California school-board trustees teach hate, division and hypocrisy
When done right, an ethnic-studies curriculum promotes mutual understanding, respect and democratic values.
By Mitch Siegler and Sara E. Brown
JNS
May 9, 2025
California’s Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) in Watsonville, near San Jose, has an antisemitism problem.
At a recent PVUSD meeting, Jewish community members voiced concerns about one of the proposed professional development vendors for the district’s “liberated ethnic studies,” specifically the Community Responsive Education. CRE was founded by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, who helped write California’s 2019 “model ethnic-studies” curriculum, which was universally condemned for its antisemitism. California Gov. Gavin Newsom even saw fit to apologize on behalf of the state, saying the curriculum would “never see the light of day.”
And although CRE’s curriculum for PVUSD has not been made public despite multiple requests, there’s every reason to suspect it contains the same offensive content.
Jewish community members brought up CRE’s troubling history, asserted the Jewish right to define antisemitism and made the reasonable request that a different vendor be chosen.
They were met with a torrent of antisemitic tropes from the dais. Trustee Gabriel Medina started by conditioning minority status on activism.
“What I’m hearing about ‘folks, I’m a minority,’” he said, referring to comments by Jewish men and women, “the minority is sitting on this side, right now [supporting CRE]. … I don’t see you people at [anti-ICE] protests. … You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are.”
You people?
A vulnerable minority is vulnerable regardless of what its members believe. By his logic, you could just as easily tell Medina that his lack of advocacy for Jews invalidates his own minority status, but that would make you as wrong as he is.
They say when you’re in a hole, stop digging, but Medina wasn’t done. On his Substack, he created a false dichotomy by implying that Latino and indigenous concerns compete with those of the Jewish community.
That’s hatred, not leadership. Perhaps that’s why a nationwide survey of 1,500 parents by THINC Foundation found that just 28% of parents trust school board members to deliver an unbiased education.
Or maybe Medina agrees with fellow trustee Joy Flynn that Jews aren’t marginalized at all, despite thousands of years of persecution.
As Flynn said, “I’ve been a little taken aback by the lack of acknowledgement of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community that the community of black and brown people don’t have. … There’s also that presentation power—the privilege that comes from presenting as white, and that is real.”
Her ignorance of the Jewish community is all too obvious here. To universally label Jews as holding “economic power” is to engage in an age-old antisemitic trope that has resulted in stigmatization, discrimination and violence against Jews for centuries.
That “privilege” would be news to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who have long maintained that Jews want to destroy the “white race.” It would also be news to Jews of color, who make up a growing percentage of the American Jewish community. Most of all, it shows a dangerous ignorance of the current spike in antisemitism in America. Antisemites don’t care whether Jewish skin is white.
The American Jewish Committee—a 119-year-old advocacy group for the Jewish people that Medina publicly disparaged—recently published its “State of Antisemitism in America 2024 Report,” which found that one-third of Jewish Americans were the personal target of antisemitism in the last year, and 56% altered their behavior out of fear, the first time a majority of Jewish Americans reported doing so.
According to the FBI, Jewish Americans are the victims of 68% of religious-based hate crimes, and one in seven of hate crimes overall, despite comprising just 2% of the U.S. population.
In short, Jews unquestionably remain a marginalized community today.
If there is one glimmer of good news, it is that Americans (though apparently, not Medina and Flynn) understand that this is not solely a “Jewish” issue. The AJC report found 90% of U.S. adults believe that antisemitism affects society as a whole and that everyone is responsible for combating it.
Imposing an ethnic-studies curriculum that erases or maligns Jews stokes the flames of antisemitism at a time when our schools must be the answer to this scourge, not the catalyst.
When done right, an ethnic-studies curriculum promotes mutual understanding, respect and democratic values. It recognizes that succeeding in an increasingly diverse America requires familiarity with a wide range of ethnicities’ history, culture, contributions and struggles.
Flynn and Medina, on the other hand, support the divisive “liberated” version, an explicitly political approach to ethnic studies that teaches students to view others through a rigid and explicitly racial “oppressor vs. oppressed” binary while grooming them to become radical activists.
LES bigotry is not confined to antisemitism; It’s hostile to any community—Hindus, East Asians and others—that defies its simplistic classification system.
By demonizing their opponents, elevating ideology over fact and gatekeeping the concept of marginalization, Flynn and Medina are putting LES principles into practice.
Sadly, the PVUSD board voted unanimously to approve CRE’s contract. PVUSD now has an opportunity and a responsibility to reconsider this decision and to develop an ethnic-studies program that reflects democratic values by including Jewish perspectives along with those of other marginalized communities.
The goal should be a curriculum that builds bridges rather than erects barriers, and that fosters understanding rather than sows division. Our students deserve an education that prepares them to be citizens in a diverse democracy, not foot soldiers in ideological battles.
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