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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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‘Nothing to Save’: Defections, Command Breakdown Grip Iran’s Security Forces as US-Israel Strikes Pound Regime
Images of Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei and late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are displayed at a gathering to support Mojtaba Khamenei, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 9, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
A taxi driver in Tehran this past week said he had picked up a commander from Iran’s Basij parliamentary force who, midway through the ride, hurled his mobile phone out the window into the rubble of a bombed building. The officer explained that many of his comrades in the Basij, the paramilitary organization operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), were doing the same, hoping the Iranian regime would assume they had been killed.
The anecdote was relayed to The Algemeiner during a press briefing by Maneli Mirkhan — an Iranian strategist and founder of Dorna, an organization working on plans for a democratic transition in Iran — and reflected what she described as the “defection and collapse” of the regime’s forces of repression.
Similar stories abound in other reports from inside Iran. The French Le Monde newspaper recounted an incident in which a woman was caught by a neighbor, an intelligence services employee, while filming an airstrike. The man accused her of spying, and his wife called the police to report the “infidel,” the newspaper said.
“The irony: nobody answered. A mundane scene, but one that reveals much,” the article noted.
Mirkhan cautioned against overstating the regime’s immediate collapse, saying it remains in place. But “the confidence within the regime and within its ability to survive is no longer there,” she said.
The families of members of Iran’s security apparatus were increasingly urging their sons to stay home, she said, as targeted strikes by the joint US-Israeli operation hit bases used by repression units. According to her account, “several hundred” personnel linked to those forces were being killed daily in strikes on their facilities.
Among the targets in recent days was the IRGC’s Sarallah headquarters, a central node of Iran’s internal security system, as well as the headquarters of three brigades belonging to the Faraja special units, which handle crowd control and the suppression of protests.
With some facilities destroyed, units have begun moving into civilian infrastructure such as sports centers and other public buildings as backup bases and resting areas, she said. But the more immediate problem, according to Mirkhan, is that the chain of command is fraying.
Her organization, she said, is in contact with networks inside Iran to help provide exit strategies for members of the security forces who are seeking to defect. Most of those reaching out are rank-and-file personnel and mid-level commanders, she said.
“What we are witnessing is that they are disoriented because of a lack of clear command,” Mirkhan said.
She described what she called “moral fatigue” among regime forces, saying that in this environment state propaganda has been one of the few things still “giving them a bit of energy.” But even that, she said, is now being weakened as the system that carries and reinforces the regime’s messaging comes under pressure.
Mirkhan argued that expanding access to outside information — including through satellite television and internet connections — could further erode loyalty among security personnel by showing them there is “nothing to save anymore.”
She said the public response should be read in the context of the fighting. The Israel Defense Forces is warning Iranian civilians in some areas to stay home ahead of major strikes — similar to its policy in Gaza — and with attacks concentrated in specific zones, many people are not evacuating or gathering in the streets for now. But Mirkhan said that should not be mistaken for support for the regime or an absence of public anger.
“We saw it on the first night of strikes, when the news of [former Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei’s death was confirmed,” she said. “Even with lots of risk to their lives, people were in the street.”
Mirkhan outlined the war’s three aims — destroying the regime’s nuclear program, weakening its capacity for regional aggression, especially its missile arsenal, and opening space for Iranians themselves to bring down the regime. That last goal, she said, would not be achieved by military action alone.
“Regime change is not something that will be operated by the attacks,” she said. But the strikes can help “open the space where people can regain strength, can go out in more security, and build up what they need to bring down the regime and replace it.”
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An Inspiring Call for Unity Among All Jews
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, addressed congregants Friday night at Westchester Reform Temple, focusing on unity within the Jewish community and was introduced by the temple’s senior rabbi, Jonathan Blake. The tone they both struck was remarkably encouraging.
They both stressed the need for internal unity regardless of personal political beliefs and differences. This message was refreshing and paved a path towards unity among Jewish people by addressing the challenge of confronting antisemitism across the political spectrum, and not getting stuck on left-right divides.
