Massachusetts teachers' union under fire for alleged antisemitic educational materials
The state's largest teachers' union is under investigation for allegedly offering antisemitic learning materials to its members.
Lawmakers question MTA president
In a tense three-hour hearing Monday, lawmakers on the Special Legislative Committee on Combatting Antisemitism grilled Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page about materials the union made available to its members that many perceived as antisemitic.
The images included a dollar bill folded into a star of David, a poster calling President Joe Biden a serial killer, a poster that said, "Zionists F*** Off," and a children's book about a Palestinian girl.
"When I was 10 years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine," State Rep. Simon Cataldo read from the book at the hearing. "A group of bullies called Zionists wanted my land, so they stole it by force and hurt many people."
The MTA has been criticized for alleged antisemitism in recent years, prompting protests from parents and teachers.
MTA President Max Page declined WBZ's request for an interview on this topic, but in the hearing, he told lawmakers the materials were for consideration by highly skilled educators, not necessarily for classroom instruction.
"The notion that our union is trying to indoctrinate our young people is simply not true," Page said. "It has unfortunately led to death threats on me and my staff and other attacks on our union."
Online petition against MTA
An online petition by the Israeli American Civic Action Network has over 10,000 signatures, and calls for the legislature to stop working with the MTA, writing, "Our demand is clear: No cooperation with a union that fosters bias and threatens Jewish students' safety. Lawmakers must stand with families and demand better for our children."
WBZ spoke with a local science teacher, who chose to remain anonymous to protect his job. He was empowered to post on social media when he learned of the allegations against his union. "I would much rather my union takes care of teachers and takes no political positions," he explained.
Still, he wanted families to know that he had never even seen the materials presented at the hearing – so he doesn't believe they were widely disseminated among the union, and they certainly did not guide his instruction of his students. "Honestly in 20 plus years I've never had the union make any suggestions to me," he explained, saying the union has never dictated what he teaches.
Additionally, the teacher told WBZ he feels it's his responsibility – and that of his colleagues – to maintain a politically welcoming, inclusive, and neutral environment at school. "You try to not announce loudly your strongly held opinions and your political views," he explained.
It's unclear what the outcome will be of Monday's hearing. No further hearings are currently scheduled.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
San Francisco Chronicle
25 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Israel vows to prevent an aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg and other activists from reaching Gaza
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel's defense minister has vowed to prevent an aid boat carrying Greta Thunberg and other activists from reaching the Gaza Strip. Defense Minister Israel Katz said Sunday that Israel wouldn't allow anyone to break its naval blockade of the Palestinian territory, which he said was aimed at preventing Hamas from importing arms.
San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Everybody is scared:' Trump's travel ban leaves Bay Area residents on edge
Hundreds of people arrived at Raimondi Park in West Oakland Friday morning to pray in observance of Eid al-Adha, a Muslim celebration. Men lined up on a massive white tarp on the baseball field, removing their shoes and laying down their prayer rugs. Women did the same but in a smaller section under a white tent. As people arrived, Ali Albasiery, a business owner and president of the As-Salam Mosque in Oakland, greeted them with a smile, a pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek. Despite his smile and the warm greetings from his peers, Albasiery, who was born in Yemen and moved to the U.S. at 10, was preoccupied by President Donald Trump's recent travel ban on citizens from his home country and 11 others. And he could sense apprehension and fear in those gathering to pray. 'Everybody is scared,' Albasiery said. 'Everybody is rushing and people are panicking.' This past Wednesday, Trump reintroduced the policy from his first term that, when it goes into effect on Monday, will prohibit travel to the U.S. by citizens of Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya and Somalia. It limits travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Trump said the move — which includes the input of the secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of homeland security and director of national intelligence — will protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks and national security threats. 'As President, I must act to protect the national security and national interest of the United States and its people,' Trump said. Trump did not point to any specific examples of terrorist attacks against the U.S. involving the countries banned. He spoke of the recent Colorado attack in which an Egyptian national, who had overstayed his visa, injured Jewish marchers supporting Israeli hostages held in Gaza, but Egypt is not included in the bans. Another justification for the move, according to the president's order, is to target countries whose visitors frequently overstay their visas. Courts blocked Trump's first two attempts to ban travel from certain countries, but in 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his third try, based on the president's authority over matters of national security. The issue of overstayed visas could give opponents fresh ammunition against the new order, and critics have already argued that it appears to arbitrarily target countries on those grounds. Bay Area groups that advocate for immigrants said they are preparing for a fight, noting that the administration's strategy has extended beyond countries with Muslim majorities and African nations. 'The administration is using a mish-mash of justifications (including what screening measures the targeted countries' governments employ, whether the targeted countries accept deportation flights, and the visa overstay rates from these countries) to assert its actions,' Carole Vigne, legal director at the Asian Law Caucus, said in a statement to the Chronicle. 