For more than a century, California has been the future of America. From Hollywood to drive-ins to public universities, Nixon to Reagan to Kamala Harris, California’s today became America’s tomorrow. In which case, Jewish Americans should be very worried, because today’s target is tomorrow’s victim.

Give me the child and I’ll show you the woke racist of tomorrow. The new California curriculum brings Critical Race Theory to the preschool. It singles out Jewish Americans as class enemies and race traitors.

The legislation for this was passed by the Democrats, the party of most American Jews, and backed by a Democratic governor.

Worst of all, Jewish American advocacy groups have abetted the creation of an explicitly antisemitic and anti-Zionist curriculum.

From now on, all California’s six million schoolchildren must study the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). Not a bad idea in theory: California is the most ethnically varied state. But a terrible idea in practice: a quarter of California’s children are sub-literate and they’re not likely to learn much when the theory is that mélange of Sixties’ radicalism, Seventies’ sociology and good old-fashioned Jew-baiting, Critical Race Theory.

What they will learn is that Jews change their names and race for profit and “privilege”. Jews are so racist that they do it to each other, with Ashkenazim protecting their “white privilege” by mistreating Mizrahi immigrants to the US. These Jewish impostors are still shapeshifting away, still complicit with “white supremacy”, “cisheteropatriarchy” and capitalism.

And also Israeli “apartheid”.

The first draft of the ESMC, released in 2019 after a three-year gestation in the minds of minor academics, denounced “classism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia”, but failed to mention antisemitism — even though Jews remain the most likely victims of racist assault in the US. Jews weren’t mentioned in the list of deserving minorities, either. They were prominent, though, among the collaborators of capitalism. Israel’s struggle for independence was, as the cant goes, “erased” in favour of the Nakba, and Israelis “use the press to manufacture” support.

The ESMC described BDS as “a global social movement” fighting for “freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid”.

It was the apartheid bit that really upset the Jewish advocacy groups. The Anti-Defamation League sensed defamation, the American Jewish Committee got committed and StandWithUs stood with them.

So, unfortunately, did fellow-travellers like the Progressive Zionists of California. Combine the softly-softly smugness of the major Jewish organisations with the sanctimonious activism of the smaller, younger groups and you have a recipe for what the woke call “complicity”.

Almost all of the major Jewish organisations have taken a see-no-evil attitude to black and left-wing antisemitism, even as mobs in Los Angeles pursued “racial justice” by destroying stores with Jewish names. The newer, “progressive” groups actively explained the violence away. These useful idiots endorsed the fatuous linkage of “Ferguson is Palestine” while signalling their virtue by denouncing “the Occupation”.

The Jewish groups share many of the radicals’ goals, mostly from partisan politics, sometimes from pampered ignorance.

The result was the ESMC’s third draft, which the California Board of Education will vote on in mid-March.

The “apartheid” is gone, but Jews are still the only Americans born into the sin of “privilege”. The rest of it, a stack of lies and omissions tantamount to incitement, is still there — and then some.

Two lessons about the Jews have been added. One attempts to affirm their “white privilege”, and the other proves it by describing Ashkenazi hostility towards Mizrachi immigrants.

A description of pre-war Zionism, deleted from the second draft of the ESMC but now restored, includes the nugget that “American Jews, as is well known, are the richest in the world”.

As for the capitalist shape-shifting, young Californians should watch out: “This practice of name-changing continues to the present day”.

The Board of Education will pass the revised ESMC curriculum because the Board are progressive Democrats and anything less would be white supremacism. Those students not stupefied by the idiotic jargon — “reconfigured articulations” of the “hxrstories” of “Latinx” peoples — will graduate to advanced bigotry in a mandatory ESMC college course. California has the US’s largest state college system, and its Irvine and San Diego campuses in particular are global hubs of BDS activism.

Tomorrow’s graduates are the day after tomorrow’s governors.

The articulations of American Jewish life are being refigured in real time by the radical left. The Jewish organisations that raise funds by bellowing “Never again” have pandered to “transformative resistance” that incites class and race revolution against Jews.

The Jewish children in the California education system will be first to pay the price. They won’t be the last.

 

Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator’s US edition