(JTA) — Texas instituted on Friday the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Students in public schools will soon be required to read Anne Frank’s diary and a host of Bible passages, along with other Jewish- and Holocaust-related texts.

The decision has drawn vigorous objections from some of the state’s Jews. Several local rabbis and other Jewish leaders pushed back on the proposal during the public comment period in the lead-up to the vote this week because of concerns including injecting Christian content into the schools.

In a vote Friday of nine to five, the Republican-controlled state education board approved the list, mandating reading selections usually left to individual schools and teachers. The curriculum will go into effect in 2030 and apply to the roughly 5.5 million schoolchildren in Texas public schools.

The move comes as the board has increasingly sought to incorporate Christianity into the state’s public schools, including in 2024 when it approved an optional Bible curriculum for elementary schools that drew pushback from Jewish parents and advocates. Last year, Republican lawmakers in the state also required the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom.

The passage of the reading list follows an effort by the state’s conservative education leaders to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class and exercise control over the texts students are exposed to.

In recent years, Texas has been at the forefront of the national wave of book removals, with several districts pulling books about the Holocaust and Jewish history, including versions of Anne Frank’s diary. Decisions by the state education board have historically had an effect on schools nationwide, in part because of the vast population of school age students in the state.

The new reading list, which spans over 150 titles, includes Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and the “original edition” of Frank’s diary. Conservatives, including in Texas, have objected to a graphic novel version that illustrates passages in which the diarist describes her sexual longings.

Other books on the list include “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.

Beginning in the fourth grade, students will also be required to read numerous passages from both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, a requirement that has drawn fierce opposition from some Texas Jewish leaders.

Board members continued to propose last-minute additions to the list right up until the vote Friday afternoon, adding the Biblical parable Jonah and the Whale to the first grade curriculum.

The final reading list was pared down from roughly 300 texts after the board initially discussed the proposal in February. At the time, state education board leaders told JTA that they had consulted with experts including the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a state government body.

On Monday, a host of rabbis and Jewish leaders attended a Board of Education meeting to voice their opposition to the reading list, including Joshua Fixler, a rabbi at Houston’s Reform Congregation Emanu El.

“There is a difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion, and these texts are going to put Texas teachers in the position of teaching religion to our kids,” Fixler told JTA following Friday’s vote.

Fixler said he believed the required reading list would cause children of all faiths to feel “alienated and isolated” because they would “see the state endorsement of one particular religious tradition.”

Fixler particularly objected to “Night” being part of the same eighth-grade unit as chapter three of the Book of Lamentations, which discusses the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews.

“To associate that with a Holocaust text like Elie Wiesel’s classic work of ‘Night’ is to imply that the Jews might in some way be responsible for the Holocaust,” Fixler, who has three children in Texas public schools, explained.

Rabbi Neil F. Blumofe, the senior rabbi of Conservative Congregation Agudas Achim in Austin, said that he was concerned that the list’s focus on Holocaust-based text would reduce students’ understanding of Jewish history.

“If one only teaches the Jewish civilization or religion as catastrophe-based, I think that that gives a narrow focus, and also can cause issues of what Judaism is and what its relevancy is currently versus what it used to be in the past,” Blumofe said.

Blumofe added that he had “yet to see an effective curriculum or teacher’s guide or ways to sensitively recognize that these are works of civilization versus works of a particular theology.”

Laney Hawes, the co-founder of Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA that she was “seething” over the result of Friday’s vote.

“The lists are promoting a singular narrow ideology,” Hawes said, adding that while proponents of the required reading stressed that it promoted “Judeo-Christian values,” she believed it excluded Jewish perspectives.

“I want my children to have a worldview that is vast and diverse,” Hawes, who is not Jewish,  said. “If they’re going to be forced to read certain books, I want those books to represent a plethora of perspectives, not just one world view.”

Fixler and Hawes said that they planned to gather with other local advocates to consider ways to fight the new curriculum. For Fixler, he hoped the outcome would emphasize for others the importance of voting in school board elections.

“I think that this should be a wake-up call to people who have been sleeping about the ways in which Christian nationalism is shaping policy on local, state and federal levels,” he said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post Texas creates required reading list that includes Anne Frank and the Bible appeared first on The Forward.