The ADL leader said that antisemitism today appears across multiple parts of the political spectrum, and that confronting it requires responsibility from both sides of the ideological divide.
Rabbi Blake’s introduction addressed developments related to Iran and Israel, and urged congregants not to allow their personal political views about current administrations in either Israel or the United States to influence their assessment of the broader geopolitical challenges.
“The stakes are larger than partisan politics,” he said, emphasizing that moral clarity is necessary when confronting a regime that has supported terrorism, threatened nuclear breakout, and vowed the destruction of America, Israel, and supportive Gulf states.
During Greenblatt’s address, he compared the recent holiday of Purim to today’s events, and drew a contrast between the past and the present by pointing out the Jewish people’s ability to defend themselves today. He asked the audience to recognize the miracle of Israel’s existence and to not take it for granted. And it was really encouraging to hear the leader of the country’s largest antisemitism advocacy organization speak with moral clarity.
Greenblatt also spoke about Jewish identity and resilience, encouraging community members to remain engaged in Jewish life and communal institutions. He reminded the congregants that the ADL is still concerned about marginalized peoples, but must now focus on its own people, since Jewish people are being targeted.
His hopeful and positive tone is exactly what we need right now, as he urged attendees to “show up” for one another and for Jewish organizations as part of the broader effort to respond to rising antisemitism.
The event took place amid heightened concerns about antisemitic incidents globally, and ongoing conspiracy theories around Israel forcing the hand of the United States into this war. Rabbi Blake and Greenblatt delivered a warning — and also encouragement — exactly when it was needed. We must starkly confront the challenges we are facing — but also stay optimistic about the future — and both men did exactly that.
Daniel Rosen is a cofounder of Emissary4all. Emissary is a movement which seeks to utilize technology to organize individual individuals and communities to combat antisemitism online and off-line. You can follow him on Instagram at mindsandheartsunite
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How Colleges and K-12 Schools Are Marching Forward with an Anti-Israel Agenda
A pro-Hamas activist wears a keffiyeh while marching from the City University of New York to Columbia University. Photo: Eduardo Munoz via Reuters Connect
Universities continue to protest the Trump administration’s efforts to expunge DEI and rein in costs, while receiving help from Congress, which has restored funding to schools. Scientists in particular have resumed their complaints regarding Federal budget cuts and increased oversight, while the media have resumed stories about the economic and social impacts of cuts on sciences, states, and individuals.
The place of antisemitism in the priorities of the higher education industrial complex were reflected at the American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting. In contrast to the many sessions on DEI and artificial intelligence, only one was devoted to antisemitism, which was paired with the topic of “Islamophobia.”
In a sign that senior university leaders have simply decided to wait out the administration regardless of appearances, Georgetown Law School appointed Elizabeth Magill, former University of Pennsylvania president, as dean. Magill resigned her position after a disastrous appearance before Congress, where she failed to stand up to hate against Jewish students. The committee that appointed her at Georgetown was comprised largely of leading Democratic donors.
University pushback against pro-Hamas students continued at a lower rate in February. American University suspended its Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter, which promised “resistance.” Students at Northwestern University who had rejected antisemitism training on the basis that it discriminated against them as Palestinians and Arabs — and who were subsequently suspended by the university — dropped their lawsuit.
Several court cases have challenged university efforts to discipline pro-Hamas protestors. In one, a district judge ordered the University of Massachusetts to lift the suspension of a student who organized a campus protest, arguing that his First Amendment rights had been breached. A judge also blocked the deportation of pro-Hamas activist and professional student Mohsen Madawi on procedural grounds. A Federal court also ordered the release of Tufts University graduate student and Hamas supporter Rümeysa Öztürk.
More positively, the New Jersey Superior Court has rejected Fairleigh Dickinson University’s effort to quash a lawsuit by a Jewish chaplain who had been disciplined for opposing an anti-Israel event on campus. Notably, the court rejected the university’s claim regarding precedent in a recent case involving MIT, in which a court held that antisemitic conduct motivated by “anti-Zionism” was protected as academic freedom.
