Political activists seeking to push extremist perspectives into the classroom are behind a nationwide acceleration of antisemitic content in K-12 classrooms, with increasingly active movements targeting school boards, district leadership and teacher organizations, according to a report published Monday by the North American Values Institute.  

The group’s 58-page report, “When the Classroom Turns Hostile: A Strategic Response to Extremism and Antisemitism in K-12 Education,” shared exclusively with JI, found that in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, what it described as radical ideological frameworks have dominated key education institutions across the country. Ideologies such as “oppressor-oppressed” are common in schools of education, accreditation bodies, teacher unions and district bureaucracies, all of which shape classroom materials. 

The paper highlights teachers’ unions and activist nonprofits as major sources of embedding radical views and ready-made anti-American content into professional development, much of which is able to bypass traditional oversight. It also raises concerns about “substantial” foreign funding flowing into Western education institutions to influence ciriculums by the Qatar Foundation International and Confucius Institutes in China.  

The North American Values Institute, formerly the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, is a nonprofit that monitors antisemitism in K-12 schools. It was founded by David Bernstein, a longtime Jewish nonprofit official who led the Jewish Council for Public Affairs from 2016-2021.

“We’re very concerned about the ideological activists taking over union leadership,” NAVI’s chief program officer, Dana Stangel-Plowe, told JI. “While that may not seem new, we’re seeing the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in particular taking a much more active role.” According to the report, DSA “urges members to enter the field in order to ‘transform our schools, our unions, and our society.’” 

The report warns that these dynamics contribute not only to rising antisemitism, but also to declining academic outcomes and increasing anti-American views. 

Attempts to combat this framework by promoting Holocaust or Jewish education have failed, the report’s authors argue.  

Rather, the writers offer several suggestions for reforming K-12 education, including changing teacher preparation programs and accreditation standards, confronting politicized teacher unions and advocacy networks, strengthening standards around curricula, addressing foreign funding and influence in education, empowering parents and school boards and building multi-ethnic coalitions. 

NAVI rebranded in February 2025 in an effort to detach from its Jewish roots to expand partnerships in fighting antisemitism with other ethnic communities.

At the time of the rebrand, Bernstein told JI that the Jewish community “has been reluctant to fight at the ideological level.”  

A year later, Stangel-Plowe said that while there is still room for improvement, NAVI has increasingly been partnering with leading Jewish organizations.

The report comes two months after the House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened investigations into public school systems in Fairfax County, Va.; Berkeley, Calif.; and Philadelphia over alleged failures to address antisemitic incidents. 

Federal investigations are “a good start but certainly not enough,” said Stangel-Plowe. “School districts are used to functioning without much accountability. We need more federal and state oversight.”

Still, she emphasized a need to address the root cause, rather than responding after incidents occur. 

“K-12 education is being treated as a vehicle for social change and an oppressor-oppressed framework is dangerous to Jewish students, Jewish teachers, and teaches hostility towards Israel and more broadly Western values,” Stangel-Plowe continued. 

We’re seeing active networks, [including] in New York City and Philadelphia,” she added. “We’re seeing radical political actors taking over union leadership and that has an influence on teachers unions which influences school board elections. The problem is embedded not just in the unions but the entire education system from teacher training, licensing and programs.” 

“We can’t fix an institutional problem with more lessons or programs,” she said. “As important as education about the Holocaust and Jewish life is, institutional problems persist unless we have a real allocation of investments in a comprehensive solution across the ecosystem. 

The current level of antisemitism in the U.S “is a political problem, not an educational problem” that “requires a new set of organizations” to solve, David Bernstein, founder of the North American Values Institute, said on Thursday.  

“A group of radicals have seized control over some of the key institutions, from higher education to K-12. It didn’t happen overnight, it happened over a number of years, but it sort of reached a tipping point,” in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks, Bernstein said during an online conversation hosted by Tikvah Ideas. The discussion addressed the re-emergence of antisemitism in American life, the Jewish community’s efforts to confront it and the effectiveness of legacy organizations trying to do so. 

The event also featured historian Jack Wertheimer — who earlier this month published a Mosaic essay on the rise of antisemitism in America, in which he interviewed some 40 Jewish community professionals. The talk was moderated by Mosaic‘s editor Jonathan Silver. 

