Seattle, We Have a Problem

BLM at School, a prominent lawyer, and a local newspaper seem to be under the spell of Hamas.

Black Lives Matter at School makes a bad bet

This past week was the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, with daily events for public school students across the city including a family history project, a talent show, and a social hour. While these events are positive and benign, Black Lives Matter at School took a definitive post-October 7th step toward embracing anti-Israel ideology as part of its mission.

BLM at School was formed in 2016 in Seattle, and as racial justice matters came to a head after the high-profile killings of several black Americans and ultimately George Floyd in 2020, it grew as a sort of education-activist collective with other groups around the country. BLM at School is not formally affiliated with the larger BLM movement. It is not under the jurisdiction of the Seattle Public Schools or any governmental body, but it has worked in partnership with SPS and the Seattle teachers’ union, SEA, since 2016. The National Education Association (NEA), the 3 million-member strong national teachers’ union, links to the BLM at School website (blacklivesmatteratschool.com) for resources for the week of action. This site is the central organizing point for BLM at School resources for educators nationwide.

BLM at School features the work of Seattle Public Schools educator-activists like Jesse Hagopian. Hagopian is one of the founders of the BLM at School movement and a longtime supporter of ethnic studies and the Palestinian cause, especially since participating in an Interfaith Peace Builders trip to Israel in 2011. BLM at School is closely related to the ethnic studies movement, including Washington Ethnic Studies Now (WAESN) and the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies (CLES), which take strong anti-Israel stances and push for the inclusion of Palestinian identity in ethnic studies as part of their vision for struggle and liberation against so-called Western, colonial, imperialist domination and their worldview of oppressor-oppressed/white-brown identity divisions that superficially connect the American black liberation cause with the Palestinian liberation cause. Both blacklivesmatteratschool.com and waethnicstudies.com are Wordpress sites registered to the same private domain registrar that offers a proxy to keep identifying details private. It seems quite likely that the same people are behind both BLM at School and WAESN, and they don’t want you to know it.

That said, the Palestinian cause doesn’t appear to be a significant part of BLM at School prior to October 7th. The 2023 annual report for BLM at School, the only one on record, makes no reference to a Palestinian struggle. But on October 17th, just 10 days after the massacre and before the start of the Israeli incursion, the BLM at School website posted a statement of solidarity with the terrorist uprising:

BLM@School wants to be clear in our recognition that this unfolding loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives is the direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians. Palestinians are reminding us that decolonization is not a metaphor or abstraction, but requires real, daily struggle. 

Of course, the BLM movement overall has embraced anti-Israel positions over the years, most egregiously this past October, when the Chicago chapter shared a graphic of a paraglider in celebration of the massacre. So it’s not really a surprise that BLM at School would find itself at home in this moment.

But is it more than that?

In a March 2023 WAESN podcast on the national BLM at School movement, Hagopian tells host Tracy Castro-Gill that they are waiting for their next big moment. In 2020, they saw support swell, and now hundreds of thousands of teachers across the country are using their materials during the annual February Week of Action, he explains. But support for BLM overall has waned due to things like scandals around the movement’s founders, conservative backlash, and even many black educators who are not keen on teaching Black Lives Matter at School lessons. (One of the reasons given is that they are turned off by BLM’s emphasis on queer and transgender affirmation.)

“Right now, there’s a lull in the larger action,” he says. “We know another day is coming and we’re planning for the next big round of struggle. The last round, we chased police out of schools across the country. The next big uprising we’ll be able to build on that I think and get even more victories.”

October 7th might just be the uprising they needed.

This year, on February 1st, before the Week of Action, Hagopian and Castro-Gill led a webinar about how to align Palestine with BLM at School. It included a number of speakers, including one who spouted conspiracy theories, such as that Israel forces Palestinian women to give birth to stillborn babies at checkpoints and that “Israel uses fake imperial feminist tropes to appear like they are a woke and legitimate state.” Feminism, she argued, is about love, freedom, life, and joy, all things that Israel is killing, and therefore Israel is killing feminism. Hagopian took the “genocide” charge one step further by accusing Israel of “epistemicide,” the killing off of an entire culture.

But the core of the meeting was how to overcome the problem of Seattle Public Schools, which allegedly tried to scrub BLM at School from Black History Month and failed to share its annual proclamation supporting BLM at School and provide educational materials in January as in years past. According to Castro-Gill, this was a Zionist plot.

On January 24th, the Seattle Public Schools media department replied to my questions about this in a rather cagey email: “the SPS Black Studies program manager has confirmed with our school leaders that SPS is participating in the Black Lives Matter at Schools Week of Action Feb. 5-9, 2024.” Castro-Gill has a history of blaming “Zionists” for opposition to anti-racism work, but it’s unclear if the district was indeed feeling pressure from pro-Israel families or staff, if it did take a step back from BLM at School out of good conscience, or if she’s just making it up.

