Antisemitism has no place in schools, but this California bill won’t help | Opinion

In this country, hatred toward Jews has been on the rise ever since the deadly 2023 attack on Israelis by Hamas terrorists led to an ongoing siege in Gaza. The question for California is whether our schools and teachers need more direction to prevent antisemitism.

Sadly, a well-intentioned bill before lawmakers could do more harm than good. Truthfully, it’s not clear that legislators on either side of the aisle can be helpful on this super-charged issue.

At issue is Assembly Bill 715 by Assemblymembers Rick Chavez Zbur, D-Hollywood, and Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay. Its worthy goal is to prevent an antisemitic learning environment in California schools. But it’s in the critical details where the intent of this bill falls apart. A leading teachers association is worried about losing academic freedom with new state mandates for “balanced” instruction about Israel and Palestine — a standard that doesn’t apply to any other conflict in the world.

Teaching materials are already highly regulated in California. It is already against state law for any public school body to approve of any instructional materials that could lead to the unlawful discrimination of a student. This legal protection is vast, whether the issue is disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or “any other specified characteristic, equal rights and opportunities in the educational institutions of the state.”

It seems clear where California legally stands on antisemitism in our schools — and on any form of religious-based discrimination against anyone in this state, without this legislation.

Antisemitism, Islamophobia not treated equally

Nonetheless, AB 715 seeks to include both antisemitism and Islamophobia in the existing prohibition against teaching materials that could lead to discrimination based on religion. But there is no symmetry of addressing discrimination faced by these two faiths equally in the bill.

AB 715 contains a lengthy and problematic description of what constitutes an antisemetic learning environment. Prohibited, for example, are materials that “do not use accurate, balanced and objective language and content, do not distinguish between opinion and fact or do not respect the historical, cultural or religious significance of Israel to the Jewish people.” Balance is inherently subjective to achieve. Is it fair for teachers and schools to face challenges of imbalanced instruction when it defies any legislative description?

AB 715 makes no similar attempt to describe an Islamophobic learning environment, a misguided legislative way of elevating one form of discrimination to be more important than another..

Most problematic of all is AB 715’s proposal to create an “Office of the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator” inside the State Board of Education. Missing, again, is a fellow coordinator to prevent Islamophobia. However, upon contemplating such offices, a much larger problem with AB 715’s approach becomes evident.

This whole notion of creating a bureaucracy to combat a single type of religious discrimination is misguided.. How many such offices would California need, out of fairness and equity, to prevent discrimination for every permutation of discrimination? The State Board of Education should be staffed to take all forms of discrimination equally seriously. Any other approach risks more division and more hatred.

A bill too hot for lawmakers to touch

AB 715 sailed through the Assembly without a single one of its members demonstrating the courage to stand up and say this approach to fighting hatred is wrong. Now in the Senate, some opposition is surfacing — most notably from the California Teachers Association, which is defending “the rights of educators to assist students in developing critical thinking skills by exploring and discussing divergent points of view.”

The Senate has referred the legislation to education and judiciary committees. Then, AB 715 would head to the appropriations committee.

These same two lawmakers last year advanced legislation to detail how California high schools should go about developing their curricula for a semester of ethnic studies. Nobody ever voted against it. The bill quietly died in appropriations, placed on the “suspense” file, never to return.

Lawmakers are right to wonder what— if anything — Sacramento can do to keep our schools safer from intolerance that could lead to discrimination and violence. AB 715 is not the answer.

This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Antisemitism has no place in schools, but this California bill won’t help | Opinion."