'The fight to stop this new ban will require more creative and strategic approaches to expose the underlying racism and xenophobia.' Hundreds of people protested at major airports nationwide when Trump announced his first travel ban in 2017. But this week, as Trump issued a new ban involving more countries than he did in his first term, many remain warily silent. Many had been expecting the move, as Trump promised repeatedly to reinstate his bans in his campaign last year. The muted response isn't lost on Albasiery, owner of Shoprite and four other small convenience stores in Oakland, who said he is focusing on helping members of his community. The day after Trump's announcement, he was awakened at 1 a.m. by a Yemeni friend who said his father was forced to leave his mother in Yemen. His father had received a visa, but his mother had not yet; his father was worried he'd be banned from entering the U.S. if he did not leave right away. 'Everyone that has received their visa within the past week or two weeks, they are rushing to get into the states,' Albasiery said. 'They don't know, if they come (whether) they'll be turned back.' The Bay Area is home to more than 4,800 people born in Yemen. The total number of Bay Area residents who come from the 12 countries targeted by the full travel ban is at least 76,000, led by Iran and Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Census. The communities are even larger than those numbers indicate, with more having ancestry from the countries. These diasporas are spread throughout the Bay Area, and many are clustered in the East Bay. Fremont is known for its large Afghan population; Union City is home to a Myanmar community and cultural center; Hayward is a center for the Sudanese community; while the Iranian population is more dispersed throughout the region. Many first-generation immigrants here send money back to their families. Some people are concerned about traveling to their homelands to see their loved ones and possibly not being able to return, depending on their own immigration status. Alaa Suliman, a Hayward resident and professional development officer at the Sudanese Association for Northern California, which represents over 1,000 people from the country in the Bay Area, said this week's announcement is more painful than Trump's first round of travel bans. Sudan is in the midst of a civil war that has killed thousands of people. 'The Sudanese people are literally in the most dire need for support and for international attention,' Suliman said. 'We have to speak up, we have to protest, we have to resist. This is just the beginning of a really long, corrupted journey.' Suliman planned to attend a morning prayer in Hayward with her community on Friday to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Albasiery, who organized the event in Oakland, said he was spending the rest of the day with his sisters and cousins in Oakland to have cake and sandwiches. He fretted for his friends and for the current state of Yemen, where an 11-year civil war has resulted in 233,000 deaths, 131,000 of those caused by lack of food, services and infrastructure, according to the United Nations. On Friday, Albasiery said most people were trying to stay focused on the holiday. One man, who was standing with a group of friends at the end of the prayer, said he didn't want to talk about Trump's travel ban. 'Not today,' he said. Others said the ban made it hard to concentrate on the holiday. 'It's very discriminatory,' said Waleed Nasser, a 57-year-old San Leandro resident who is originally from Yemen. 'People are trying to come over here and have a better life. I really don't understand what Trump is doing.' Nasser and his son, Mohammed, 19, attended Friday's prayer together. Their mood was somber — they worried about the effect of the ban on their friends and family overseas. 'There's nothing to celebrate when your close Muslim brothers and sisters are struggling back home. 'People can't get food. Children are dying, " Mohammed Nasser said. He said he didn't understand the rationale behind Trump's ban.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
America's Anti-Jewish Assassins Are Making the Case for Zionism
The founding father of Zionism, the modern movement to create a Jewish state, had a Christmas tree. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish journalist who would later convene the world's first Zionist Congress, was busy lighting the holiday ornament with his family when the chief rabbi of Vienna dropped in for a visit. The cleric was not amused—but the episode helps explain what Zionism is, why it came to be, and why it still finds adherents. Far from seeking to flee non-Jewish society, Herzl—like many European Jews of his era—ardently hoped to be accepted by it. He did not circumcise his son, and initially proposed that Jews evade anti-Semitism by converting en masse to Roman Catholicism. Only after such ill omens as the rise of Karl Lueger, the Vienna mayor who would serve as inspiration to Adolf Hitler, did Herzl reluctantly conclude that Jews would never be accepted in gentile society and pivot to pursuing Jewish statehood. Moving to a then-backwater in the Middle East was the last thing that Herzl wanted to do. It was also the last thing most Jews of his time wanted to do. Like Herzl, they simply sought to live in peace in the places they'd called home for centuries. And some, like Herzl, slowly realized that this was not going to be possible. As the historian Walter Russell Mead has put it, 'Zionism was not the triumphant battle cry of a victorious ethnic group,' but rather 'a weird, crazy, desperate stab at survival' made by those who foresaw their impending doom and despaired of other options. Seen in this context, Herzl's influential manifesto Der Judenstaat ('The Jewish State') was the 19th-century equivalent of Get Out for European Jews: a warning that well-intentioned liberalism would not save them, and that they needed to escape while they still could. Ever since, much of the world has worked to prove Herzl right. This past Sunday in Colorado, a man infiltrated a solidarity event for Israeli hostages in Gaza and began setting the Jews there on fire. The attack left 15 wounded, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor. The Boulder assault occurred just weeks after the execution of a young couple outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where a leftist extremist allegedly emptied his clip into one of the victims as she tried to crawl away. That shooting followed