Washington Ethnic Studies Now Has a Jewish Problem

In any case, on February 7th, halfway into the BLM at School Week of Action, the Seattle School Board addressed Black Lives Matter at a meeting that lasted four hours. Board president Liza Rankin started with an acknowledgment of BLM at School, calling Hagopian out by name. Superintendent Brent Jones followed with an annual proclamation and shared that SPS had raised the pan-African flag and that the district supports the BLM at School Week of Action as in years past. “Therefore, Seattle Public Schools declares that the lives of black students matter and hereby proclaims February 5-9, 2024, Black Lives Matter at Schools Week of Action,” he read.

The meeting was flooded with supporters for BLM at School’s demands, especially ethnic studies, which is facing an uphill battle. Currently, WAESN is not on track to gain a specialty endorsement to train Washington teachers in ethnic studies (which would give them great power and resources), but is looking to the 2025 legislative session to get back in the game.

These days, WAESN is dedicated to fighting SB5851, which would mandate Holocaust and genocide education and dedicate $2 million to the Holocaust Center for Humanity for educating teachers statewide. Castro-Gill has on multiple occasions expressed resentment about Holocaust education. She demonstrates a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, Jewish history and identity, and the work and approach of the Holocaust Center for Humanity. In a February 6th webinar about the state of ethnic studies, she claimed that the money will go to the Holocaust Center to teach about death and destruction while “tokenizing” other groups that have experienced genocide by teaching about them without them. Furthermore, she argued, what should be taught is not “trauma porn” but “resistance and liberation and humanity and hope.”

There’s a word for that. It’s Zionism.

The takeaway: BLM at School is a local organization with national clout that’s in bed with all the ethnic studies groups that have embraced virulent and ignorant anti-Israel ideology. BLM at School is wagering on October 7th being a point of mobilization, which should be extremely scary to parents with kids in public schools all over the country. While it’s possible that SPS is slowly backing away, it’s also been in bed with BLM at School for too long to be able to untangle the sheets now. That said, the pro-Hamas narrative may ultimately backfire.

Let’s hope so.

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From the river to the King County Bar Association

Local lawyers in the Jewish community are outraged over the King County Bar Association’s most recent newspaper, Bar Bulletin, which printed on the front page “From the River to the Sea,” a historically inaccurate and totally bonkers piece by former KCBA director Dua Abudaib that decries that this innocent little 10-word phrase, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is being unconstitutionally censored. The opinion piece, presented as a front-page story, claims as fact that “The settler colony of Israel and the United States are kindred spirits in this way — both believe(ed) that a land was destined to them — by God — and use rampant violence to claim this ‘destiny.’”

Abudaib is currently the deputy executive director of the Washington State Bar Association.

Let’s go over that again. One of the leaders of Washington’s biggest legal association published an essay called “From the River to the Sea” on the front page of the print KCBA newspaper.

As someone who worked in print for a long time, I know how much effort goes into it and how many eyes see it and how many hands touch it. How could this have happened?

After getting substantial pushback from local lawyers and the Cardozo Society, which is working with the JCRC and the Federation on a response, KCBA is making amends.

But here’s the problem: how did they not think this was a problem? How did smart people with legal brains miss this? Were they scared to push back? Are they sealed in echo chambers? Have they all been lobotomized?

An ironic complement to this story is one from Rabbi Olivier BenHaim, who recently found his own opinion piece about the post-October 7th Jewish experience for Real Change news canceled.

Real Change needs some real change

Rabbi Olivier BenHaim, the progressive Sephardic rabbi of Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue, has been writing a column for Real Change news, a local paper whose mission it is to “provide opportunity and a voice to low-income and homeless people while taking action for economic, social and racial justice,” since 2018. Until now. His most recent column, about Jewish lived experience since October 7th, was submitted per usual but didn’t receive a response.

He writes in an email:

I wrote my allotted 450-word Op-ed, emailed it by the deadline and, as the process had been all these years, expected to hear back from the paper’s editors with their emending suggestions before going to print…

I never heard back. I wasn’t even dignified with a reply, let alone a simple acknowledgment that my column had been received. I emailed again wondering if my submission had, perhaps, been lost in the ether. No reply. I went on Real Change’s website to see if they might have uploaded it there. All I found was pro-Palestinian propaganda pieces that were extremely difficult to read. I knew then that I had been canceled. I saw that my voice had been silenced, that Jewish voices were no longer welcome in this newspaper. It was heartbreaking. 

Here is the piece he submitted:

To mark the anniversary of my nearly 20 years of service to my community, I was gifted a 3-month sabbatical I just returned from. But the world I returned to isn’t the world I left.

This long-awaited sabbatical started exactly on October 7^th, “a day,” if I may quote FDR, “that will live in infamy.” My work, these past weeks, has mostly revolved around responding to the grave concerns my congregants and the Jewish community at large have felt, confronted by the hatred spewing onto American streets and university campuses.

Most of us, left-leaning progressive Jews, have been shocked by the virulent hatred and calls for genocide coming from those whose causes we have supported and fought for for so many decades. We suddenly witnessed our former allies accusing us of being accessories to an evil colonization project or colonizers ourselves. But colonizers have, by definition, a homeland to return to when overthrown. Israel is the homeland Jews returned to as refugees from European persecutions, Holocaust survivors, and victims of ethnic cleansing from Muslim lands. There is no other homeland to leave for.

