At Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibovitz examines the ongoing struggle by parents, community members, and the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT) to end the use of anti-Israel curriculum in Massachusetts’s Newton South High School. The effort began in 2011 and continues to this day, with the school district and local government---as is all too common in such cases---closing ranks and, as Leibovitz points out, mainstream Jewish organizations either unwilling or unable to rise to the occasion.
At the heart of the controversy is the Saudi-funded history textbook “Arab World Studies Notebook” and teacher training workshops conducted in the past by anti-Israel academic Paul Beran, the then -- director of the Outreach Center at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. While the textbook is no longer in use at Newton, according to APT, “the curriculum otherwise remains largely unchanged-still containing most of the problematic elements he and other concerned parties pointed out.”
“And so,” concludes Leibovitz, “the controversy surrounding the Newton curriculum is far from over.” But the latest effort, which is being supported by the Massachusetts Teachers Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, may yet prove fruitful: “On March 28, 2019, a group of Newton residents, represented by Hurvitz, filed a lawsuit against the Newton School Committee, Superintendent Fleishman and others, arguing that the school system promotes stereotypes against Jews, a violation of the Equal Rights Amendment of the Massachusetts Constitution and the Massachusetts Student Anti-Discrimination Act.”
