Specifically, the bill allows schools to adopt "a locally developed ethnic studies course approved by the governing board of the school district or the governing body of the charter school," meaning the local district can adopt and approve their own curriculum. This includes one that was drafted and scrapped in 2020 due to backlash from AMCHA, its initiative director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and the Jewish community over antisemitism within the curriculum. The curriculum was written by The Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute (LESMCI), which is a for-profit organization. It referred to Israel as an apartheid state and claimed it violates international law. They called the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement a "global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians."Additionally, the word antisemitism is not mentioned once in their 19-page curriculum glossary. However, it defines terms such as homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity and transphobia.
The new curriculum was drafted by the California Board of Education. However, lobbyists from LESMCI have petitioned schools to implement the original curriculum, according to an AMCHA press release. The Hayward Unified School District, located in the San Francisco Bay area, has already committed to implementing the original version.
“The policy and efforts to develop an Ethnic Studies framework are informed by and will include Critical Race Theory and the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum,” the district wrote in a press release in June.
Rossman-Benjamin felt that the Jewish community's hard work to banish the original curriculum was all for naught.
"Although the bill recommends that school districts adopt the SBE-approved model curriculum as the basis for the required courses, it also allows for the use of any curriculum approved by a school district – even the rejected, overtly antisemitic and anti-Zionist first draft that outraged the Jewish community, the Legislative Jewish Caucus and the governor," she said in her testimony.
"The original authors of that first draft have been carrying out a successful campaign to promote their curriculum – including its anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist lessons – throughout the state," she continued."They’ve garnered support from the two biggest teachers unions, as well as from the state’s higher education ethnic studies community. They’ve also been vigorously lobbying individual school districts and some, such as Hayward Unified, have already adopted it. If AB 101 becomes law, we believe most school districts will follow suit."
Although the new curriculum contains lessons about the Jewish experience in America and antisemitism, it contains a "Fact Sheet on Jewish Americans and Complicating Ideas of Race." It claims that classifying Jews as "non-white" is a white supremacist and Nazi concept."Light-skinned Jews may experience the benefits of conditional whiteness on the basis of their appearance, for example, safer encounters with law enforcement, and also experience antisemitic prejudice and discrimination on the basis of their Jewishness from both extremes of the political spectrum," according to the fact sheet.
It defines conditional whiteness as the ability to gain the "benefits of whiteness" when dropping ethnic markers of difference.
According to Rossman-Benjamin, more than 70 rabbis and 1,000 Californians have called to block the bill's passing. It will come to vote in the state Senate sometime this summer, according to a JNS op-ed from Rossman-Benjamin.