Beating, Not Joining, Ethnic Studies

Key Findings:

This essay discusses the implementation of a semester-long course on ethnic studies in public high schools in California within the next 10 years, and whether or not it will benefit the perception of the Jewish community. The author argues that though it may yield some benefits, it is a rather poor solution that is likely to further mischaracterize the Jewish community by attempting to perceive the American Jew through boxes borrowed from other racial conflicts in America. 

The author’s principle grievance with this curriculum is that “the main purpose of ethnic studies isn’t to celebrate America’s multicultural society. It’s to denounce every form of American perfidy, real or not…” In other words, the semantics of a broken system are at risk of becoming more important than an approach that might fix the system— familiarizing students with these ethnic groups via their cultures, histories and religions.

The second issue the author brings up is that Jewish American history does not fit the worldview of ethnic studies. Jewish immigrants experienced greater freedom religiously and financially in coming to America as opposed to other countries where they had experienced the opposite for decades. The author gives further examples of minority groups (Albanian, Nigerian, Vietnamese) having experienced this same thing. However, the worldview of ethnic studies makes little room for such stories because according to its framework, there is only one context in which history exists— ‘colonizer vs. oppressor’. The author emphasizes that American Jewry, on the contrary, disproves this. He further argues that where the “curriculum sees ‘interlocking systems of oppression and privilege’, the Jewish experience in America has largely been one of interlocking systems of opportunity and advancement…”

The author concludes the piece by suggesting that there are more efficient ways to educate students on the Jewish community, such as adopting a model that provokes a critical thinking based approach that is unique to each ethnicity, rather than applying them to a one-size-fits-all model.