The Los Angeles skyline. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

On March 7 at 1:00 pm, a grassroots movement called End Jew Hatred will make Jewish and other voices heard at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, against the proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) in California.

While many of the curriculum’s faults and failings have been listed in previous articles, such as here and here, what is arguably the most daunting is that the authors of the curriculum have been traveling to California school districts and promoting the first draft — one that not only presents a huge problem for the Jewish community, but for the Black community as well.

The ESMC is so problematic that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s former attorney, Clarence Jones, was compelled to speak out against it.

In his letter, Jones says:

It is a fact that the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s under Dr. King’s  leadership transformed our country, overthrowing a century of Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist terror throughout the former Confederate states.

This fact, which I had thought was well known to all educated persons, has been removed from the ESMC. This is morally unacceptable and renders the entire curriculum suspect.

Moreover, it appears that this omission was deliberate. For example, ‘Evolution of Black  Political and Intellectual Thought’ is limited to three examples ‘racial accommodationism, Black nationalism, and revolutionary intercommunalism,’ with the  implication that the intellectual and moral basis for radical nonviolence advocated by Dr. King, his colleagues at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the heroes of  the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette and Robert Moses, is unworthy of inclusion in this intellectual history.

And Clarence Jones is not the only one who has these strong views against the curriculum; in fact, his views are shared by members of many different minority groups, including those who have fled communist regimes, like Elina Kaplan, who fled the Soviet Union with her parents when she was 11.

In a Tablet article, Kaplan says this about the ESMC: “This curriculum is pervasive and all-inclusive. It creates a means of understanding the world that does not allow questioning. And it’s a view that actively invites anti-Zionism into the classroom. It requires it.”

End Jew Hatred’s stance is that no educational platform founded on such divisive principles can bear good fruit. And small or cosmetic changes aren’t enough; any remnant of the problematic ESMC needs to be removed from public school learning. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. In fact, according to the AMCHA Initiative, as of January, at least 20 districts have already adopted the original draft.

That’s why End Jew Hatred and other pro-Jewish and pro-Black voices will be at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard on March 7 — not just to urge the school board to stop the ESMC’s implementation, but to ban any iteration of it from being taught in classrooms.

Joshua Washington is the Executive Director of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI).