Hate, Division, Extremism and Antisemitism:
The New Face of K-12 Education
By Mitch Siegler, Founder

On April 16, a disgraceful episode took place in Pajaro Valley (Santa Cruz/Watsonville), California.

It wasn’t just that the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) renewed its contract with Community Responsive Education (CRE), an ethnic studies consultant that helps indoctrinate K-12 children with radical ideologies (its founder and co-director, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, helped write California’s “model ethnic studies” curriculum in 2019, which asserted that “schools are battlefields where war is waged” and was forcefully rejected for its antisemitism).

It wasn’t even that the Board of Trustees of the district voted unanimously to renew the contract, which was rightly canceled in 2023 over allegations of antisemitism in the curriculum, and apologize to Tintiangco-Cubales in a non-agendized item that may have violated California transparency laws.

The ugliest part of it – but the most revealing – was the antisemitic vitriol unleashed by two trustees at members of the local Jewish community.

Radical ethnic studies advocates usually try to hide their antisemitism, but these trustees took their masks off.

Trustee Gabriel Medina thinks that you’re only a real minority if you’re an activist for the causes he believes in. “What I’m hearing about ‘folks I’m a minority,’” he said, referring to the Jews’ comments; “The minority is sitting on this side supporting CRE… I don’t see you at protests… You people only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial to you, so you can tell brown people who they are, but guess what, we’re telling our own stories now.”

“You people” may have referred to the Jewish commentors, but his screed reflected the deeply antisemitic elements of the “liberated,” Marxist-derived worldview he wants to inculcate in young learners.

Medina’s claims reflect his belief that while Jews may be a numerical minority, their supposed “oppression” of other minority groups disqualifies them from sympathy and, ironically, the ability to tell their own stories.

Never mind the fact that Jews have been discriminated against for millennia and that most Israeli Jews are “people of color” from the Middle East and Africa.

Proponents of this radical ideology are oblivious to Jewish concerns about antisemitism, often claiming that Jews “weaponize antisemitism” to silence real minorities.

But Jewish Americans are a marginalized, vulnerable minority group by any definition, making up only 2% of the American population yet suffering from 68% of religious-based hate crimes and 15% of all hate crimes.

Jews have the right to define antisemitism, just as all groups have the right to define what prejudice and hatred against them look like.

Trustee Joy Flynn does not agree, however, and joined Medina in the hate parade. “I’ve been a little taken aback by the lack of acknowledgment of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community, that black and brown people don’t have.”

Jewish “economic power” is a classic antisemitic accusation – and another way to deny that Jews are marginalized. So it should be no surprise that the Anti-Defamation League characterized what transpired at the board meeting as “raw antisemitism” and demanded an apology. Or that Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools Faris Sabbah lambasted the PVUSD trustees, who "appeared to invoke anti-Semitic tropes.”

Instead of engaging with those criticisms, Medina retreated to race essentialism again: “This tactic chills speech,” he wrote, “especially when used against trustees of color challenging systems of power” – feigning honesty and transparency when the opposite is true, and attacking anyone with the audacity to challenge his radicalism, the standard refuge of “liberated” ethnic studies (LES) ideologues when confronted.

That’s how LES works: shoehorn racial groups into an artificial hierarchy of oppression, call inconveniently successful minorities like Jews, Hindus, and East Asians “oppressors,” and valorize the concept of punching up.

That is what led San Francisco’s school board vice president Alison Collins – who believes that merit-based school admissions are racist – to tweet at Asian Americans: “Being a house n***** is still being a n*****.” She excoriated them because they “believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS” and “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead.’”

Could there be a worse, more contemptuous, lesson for minority students? That their role is to be forever downtrodden, oppressed, and victimized by their fellow Americans? That you can tell an oppressor by looking at them? That there is no point in trying – otherwise you’re using “white supremacist thinking”?

The Pajaro Valley trustees’ comments represent a much deeper rot in our country. It is up to us as concerned citizens to fight against it – by showing up at board meetings, submitting letters to the editor and op-eds, and advocating to our representatives. Let it be known, clearly and forcefully, that what is happening is unacceptable, harmful, and anti-American.