With the Trump administration imposing political litmus tests on curriculum, slashing billions in federal funding for schools, and firing more than half of the Department of Education’s staff, public education in the United States is under siege.
Now in the country’s most liberal stronghold, California teachers and advocates are raising the alarm over yet another threat to academic freedom: Assembly Bill 715.
On its face, the state legislation — titled “Educational equity: discrimination,” introduced by members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and sponsored by the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California — is aimed at preventing antisemitism in schools.
But educators and civil rights advocates in California say it’s a clear attempt at censorship by pro-Israel groups, designed to suppress classroom discussions of Palestine, colonialism and human rights.
“This pro-Israel bill is so dangerous and was devised with ill intent from the very beginning — and actually mirrors Trump and right-wing efforts to censor and attack public education,” San Francisco-based political organizer Nadia Rahman told a crowd of more than 70 people gathered at the state capitol building to speak out against the bill in August.
With state lawmakers returning from the summer recess and a Senate Education Committee hearing set for early September, members of the California Coalition to Defend Public Education rallied against the bill and visited all 120 state legislators’ offices, urging lawmakers to vote against the measure and any amendments that preserve what opponents have described as a censorship framework.
“AB 715 is weaponizing anti-discrimination to essentially protect Zionism and the State of Israel from criticism in our K-12 curriculum and classes,” says Musa Tariq, policy coordinator at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ San Francisco Bay Area office. “And it’s creating an environment of fear, hostility and repercussions for any teachers that want to talk about this issue.”
“AB 715 is weaponizing anti-discrimination to essentially protect Zionism and the State of Israel from criticism in our K-12 curriculum and classes.”
The bill was introduced last spring after widespread outcry forced lawmakers to withdraw an earlier variant focused on ethnic studies classrooms. But teachers and educators as well as Arab, Muslim and Jewish groups argue that the new measure revives the most troubling elements of its predecessor and expands the scope of its reach even further.
Redefining antisemitism
Assembly Bill 715 would expand the state education code to redefine nationality “to also include a person’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, or residency in a country with a dominant religion or distinct religious identity.” It’s part of a broader effort by pro-Israel advocacy groups to widen the definition of antisemitism beyond reason, in ways that conflate bias against Jewish or Israeli people with criticism of Israel and its policies.
The bill also criminalizes the creation of “an antisemitic learning environment” through “denial, erasure, or distortion of Jewish history, ancestry, identity, or culture,” “denigration of people who believe Zionism is inherent to Jewish identity,” or “language or images directly or indirectly denying the right of Israel to exist,” among other acts. The legislation also bans teachers from using “antisemitic content, including inaccurate historical narratives such as labeling Israel a settler colonial state.”
Additionally, the bill would also create a new “antisemitism czar” and “Office of the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator,” empowered to handle complaints against teachers for “antisemitic” lessons. Critics warn this could allow outside groups to bypass local review processes and harass educators, and would elevate antisemitism above other forms of discrimination.
AB 715’s language has drawn condemnation from a litany of teachers’ organizations and associations — most prominently the California Teachers Association.
“Any efforts to prohibit certain materials at the classroom level will have a chilling effect on the kinds of conversations students and teachers engage in,” the group has warned in a letter to Senate Education Committee leadership. “Teachers might feel constrained or fearful of addressing the topic altogether if they worry about violating legal requirements, leading to a lack of discussion on an important global issue.”
Educators not only fear what the legislation would mean for students’ ability to speak and learn about international affairs and human rights issues. They also fear for themselves and their colleagues.
“Teachers could be penalized for using accurate, well-documented instructional materials that discuss domestic and global issues affecting Californians, such as the history of mass deportation, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and U.S. military intervention in the Middle East,” the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, an umbrella organization for the faculty associations at each of the statewide university system’s campuses, wrote in their own letter to education committee members.
Despite warnings from educators, many state lawmakers initially lined up to support the bill. Last May, the chairs of the Black, Latino, Native and Asian-Pacific Islander legislative caucuses all signed a statement endorsing AB 715. In May, the bill even passed unanimously (9–0) in a special Assembly Education Committee — before it was ultimately pulled from its Senate Education Committee hearing in July, due in large part to widespread opposition by educators, teachers’ unions, student advocates, and legal organizations across California.
Opponents argue the bill opens the door to the surveillance and punishment of educators who include lessons that teach about Palestine or challenge colonial narratives in their curriculum, and that the measure would replace fact-based education with fear and censorship.
“The bill would create a climate of fear in which educators self-censor or avoid topics out of concern for professional retaliation, doxxing, harassment, and public targeting,” the Council of University of California Faculty Associations wrote. “We are already seeing teachers and students across California being aggressively suppressed and disciplined for discussing Palestine. AB 715 will only deepen this repression.”
“We are already seeing teachers and students across California being aggressively suppressed and disciplined for discussing Palestine. AB 715 will only deepen this repression.”
What’s more, the council argued, this political censorship and crackdown on academic freedom “sets a dangerous precedent that will likely spread beyond K-12 classrooms and the issue of Palestine and Israel.”
One struggle
Theresa Montaño is not Palestinian. Nor is she Arab or Muslim.
But as a professor of Chicano studies at California State University’s Northridge campus and a chair of the California Faculty Association Teacher Education Caucus, she’s also starkly concerned about AB 715.
The scope could easily expand beyond suppressing curriculum critical of the Israeli government, she explains. “Right now, it’s Palestine. But who’s to say that tomorrow won’t be issues like immigration, or anything that’s controversial?” Montaño says. “There’s a real danger to the democratic exchange of ideas that many of us have enjoyed in a classroom.”
At the moment, she says, lawmakers are only interested in banning references to Israel as an example of settler-colonialism. But it’s far from the only controversial case of settler-colonialism.
“As a Chicano Studies professor, when I teach about what happened in the Southwest, what happened to Mexico’s territory, and what happened to Indigenous lands?” Montaño asks. “When we talk about the history of the United States, about settler colonialism and the impact that it had on Indigenous peoples who were living here — who’s to say that later on, someone’s [not] going to say, ‘Well, you can’t talk about settler colonialism?’”
For many pro-Palestine advocates, it’s no coincidence that lobbyists and many politicians in California are bent on undermining alternative perspectives and histories critical of Israel.
Rahman believes these attempts are partly because Israel’s occupation of Palestine offers a visible, modern case study to understand systems of colonization. That makes the Palestinian struggle for liberation especially resonant for historically marginalized communities in the United States.
“The cause of Palestinian liberation, especially when talking about minority communities in the U.S, is like all of our struggles,” Rahman says. “It’s the result of colonialization, exploitation, systems of supremacy, injustice, and segregationist systems. Palestine is a living embodiment of the history of this country.”
Tariq agrees that there are clear parallels between Israel’s origins and the United States’ own violent colonial foundations. “The story of displacement, colonialism and genocide mirrors a lot of our own backgrounds,” he says.
“I often wonder if it’s intentional that we don’t teach about Palestinian liberation — because power-holders don’t want Black and Brown kids to see the parallels between Palestinian liberation and their own histories.”