the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro on the second night of Passover. The firebomber in Colorado was captured on video shouting 'end Zionists' during his rampage. The murderer in Washington produced a keffiyeh and reportedly declared, 'I did it for Gaza.' Shapiro's would-be killer told a 911 operator that he targeted the Jewish governor 'for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.' Although these assailants all attacked American Jews, they clearly perceived themselves as Zionism's avengers. In reality, however, they have joined a long line of Zionism's inadvertent advocates. As in Herzl's time, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish acts do more than nearly anyone else to turn Jews who were once indifferent or even hostile to Israel's fate into reluctant appreciators of its necessity. Consider the Holocaust, the greatest anti-Jewish atrocity in modern memory. The Third Reich and its many collaborators exterminated two-thirds of Europe's Jews. At the same time, the enemies of the Nazis—including the United States and Canada—refused to let most desperate Jewish refugees into their countries. This inevitably funneled many people toward their destination of last resort: mandatory Palestine. The creation of Israel was the consequence less of Jewish choices than of all other Jewish choices being foreclosed by non-Jewish powers. In 1948, Israel declared independence and fought off the attempt of five invading Arab armies to strangle it in the cradle. Some 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homeland. Wide swaths of the world promptly took out their displeasure at this outcome on the Jewish populations nearest at hand. In the years following Israel's founding, nearly 1 million Jews left their ancestral homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Many fled abuse in countries such as Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Tunisia, where Jews were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and stripped of their possessions, despite having lived in these places for millennia. At the time, few of these people were Zionists. They loved their home countries, which refused to love them back, and faced persecution when they arrived in Israel. Today, this Mizrahi community and its descendants comprise about half of Israel's population and form the backbone of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing base. The Soviet Union, despite presenting itself as the vanguard of universal brotherhood, also turned on its Jews. The Communist police state cast the community as subversive, institutionally discriminated against its members in higher education and the professions, and labeled countless Jews who had no interest in Israel as 'Zionists.' The state executed secular Jewish artists and intellectuals under false charges, repressed observance of the Jewish faith, and threw those who protested into Gulags. Eventually, after decades of international pressure, nearly 2 million Jews were allowed to leave. More than half moved to Israel, where they would become one of Israel's most reliably conservative constituencies. Simply put, Israel exists as it does today because of the repeated choices made by societies to reject their Jews. Had these societies made different choices, Jews would still live in them, and Israel likely would not exist—certainly not in its present form. Instead, Israel is a garrison state composed precisely of those Jews with the most reason to distrust the outside world and its appeals to international ideals, knowing that these did precisely nothing to help them when they needed it most. In this manner, decade after decade, anti-Semitism has created more Zionism. Put another way, the unwitting agents of Zionism throughout history have been those unwilling to tolerate Jews in their own countries. Bruce Hoffman: The Boulder attack didn't come out of nowhere Given this dynamic, a rational anti-Zionist movement would devote itself to making Jews feel welcome in every facet of life outside of Israel, ruthlessly rooting out any inkling of anti-Semitism in order to convince Jews that they have nothing to fear and certainly no need for a separate state. Such an anti-Zionist movement would overcome Zionism by making it obsolete. But that is not the anti-Zionist movement that currently exists. Instead, Israel's opposition around the globe—whether groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah or their international apologists and imitators —often seems determined to persuade those Jews who chose differently than Herzl did that he was right all along. Attacks such as those in Colorado, Washington, and Pennsylvania, not to mention the white-supremacist massacre at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, have raised the costs of being Jewish in America. Synagogues, schools, and other Jewish institutions collectively pay millions of dollars to secure their premises, resulting in communities that are less open to the outside and attendees being forever reminded that they are not safe even in their places of worship. And now American Jews thinking of attending communal events must stop to consider whether would-be attackers will associate them with Israel and target them for death. America, at least, was not always this way. The country has long stood as the great counterexample to the Zionist project—proof that Jews could not just survive but thrive as equals in a pluralistic liberal democracy, without need for their own army or state. After Barbra Steinmetz, the 88-year-old Holocaust survivor in Boulder, was attacked, she had a message for the country. 'We're Americans,' she told NBC News. 'We are better than this.' That is what most American Jews and their allies believe, and the justification for that belief was evident in Colorado this week, where Jared Polis, the state's popular Jewish governor, forthrightly condemned the attack. But if the perpetrators and the cheerleaders of the incipient American intifada have their way, that spirit will be stifled. Such a victory, however, would be self-defeating. According to video captured at the scene, the Boulder attacker accidentally set himself on fire in the middle of his assault. It would be hard to script a better metaphor for the way such violence sabotages the cause it purports to advance. If the anti-Zionist assassins succeed in making Jewish life in the United States less livable, they will not have helped a single Palestinian, but they will have made their opponents' case for them. They will have proved the promise of America wrong, and the darkest premonitions of Zionism right.