Much of the pro-Israel world seems to have seen New York’s Tuesday Democratic primaries as bad for the Jews. When it comes to at least one race, that perspective needs revising.

Yes, Brad Lander, who is highly critical of Israel, defeated the AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10 — which, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute, boasts the second-highest number of Jewish voters of any district in the country. But seeing that result as “bad for the Jews” misunderstands what the candidates, both of whom are Jewish and self-professed Zionists, were arguing about.

Both are motivated by a profound wish to protect Jews in the United States from rising hatred. Both understand how high the stakes are. What divided them was the question of how to govern well for Jews — a new iteration of a dispute between two robust strains of Jewish thought that extend deep into our shared history.

Both Lander and Goldman ran on their Jewish identities and built explicit plans for confronting antisemitism into their pitches to voters.

Goldman called himself a “proud Zionist,” and told the NY Jewish Week “I do think there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified,” even as he said he’d pushed AIPAC to be more willing to criticize the Israeli government.

Lander, upon winning by an almost two-to-one margin, told supporters, “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights, and I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job.”

Both men accepted, as a starting premise, that antisemitism is rising and real. What they disagreed about was where the danger is concentrated, and which set of political alliances will actually help contain it.

Goldman focused on concerns about the political left’s tendency to treat Zionism as suspect. He prioritized standing with Israel, staying close to its institutional defenders, and refusing to let the loudest progressive critics define what counts as acceptable Jewish politics.

Lander, instead, argued that conflating support for the Israeli government with Jewish safety leaves Jews exposed if and when that government’s policies become impossible to defend. His strategy: decouple Jewish identity from Israeli state policy, ally with the growing progressive coalition in New York politics, and fight antisemitism from inside that coalition’s ranks rather than outside and against it.

Both of these approaches draw from recognizable, longstanding strains of American Jewish thought. Goldman hewed to the camp of covenantal loyalty first and foremost to the Jewish people, and, by extension, to Israel as a sacred trust. And Lander hewed to the camp of universalist ethics and solidarity with the marginalized.

To call one of those stances worse for Jews than the other ignores the historical truth that both are deeply grounded in American Jewish life. But there is something potentially troubling for Jews about this contest: the evident truth, which it displayed, that the rift between these two schools of American Judaism is widening rather than closing.

That split isn’t really about the state of Israel. It’s a much older argument inside Jewish thought, about whether Jewish ethics point outward or inward first.

The universalist strand understands much of the Hebrew Bible, and centuries of subsequent commentary, as promoting the idea that justice is owed to everyone. It lives by the instruction to remember that we were once strangers in Egypt and the commandment that the same law applies to the stranger as to the native-born. It follows the prophets who reserved their harshest words not for the Jewish people’s enemies, but for that people’s own failures to protect the poor and the powerless.

According to this reading, Jews must practice solidarity with anyone suffering. A Jewish politics that didn’t extend itself to advocating for Palestinians, immigrants, or any other group facing state violence would be failing the tradition rather than honoring it.

The particularist strand reads the same texts and the same history and draws an opposite lesson: that universalism without a prior, unapologetic loyalty to one’s own people is exactly the moral posture that left Jews undefended for most of their history. This strand sees that loyalty as a structural condition that allows Jewish communal survival. To its gaze, a Jewish politics that can’t put Jewish safety first, especially after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, has lost its way.

What makes the tension between these stances difficult to resolve is that both readings are genuinely supported by the textual and historical record, which is long and varied enough to furnish ammunition for either side without anyone needing to misquote it.

Goldman and Lander didn’t invent this fight. They just gave New York’s most Jewish congressional district a chance to vote on it again, in a fresh context, with the war in Gaza standing in for whatever the live test case happened to be a generation ago — and whatever it will be will be in the next crisis in Jewish history.

That divide is part of why framing progressive victories on New York’s primary night as a loss for Jews flattens something more interesting happening inside NY-10 specifically. This election was a fight between two Jewish candidates, on some of the most Jewish terrain in the entire country, with each offering a fully worked-out theory of how to keep Jews safe, and each able to point to real receipts.

