Members of the Santa Ana school district’s ethnic-studies committee claimed Jews ‘benefit from white privilege’ and refused to describe Hamas as terrorists.
Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) officials and hired consultants conspired to keep Jewish community members in the dark about ethnic-studies courses on the grounds that, as Jews, they are inherently racist and would disrupt plans to enlighten the student body, according to a new filing in an ongoing lawsuit.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center, and the law firm Covington & Burling sued SAUSD in September 2023 over alleged violations of the state’s open-meeting laws. The organizations charged the district with intentionally skirting California policy to push a curriculum that casts Jews as oppressors. Information brought to light during legal proceedings suggests those behind the ethnic-studies curriculum promoted anti-Jewish rhetoric and conspiracy theories.
Understanding the Jewish community’s concern about the curriculum, members of the steering committee noted in an official agenda that they would need to “address the Jewish question.” They would do this by using “Passover to get all new courses approved” — meaning scheduling meetings on Jewish holidays so Jews could not attend — according to a text message between officials obtained as part of the lawsuit.
The message recipient responded that conspiring to exclude Jewish community members from the meeting was “actually a good strategy.”
The desire to freeze Jews out of the decision-making process stems from a belief that Jews are white supremacists, as the words of committee members show. One leader referred to the only Jewish committee member as a “colonized Jewish mind” and a “f–king baby” for expressing concerns over the depiction of Jews in the curriculum. Another individual on the committee reportedly said that “Jews are not a disadvantaged ethnic group in the U.S. because they were never slaves,” that “Jews greatly benefit from white privilege, so they have it better,” and that the school district should “only support the oppressed, and Jews are the oppressors.” Another argued that Jews are “racialized under the white category.” One committee leader described Jewish organizations that took issue with the curriculum as “racist Zionists.”
One employee, the court filing states, refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization because doing so would “dehumanize” its members.
Sean Arce, the head of the consulting firm the school district hired to train teachers on the ethnic-studies curriculum, has made several inflammatory public statements about Israel and Jews. He posted on social media that “Israel is nothing more than European settler colonialism draped in religion defended by white guilt and capitalism,” and immediately after October 7 wrote that the “decision by the racist democrats to send military forces to support a racist colonial occupation says everything about the nature of the settler U.S. nation.”
Curriculum committee members reportedly refused to disavow those statements and did not “consider it problematic that someone espousing such views would be responsible for training SAUSD teachers,” the filing states. One employee said she would have “like[d]” at least one of the posts if she had seen them.
The materials included in the ethnic-studies curriculum push similar ideas. One “teacher resource” claims that “Israel is the main contemporary example of settler-conquerors” and that “the Palestinian cause is decidedly proletarian in its tone, seeing its oppressor as an exploiting and colonial Israel — backed up by American imperialism.” A geography course outline states that “[s]tate sanctioned violence against Palestinians . . . will be placed in [its] proper context as [a] consequence of European imperial nation-making.” Israel is only mentioned in the ethnic-studies courses “within a broader analysis of empire and settler colonialism of nation states throughout the Global South.”
The organizations suing the school district argued that, in addition to the antisemitism permeating the committee, the officials tasked with leading meetings to discuss the curriculum violated California transparency laws. Under the Brown Act and AB 101 — the 2021 statute mandating ethnic studies in California public schools — K-12 school boards are required to make the broader public aware of curricular materials and to allow for discussion. The Santa Ana school board did not make the issues surrounding “the Jewish question,” as they put it, known to school-district families, nor did they allow members of the community to comment on curricular materials.
“Both the Brown Act and AB 101 require transparency and opportunity for public comment on proposed ethnic studies curricula that deviate from the state-approved model curriculum,” Brandeis Center general counsel L. Rachel Lerman said in a statement. “Governor Newsom swore that biased and antisemitic content taken out of early (and disapproved) versions of the model curriculum would ‘never see the light of day.’ He did not mean that this content should be snuck back in under cover of darkness, but that appears to be what has occurred.”
ADL senior director of national litigation James Pasch said that “the district intentionally hid information from the public to try to get away with teaching antisemitic lies to the next generation in Santa Ana” and that “the antisemitism that infected this process sent a clear message to Jewish students and families that their voices are not welcomed, and that they were intentionally excluded.”
Marc Stern, chief legal officer at the AJC, said in a statement that school-district officials were motivated by antisemitism and sought to hide that reality.
“This is not speculation,” Stern said. “Discovery in this case has revealed a persistent pattern of antisemitism in the steering committee. Antisemitism has no place in any governmental body and it is doubly concerning when it involves children and their education. That proponents of this proposal made a concerted effort to hide their antisemitism is yet further evidence that they knew what they were doing was wrong and did not want it disclosed publicly.”
A SAUSD official told National Review that the school district is “unable to provide any comment on pending or ongoing litigation.”