We saw signs being brandished affirming: “From the river to the see Palestine will be free!” Geographically, this refers to the entire state of Israel and we, Jews, understand it to mean “judenrein,” the Nazi term for Jewish ethnic cleansing. We frightfully heard the shouts of our fellow Americans adding: “by any means necessary,” and understood it as a call for Jewish extermination, the replaying of the horrors of October 7^th until no Jew is left alive in the land. We saw our neighbors chanting these hateful slogans while rapturously celebrating the broadcast massacre of our children and elderly, the rape and body mutilation of women, and the burning alive of entire families. If that’s not antisemitism, what is?

Beside feeling anxious that any of these demonstrations might devolve into Hamas-like mob attacks on our coreligionists, the American Jews I speak to feel betrayed and rejected for simply being Jewish, ostracized for affirming the right and necessity for the State of Israel to exist when we have been striving for peace and the creation of a secure independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

What we need today is to hear the voices of our neighbors who oppose calls for the genocide of any minority in America, to denounce such hatred and to stand with us in affirming anew the pluralistic values of tolerance and multiculturalism this country epitomizes. We, Jews, know the price of our neighbors’ silence. The Holocaust took place only 80 years ago. Please, call your elected representatives and demand that they do “not stand idly by while your neighbor’s life is threatened.” (Lev. 19:16) We can be stronger together.

BenHaim’s email continues:

These last few days have been painful. I have given so much of my time in support of Progressive causes over the years that this rejection feels like a personal betrayal. It deeply saddens me that the march to alienate each other from each other is accelerating. Every side of the political spectrum is finding yet more ways to exclude and reject. As a society it is fast becoming impossible to integrate multiple and opposing perspectives in one’s views, let alone debate ideas, as there is an increased demand for conformity in partisan thinking. I can’t see a possible scenario where this ends well.

My Jewish values have taught me to make room for both Hillel and Shamai. To relish in debating all ideas, that I might grow from including as many perspectives as I can in my learning l’shem Shamayim. In order to uphold such principles, it feels to me that I have no choice but to work to support the thriving of a liberal pluralistic democracy that is strengthened by open debates and a diversity of always-welcomed opinions. If anything, this rejection by Real Change is moving me to work toward shoring up the political center away from the ever more radicalized Left and Right. Somehow, I have the distinct feeling that I am not the only one.

After writing this up and sending it out, BenHaim received a response from a Real Change editor explaining that the column “raised red flags”:

We chose not to publish your column because it posed an inaccurate and misinformed definition of colonization and harmfully equated being pro-Palestinian to terrorism. I also believe the overall column incited an undertone of racism and islamophobia (sic) towards Muslims that I can not in good will publish in Real Change’s newspaper. 

Instead of asking for clarifications or edits, the paper categorically denied publication. As for the Islamophobia charge, this is likely in response to the statement about Jews fleeing to Israel from Muslim lands. BenHaim’s own family is Algerian and Turkish. Yet this is the kind of history that doesn’t fit the prevailing narrative. So it must be that this progressive immigrant rabbi has hate in his heart.

The editor goes on to assure BenHaim that the last thing they want to do at Real Change is “silence other voices,” and perhaps he could write a column about anti-Semitism: “I would welcome a column that focuses on this without pitting other communities that are also facing discrimination and harm.” 

In other words, please write a story about anti-Semitism we can all be comfortable with.

Progressive spaces in Seattle seem have three main problems: acceptance of inaccurate and harmful information, a fear of thinking critically and questioning assumptions, and a pure lack of curiosity.

As they like to say, “do better.”

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I don’t condone graffiti, but…shoutout to whoever tagged the dumpsters in Leschi.

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Community Announcements

Check out the Seattle Jewish community calendar.

Check out ways to support Israel through UNX (UnXeptable) Seattle.

Candlelighting in Seattle is at 5:04 p.m. The parasha is Mishpatim.

Shoutouts

Congrats to Erica Weintraub Austin of Pullman, chair of the WSU committee that vetted the nominations for two honorary doctoral degrees. One of the degrees went to Carla Peperzak, who aided the Dutch resistance against the Nazis. Peperzak recently turned 100. Read more here.

Mazel Tov, Nancy Greer, on your extraordinary leadership roles for the Jewish Federation the past 14 years and happy retirement! Collaborating with you, Emily Alhadeff, Linda Clifton and Jim DiPeso on Jewish In Seattle magazine was a highlight of my professional and volunteer careers. Thank you for your lasting impact on the Jewish community and for your friendship. See you at mahjong! —Marilyn Corets, Editorial Committee Chair (2015-2021)

Wishing Lea Hanan, Lea Shoshana Bat Miriam, a refuah shlemah. —Mel and David and Family

Kol haKavod to Louis and Bayla Friedman Treiger for sponsoring kiddush lunches at Minyan Ohr Chadash. —Ruthie Voss