently enduring it?” Medina said. He recommended reading “100 Years of Palestine,” an apparent reference to Rashid Khalidi’s book “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”
The State of California recommends using Facing History & Ourselves in its Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which was approved by the State Board of Education in 2021. Some of its materials are already in use in Pajaro Valley, multiple officials said during the meeting.
The vote against FHO came amid an intensely polarizing period for the Pajaro Valley school board. Over the past month, two members have been accused of making antisemitic statements during a meeting when the board approved a $90,000 ethnic studies contract with a left-leaning consulting group. The incident spurred headlines in national Jewish newspapers and the local press.
Board member Medina has also come under fire from some of his colleagues, who proposed a resolution on Wednesday to censure him due to his statements aimed at Jewish community members, including using the phrase “you people” and accusing them of showing up for meetings only “when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are.”
The censure resolution alleged other inappropriate comments by Medina. During a closed session on April 23, it stated that he called a fellow board member a “Barbie” and shouted “several times, ‘come at me Barbie!’” It also alleges during the same meeting that Medina “yelled continually at fellow Board members, repeatedly telling one Board member to ‘shut the f**k up.’”
The resolution to censure him failed 4-2.
Also at the meeting, at which Jewish issues repeatedly took center stage, members unanimously approved a resolution commemorating May as Jewish American Heritage Month. Medina commented on the measure by recognizing the anti-Zionist activists in the room and thanking them for their efforts.
During the meeting, school board members grappled with the word “Zionism,” appearing not to have a firm definition.
“I am still trying to figure out the definition of Zionism,” said board member Misty Navarro, who drew ire from activists in the room and supported the contract with FHO.
She read from an AI-generated definition: “Zionism is generally defined as the belief in the self-determination of Jewish people and the establishment of the Jewish state,” she said. Medina called for a “point of order,” to which Navarro replied, “I’m not done yet.”
“We’re talking about $5,000,” Navarro said of the FHO contract. “I think it’s actually a really big step towards our Jewish community to show that we are being inclusive,” she added, before telling attendees to “stop shouting out from the audience!”
Zionism, a word that has become a source of intense disagreement and whose meaning is often obscure even to people who use it, emerged in the latter part of the 19th century as a movement among European Jews, facing antisemitism, to build a national home in what was then Ottoman-controlled Palestine. Today, Zionism is generally understood to be support for the continued existence of the Jewish state.