Finally, a report from the Department of Education noted that Qatar had tripled its contributions to American universities in 2025. Some $1.2 billion was given to American universities, with Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Texas A&M, and Northwestern, being the largest recipients.
Faculty Support for Hamas Remains High
Faculty support for Hamas remains high despite administration efforts to persuade or force fewer expressions of enthusiasm.
There was a presentation at the CUNY Law School entitled “The Underground in Gaza,” which claimed that Hamas tunnels used for terrorism are part of “resistance to colonization” and “decolonial land use.” This will be followed by a conference at CUNY Graduate Center on “Palestinian History Between Past and Present” featuring a number of prominent anti-Israel scholar-activists.
One notable development in February was a report detailing how the Mellon Foundation has reshaped humanities and social sciences faculties towards social justice and “scholar-activism.” The report noted that as Federal funding for the humanities was reduced over the past two decades, the Mellon Foundation, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, had offered institutions funding to adapt research, courses, curriculums, and entire mission statements to comport with the foundation’s social justice emphasis. In doing so the foundation pushed scholarship which emphasized race, class, gender, and inequality, with an anti-Western bias.
The report, and another on humanities funding from the American Enterprise Institute, complements those showing how the Qatar Foundation has inserted itself into university operations including personnel decisions, particularly with respect to DEI, as a condition for grants.
Unsurprisingly, another report on the University of California found that while students are the most visible actors, faculty and academic departments are key institutional drivers of the hostile environment. At UCLA alone, some 155 faculty members have publicly endorsed BDS and dozens of departments issued statements in support of pro-Hamas encampments.
Seemingly cognizant of the perception of Middle East studies as the focal point for campus anti-Israel agitation, a Columbia University provost released a report recommending adding additional faculty and courses in Israel studies. At the same time, reports indicated that the leading candidates for the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies were all scholar-activists with minimal publication records who had expressed support for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
One result of relentless antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus is a widening crisis for Jewish faculty. A new poll indicates that 40% of faculty felt compelled to hide their identities, while a similar figure were considering leaving academia.
Student Attacks Against Jews Continue, If Down Slightly
On campus, harassment of Jewish and Israeli students appears to have declined somewhat as a result of restrictions on pro-Hamas protests. Off campus protests continue, as in the case of an anti-ICE event outside of Columbia University which featured the same students and faculty who had supported Hamas in 2025 and 2024. Anti-ICE protests organized by groups such as Students for a Democratic Society and others such as SJP chapters which had been at the center of pro-Hamas protests, have been noted at many campuses including the University of Minnesota, Cornell, and Columbia.
A serious incident took place at a cafe near DePaul University where Jewish students attending a Hillel event were harassed and eventually driven out by pro-Hamas students and staff. The university president later expressed outrage at the incident, which was another in a series which have taken place at the institution.
The Princeton SJP chapter canceled the appearance of anti-Israel speaker Norman Finkelstein and stated he might appear at another time. The university noted it had not barred Finkelstein.
BDS resolutions continue to be proposed in student governments despite the fact that they are opposed almost uniformly by administrations and trustees. Examples in February include:
- The University of Maryland student government passed its fourth anti-Israel resolution of the year. Student government at Maryland has been dominated by pro-Hamas activists for several years despite the school’s large Jewish population;
- A resolution in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln student government calling for divestment from weapons manufacturers passed after language specifically naming Israel was removed.
Campus disruptions of speakers deemed insufficiently hostile to Israel continued in February. One example was the disruption of a talk by left-wing journalist Ezra Klein at Sarah Lawrence College. Klein was called a “Zionist pig” and signs held by protestors included “Nazi” and “Sarah Lawrence, we know you; you protect Zionist Jews.” Sarah Lawrence president Cristle Collins Judd sat next to Klein on stage and did not intervene, but reportedly commented to him, “Welcome to Sarah Lawrence.”
Judd’s emailed condemnation of the incident elicited protests for the SJP chapter who accused her of “blatant lies wielded to vilify students and manufacture consent for disciplinary charges” and claimed Sarah Lawrence was attempting to “suppress dissent against Zionism and imperialism at any cost.” The group threatened retaliation if disciplinary procedures were taken.