Bernstein continued, “In order to fight against radical ideology, we have to ask, what’s the opposite of that? And to me, that’s Western values, enlightenment values, classical liberal values. We like to call them American civic values, right? These are the values of pluralism, free expression of ideas, or in Jewish terms, it would be machloket l’shem shamayim, arguments for the sake of heaven. Equality of opportunity, the rule of law. This is the core of the American creed. And I believe it is that core has kept America safe and has sort of pushed the radicals to the margins of society.”  

“I believe that that is faltering, it’s faltering on the left, I think it’s increasingly faltering on the right. I think we have to regain the high ground on those issues. So when I think about building coalitions and fighting antisemitism, it’s not so much that I think there’s some magic bullet about antisemitism.” 

Rather, Bernstein suggested coalitions “rebuilt around shared interests and values — but not on the shared interests and values that the mainstream organizations traditionally have done.”

“They’ve been building coalitions around progressive causes,” he said, “believing that progressives would shield us from what they saw as the true radicalism, the true antisemitism from the right. But there’s this other set of values that I think were actually at the center of American Jewish security that we took for granted. And it’s those values that I talked about, those classical liberal values. And so what I’m looking to do is to find allies.”

For example, Asian Americans and Hindu Americans aren’t necessarily going to take an interest in keeping anti-Israel rhetoric out of the classroom, Bernstein said. But they will work with Jewish groups to oppose the rise in K-12 classrooms of the “oppressed-oppressor ideology in the same way we are.” 

The “mistake” Jewish organizations are making in the K-12 space is saying “as long as you don’t touch us Jews, or you don’t talk about Israel, we’re okay with it,” Bernstein said. “I think they have much more leeway to [denounce] this anti-colonialist framework [that’s being taught].” 

“It’s not about seeking agreement, it’s about seeking alignment,” said Bernstein, who added that  change would “require a new set of organizations that are not bound by those same constraints,” as legacy organizations are.

Wertheimer responded, “I’m not sure that we necessarily need new organizations that will do that.”

“A lot depends on which sectors we’re talking about,” he continued. “The difficulty that we have here is the conflation of antisemitism and ‘anti-Israelism,’ to use a shorthand here. And those organizations that are trying to push back against anti-Israelism are trying to educate about the history of the Middle East, the history of Israel, how it came about, and so on,” continued Wertheimer. “That’s not going to win the kinds of allies that you’re talking about.” 

At the same time, he said local Jewish federations — especially large ones — that depend heavily on government funds, then “channel [funds] to various human services agencies that are under the umbrella of federations.”

“And so I’m supporting [Bernstein’s argument] in the sense that those federations have to be careful not to alienate the government officials who are going to be making the allocations decisions of those funds, and they can shift them around.” 

But because the majority of American Jews identify as liberal or left of center, “they feel uncomfortable pushing back against progressives,” Wertheimer argued.

“Because there are elements of the progressive agenda that they sympathize with, reproductive rights as an example, but there are a range of issues,” he continued. “What progressives want in those areas is good for American society, and therefore will also be good for Jews.” 

Wertheimer said that critics of legacy organizations are “unwilling or unable to acknowledge that many of these organizations that are involved in this campaign also have to deal with internal Jewish politics.”

“It’s not as if the American Jewish community is prepared to speak with one voice,” he continued. “This is a community that is deeply divided over politics, and Jews are not unique in this regard. Obviously, the American population at large is deeply divided, and many of these organizations, including federations, are trying hard to hold the Jewish population together as best as possible, but that then limits what they can say.”

Silver said that in trying to build alliances, Jewish organizations sometimes overlook evangelical Christians. 

“There’s a large fact that there are millions of Christians in the United States that are praying for Israel when they wake up in the morning, and praying for Israel when they go to sleep at night. And that, in their mind, they think that the nations that bless Israel will be blessed, and are not only open to acquiescing to the presence of Jews in their country, but love Jews,” he said. “The American Jewish community, by and large, has not shown the kind of gratitude and alliance building that that opportunity represents.” 

Wertheimer posed “an educational challenge” to the Jewish community, in an effort to address this. The “large majority of Jews are concentrated in blue states and in blue cities, and they don’t have very much contact with [evangelical Christians]. Not only that but they still maintain this kind of reflexive fear of what pious Christians really think about Jews and what the motivations are for this,” he said. “And that’s part of an educational challenge that needs to go on within the Jewish community.”