| Please see the letter from ZRC and the North American Values Institute about alarming developments in curricula in schools across the country.
Dear Rabbi,
As the High Holidays approach, families in your congregation are looking for messages and guidance that will be meaningful during these challenging times.
The High Holidays, a season of renewal, also coincides with the beginning of the school year. The North American Values Institute (NAVI), an organization dedicated to supporting liberal values and opposing radicalism in K-12 education, and the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition, dedicated to love of the Jewish people and Zionism, believe this is a moment that calls for moral leadership from those most trusted by our community. We believe it is essential to draw attention and sound the alarm about what is happening in schools across the country.
Troubling ideological trends are reshaping K–12 education. Ideas once confined to small corners of college campuses have now entered the mainstream and appear in school curricula. While some methods of how children are taught to understand history, identity, and justice are acceptable, others fuel hostility toward Israel, Judaism and the Jewish people.
We are writing to you to ask for your partnership in raising awareness about this growing trend, as it presents a serious challenge to how non-Jews perceive us and how Jewish students feel about their own identity and history.
Among this country’s greatest blessings is the open and free exchange of ideas. This, coupled with the protection of freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, has enabled Jews and other minorities to thrive. But the ideology we speak of in K-12 and higher education rejects disagreement, discourages honest engagement, and enforces conformity— all of which are antithetical to values we hold dear. We are concerned about the long-term and short-term damage of this approach. We are therefore urging you to alert parents to pay attention to this growing challenge, which threatens the civic principles and moral commitments that have long safeguarded Jewish life in America and prevented ideologues from indoctrinating our kids.
What’s happening in many K-12 schools would have been unthinkable just a few years ago:
- Jewish identity is marginalized and racialized. In some cases, students are asked to complete “identity maps” or “power and privilege charts” that label Jews as white and privileged, obscuring our people’s history, faith, and experience.
- Zionism is being delegitimized. Israel is often presented in classrooms through a one-sided “settler colonialism” political lens. Jewish students who voice support for Israel may be intimidated and treated as morally suspect or pressured to recant.
- Complexity is erased. Curricula organized around ideas like “decolonization” or “critical consciousness” divide students into binary categories of oppressors/oppressed, which leaves little room for dissent, context, or Jewish historical experience and presents a distorted and negative perspective of Jews.
- Parents are being sidelined. Jewish families who raise concerns are often ignored, shamed, or excluded for expressing discomfort with ideological content.
- Silence is common. Teachers and administrators who object to politicized materials are intimidated and often afraid to speak up out of fear. The result is a narrowing of discourse that echoes throughout the school community and harms Jewish and other students.
- The principles of open inquiry, critical thinking, and respectful disagreement—or in the Jewish tradition “Makhloket Leshem Hashamaim”—are being replaced by moral and intellectual orthodoxies. Not only is this a distortion of history and reality, but it has a clear political agenda that will have long-term detrimental impact on us as well as on America as we know it.
To read the full letter with a call to action, Click Here |