A talk entitled “Being Jewish in America Today” at the University of Virginia Jewish studies program by writer Adam Kirsch was similarly disrupted by student protestors “resisting the Zionist speaker.” Neither Sarah Lawrence nor Virginia have taken disciplinary measures against students.
A new AJC/Hillel survey indicated that 42% of American Jewish students have experienced antisemitism on campus. Half reported feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, while 34% indicated they had refrained from displaying their Jewish identity. Some 69% stated that Israel was an important part of their identities and 80% of parents indicated that antisemitism was part of their decision where to send children to college.
What’s Happening in K-12 Schools
One notable development in February was the involvement of outside groups such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation in training and organizing student walkouts and anti-ICE protests. These groups have shifted from pro-Hamas to anti-ICE protests and make the explicit equation of “Gaza” with “Minneapolis.”
The same groups, along with the Sunrise Movement, Code Pink, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and others, are working with the DSA and teachers unions in cities like Dallas to celebrate Palestinian “resistance” and oppose the US government.
Teacher training remains a focal point for radicalization, particularly in connection with mandated ethnic studies curriculums. The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium was awarded a contract by San Jose (CA) schools to train teachers. Lesson materials include materials on “Stolen Land” and “Youth Incarceration and Resistance in Palestine.” The leadership of the consortium include University of California ethnic studies faculty connected with the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.
The school system also paid teachers to attend the Xicanx Institute For Teaching and Organizing (XITO) Summer Institute which presented materials on “Teaching Border Imperialism From Turtle Island to Palestine: Ethnic Studies as a Tool For Liberation” and “Transformative Teaching: Interactive Read-Alouds and Art as an Entry Point For Teaching Palestine in K-5.”
The addition of Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) as a pedagogical foundation and legal enforcement mechanism in Canadian schools, effectively enshrining the Palestinian narrative as unquestionable truth and criminalizing expressions of support for Israel and even visible expressions of Jewish identity, has cemented radicalism. Canadian journalists investigating APR trainings for teachers in Hamilton (ON) have been denied access to materials on the grounds that sharing it publicly would be a “Danger to Safety or Health.”
To complete the equation, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has hired the anti-Zionist group Independent Jewish Voices to provide antisemitism training for teachers. The group “firmly rejects the use of IHRA, which distorts the definition of antisemitism to conflate political criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism” and will be “including anti-Palestinian racism tools into the training.” Unsurprisingly, antisemitic acts in Ontario schools increased dramatically after October 7th.
Individual teachers also continue to instigate dramatically antisemitic incidents. In one case a Muslim San Diego teacher was fired after posting a video in which she accused Israel of “hijacking protests in order to do the same BS that they’re always doing — which is just stealing from people. And that includes everything from goods and services all the way down to the livers and kidneys and eyeballs.”
Conversely a teacher at the elite UN International School in New York was fired after complaining about harassment from Muslim teachers who made statements regarding how “Jews are driven by money.” The school, which educates children of UN officials, received a Qatari pledge of $60 million in 2023.
A newly filed lawsuit against the State of California on behalf of Jewish parents and children accuses the state of failing to address systemic antisemitism in local school districts including Berkeley, Los Angeles, Santa Clara, San Francisco, Campbell Union, Fremont, and Oakland. The suit alleges that Jewish students were subjected to antisemitic harassment from teachers and peers with administrators taking no action or supporting their attackers. The trajectory of California schools reflected in the lawsuit appears to match that of British schools, which have been overwhelmed by horrific antisemitism towards the relatively small number of Jewish students.
Finally, a new campaign by left-wing and pro-Hamas groups in Canada has targeted Jewish summer camps for their support of “genocide.” The effort seeks to strip accreditation from at least 17 camps across Canada “because they encourage support for a genocidal, settler-colonial state.” The groups include the Palestinian Canadian Congress, Just Peace Advocates, the Ontario Palestinian Rights Association, and PAJU Montreal. Jewish groups condemned the campaign, which the Ontario Camps Association called “discriminatory and antisemitic in nature.”
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.