PHOTO: Janine Gottheiner discusses her experiences with anti-Israel bias at Portland's Lincoln High School during the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland's Parent Advocacy Night Monday, Apr. 7 at Congregation Neveh Shalom. (Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review)

By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
At the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s latest K-12 Parent Advocacy, held Monday, Apr. 7 at Congregation Neveh Shalom, Danielle Frandina pointed out a fundamental problem.
“A lot of people don’t understand antisemitism and they don’t recognize it,” she said.
Frandina, who has led the development of a curriculum on contemporary antisemitism for Facing History and Ourselves, the national education nonprofit, said this can lead to the kinds of incidents that Janine Gottheiner, the parent of a Lincoln High School student, described when her child came home and mentioned a classroom presentation about the ongoing war in Gaza that made her uncomfortable.
“The sources are very questionable; Al Jazeera, visualizingpalestine.com, sources that are not credible,” Gottheiner said of the slides she saw. “This slide show begins with a slide introducing the concept of the Oct. 7 invasion, and then 46 slides demonizing Israel, repeating lies about the civilian death toll, omitting crucial facts about the maps of the region, dealing in antisemitic tropes, tokenizing Jewish anti-Zionists and then ending with the brilliant conclusion that luminaries like Cynthia Nixon and Selena Gomez have urged Biden for a cease fire.”
Gottheiner and Federation Chief Community Relations and Public Affairs officer Bob Horenstein are working with the school and Portland Public Schools to address the situation, but Gottheiner pointed out that materials like these are truly dangerous both for the present and the future.
“This is their education. This is their entry into what is happening,” she said. “And that is frightening, because if this is the way they’re getting educated, wow, we are in trouble.”
She’s not the only one facing these issues with curriculum. Scottie Weintraub explained that she was anxious when her freshman son at McDaniel High School in Portland came home saying his world history class would be taking on a unit about Palestine.
“He said to me, ‘Mom, my teacher is really nice. He’s a great teacher, and I’m sure he’s not going to do anything bad,’” Weintraub explained. “But when I saw what he was covering, that’s when I got concerned.”
The curriculum in question was “Teaching Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel” by Bill Bigelow. Bigelow, a longtime social studies teacher for Portland Public Schools, also works with Rethinking Schools, an education activism non-profit, and is one of the editors of “Teaching Palestine,” a book published by Rethinking Schools and the basis for an upcoming workshop being hosted by the Beaverton Education Association, the union for teachers in the Beaverton School District.
Weintraub contacted the teacher and met with him and McDaniel’s Vice Principal. The outcome was somewhat surprising.
“We had a great conversation,” Weintraub said. “What I came to realize pretty quickly is that his interest in this lesson was not grounded in ideology. It was not grounded in him having a political opinion he wanted to push.”
The school ended up pulling the curriculum.
-
As it turns out, a lot of people don’t understand antisemitism because they don’t understand Judaism. One of the ways to combat that is the Student to Student program, which trains high school students to present to their peers.
“We go into schools, and we educate the students in those schools, not on the Israel-Hamas War, but on being Jewish,” Maddie Garfinkle, a junior at Ida B. Wells High School and Student to Student presenter explained. “We talk about different aspects of what it’s like to be Jewish, and our heritage and our traditions.”
Portland is the newest of 26 cities in North America to operate the Student to Student program, originally developed by the Jewish Federation of St. Louis. There are, or course, many more cities not benefiting from this program – that’s where curriculums like the one Frandina works on are critical.
“It is essential that antisemitism is not students only point of reference and exposure to Jewish identity and culture,” Frandina said. “We need to see living, breathing Jewish. Jewish life. Many schools have no exposure to that, and what happens is these narrow stereotypes form of what it means to be Jewish and what it looks like to be Jewish.”
Her organization, Facing History and Ourselves, started out by building a curriculum around the Holocaust, but has since expanded its focus because that’s only part of the picture.
“If students only exposure to Jewish identity is the Holocaust,” she said, “that is also a very narrow understanding of Jewish history and Jewish life.”
Frandina’s team created interactive tools allowing students to explore Jewish culture, history and practice at their own pace. The curriculum next moves on to contemporary expressions of antisemitism because, just as Judaism is not defined by the Holocaust, neither is hatred thereof.
“One of the things we really want to focus on is suppression of identity as an impact of antisemitism. Most teachers and administrators would never say it’s OK that a kid can’t bring their whole self to their classroom, right?” Frandina said. “So, if you now have a student who can’t come into their classroom wearing a Star of David or talking about their relationship to Israel or even saying that they’re Jewish, that is the impact of suppression of identity, which is something I think we would all say is a terrible thing that we should be combating.”
Facing History’s work is getting results – after a four-week lesson series for teachers, the percentage of those who said they felt like they could discuss the intersection of anti-Zionism with antisemitism jump from 17 percent to 48 percent, and the share saying they could articulate how antisemitism fits into the broader spectrum of racism jumped from 51 percent to 83 percent.
What Facing History’s work doesn’t do is teach about the current conflict in the Middle East. But it gives students the tools to engage with material about that conflict in a more meaningful manner.
“We want students to recognize antisemitism wherever it shows up; if it shows up on the far right, if it shows up on the far left, or anywhere in between,” Frandina said. “If they know the tropes, if they have seen examples of it and analyzed them in a contained, safe environment, then it’s not so much that they need to know the regional history of the Middle East or you know everything about the war, they need to be able to see when these tropes and conspiracy theories are embedded in the rhetoric.”
Learn more about Facing History’s work at facinghistory.org.
Rising juniors or seniors interested in participating in next year’s Student to Student cohort can get more information at jewishportland.org/studenttostudent.
To report incidents of antisemitism in schools, email Horenstein at bob@jewishportland.org or Federation Director of Educational Initiatives and Associate Director of Community Relations Rachel Nelson at rachel@jewishportland.org.