That is not a fight over whether Jews matter in New York politics. It is a fight over which of two coalitions — one anchored to Israel and institutional Jewish groups, and one tied to the multiracial progressive coalition reshaping the city — is the safer harbor for American Jews going forward.

It’s fair to be concerned about how bitter that fight seems to be becoming. But it’s also fair to celebrate the fact that Jewish life can still maintain such rich ideological diversity. This was a constructive political race conducted between Jews, waged substantially in Jewish terms, over which political strategy actually protects Jewish life in a moment when antisemitism is on the rise. It’s arguable that to have the choice between candidates like Goldman and Lander, who take their own Jewishness seriously enough to fight about what it should mean in American politics, is actually very good for the Jews.

The post The biggest Jewish issue in New York’s most Jewish primary wasn’t really Israel appeared first on The Forward.

I’ve perhaps arrived early to an older man’s fixation: Civil War. Not the American one. (At least not the one that took place in the 19th Century.)

This week I returned to Westeros for House of the Dragon Season 3, in which various platinum-haired nobles born of incest fight for a throne made of swords with lizards that breathe fire. I chased it with the Public Theater’s fine production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, in which branches of the same family pledge their allegiance to a white or red rose corresponding to their preferred ruler of England.

Before I saw any of that, I was in the Berkshires to see S. Asher Gelman’s play The Zionists, about a Jewish house divided by (what else): Israel. In that play, there was no kingdom to inherit, but our common inheritance as Jews is a tendency to disagree that, if not approached with mutual respect, can yield disastrous results.

Jewish tradition has its own version of these stories: Last week’s parshah was Korach, in which Moses faces rebellion — and the rebels face the fate of being swallowed by the ground and dragged down to Sheol.

A while later in Tanakh time, the House of David and Saul had their factions. Then the sons of David, and on and on.

Jewish civil war, as chronicled by Josephus and other historians, most recently Barry Strauss, was perhaps at its most bitter circa 63 BCE, when the Romans intervened in a succession dispute between the Hasmoneans (leading to the end of the dynasty and the beginning of Judea as a Roman client state) and 70 CE, when rival factions among the Zealots, confronting the common foe of Rome, couldn’t put their differences aside long enough to quell the siege of Jerusalem.

In the Talmud account, it is baseless hatred between two men that sets the temple ablaze.

Recently I spoke with the historian Laura Arnold Leibman. We were discussing early American Jewry, which — surprise — was split on whether to support the Patriots fighting for independence or remain loyal to the British Crown.

Reviewing this more recent history, she remembered teaching a course on antiquity and telling the story of First Century Jerusalem.

“One of my non-Jewish students said, ‘This is so fascinating to hear that there were these different sects of Jews and that they disagreed with each other. Is it like that today?’” Leibman told me. The student, she said, had “clearly never been to a bar mitzvah.”

In Game of Thrones, Shakespeare and the Bible, internecine fighting ends — that is, when it doesn’t begin — when someone dies. Someone is crowned and gets to write the favorable history.

Looking at American Jewry today, we are relitigating the past and revisiting old arguments.

Bundism in the key of anti-Zionism is hot again — though critics say its ideas were tested and failed to the tune of millions of dead Jews between Hitler and Stalin. Supporters of Zionism cite scripture for our claim to the land, archaeology to establish our continued presence or a massacre of Jews that predated an attack on Arabs to point to who’s to blame for ongoing violence.

Given a turbulent present, we too often retreat into familiar narratives, so locked into our views that we shut out perspectives that might challenge us. The history of Am Israel, really a family story, teaches that when we close ourselves off to dissent, we face a kind of doom.

Leibman told me another story that signals a different approach.

After the Revolutionary War, Moses Seixas, the lay leader of the Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island, paid an early morning visit to his brother-in-law Hiam Levy, accompanied by the local sheriff. Levy was a Tory, and Seixas came to confiscate his belongings for the Revolutionary government.

This all had the makings of a family feud, but researching her book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism, Leibman found a letter Levy wrote to Moses, conveying his safe arrival in Amsterdam and thanking him for his support getting him set up financially there.

“They may have had political differences,” Leibman said, “but those kin connections trumped other sorts of problems.”

In this, there’s a model to be emulated.

The post Civil war’s nothing new for Jews. How do we survive this one? appeared first on The Forward.