On September 3, Massachusetts’ Northampton High School (N.H.S.) was shut down – dramatically, yet without much fanfare. All 900 pupils were given the day off, with every teacher conversely cooped up inside. Meanwhile, swarms of armed police patrolled the grounds. Their purpose was to deter any potential commotion from concerned parents or students who might attend to voice their discontent. N.H.S. was hosting a highly controversial staff instruction delivered by the “training and support organization” Project Shema.
Days earlier, local outlet The Daily Hampshire Gazette reported on how over 500 community members had signed a petition demanding N.H.S. scrap the “professional development training” delivered by Project Shema, which purportedly focuses on “addressing antisemitism” and instead “plan training on anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism.” The petition was launched “by parents of current students and current high school staff” due to their concerns that “Project Shema conflates antisemitic comments with criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.”
They charged that Project Shema closely aligns with the noxious Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a prominent and extremely well-funded Zionist lobby organization. With a sordid history of infiltrating and destabilizing social justice movements, it preaches the perverse gospel that any condemnation of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinian people equates to antisemitism. The petition’s authors allege Project Shema employs similarly disreputable tactics and rhetoric to insulate the Zionist entity’s neverending erasure of Palestine from scrutiny. They further stated:
By using Project Shema as a training resource, N.H.S. will be endorsing a narrative that the colonization, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation of Palestinian land and people is legitimate. It will bolster harmful narratives that Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are irrational and inherently antisemitic. N.H.S. will be aligning with those who claim that Israel’s genocide of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza constitutes ‘self defense.’”
For its part, Project Shema contends, “we do not offer education or advocacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” but simply “help upstanders understand Jewish identity and nurture empathy for Jewish traumas and lived experiences.” Publicly, its operatives and supporters repudiate any connection with the ADL or the League’s disingenuous crusade to neutralize anti-Zionist perspectives under the bogus aegis of combating antisemitism. Yet, as we shall see, there are unambiguous grounds to believe these denials to be brazen lies.
Furthermore, there is significant cause for concern that the N.H.S. training day is no one-off but just the beginning of a wider rollout across all U.S. public schools. If that comes to pass, Project Shema will effectively infiltrate countless classrooms across the nation and, in turn, the hearts and minds of millions of unsuspecting American teenagers – one of the Western world’s fastest-growing anti-Zionist constituencies, among them many Jews. Are we witnessing the latest chapter in Israel’s ceaseless overseas censorship crusade erupt?
‘Hate-Filled Statements’
On September 6, Rabbi David Seidenberg, a self-described “progressive,” authored a guest column for The Daily Hampshire Gazette, offering a scathing rebuttal to the outlet’s reporting on the community petition. He firmly declared anyone claiming Project Shema was at all affiliated with the ADL had “outright lied.” He added that it was “sad” they and those promoting the petition “couldn’t do the few minutes of internet research it would have taken them to find this out”:
Project Shema explicitly rejects the idea that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism, which is the exact opposite of pronouncements by the [ADL]. In fact, Project Shema was founded by progressive Jews to be an alternative to the ADL – exactly the opposite of the claims made by the petition. Project Shema teaches that narratives about antisemitism must not be used to close off feelings of empathy with Palestinians and deny the struggle for justice for Palestinians.”
This would be all well and good – but even the most rudimentary online digging reveals there are, in fact, deeply intimate bonds between Project Shema, its founders and operatives, and the ADL. For one, the pair are formally partnered in many U.S. states, regularly offering joint training programs across the country, where attendees are taught “how to combat anti-Jewish hate.” The organizations have also co-hosted numerous events on topics ranging from antisemitism to “the intersectionality and experiences of LGBTQ+ Jews and Jews of Color.”
Moreover, Project Shema’s founder and training facilitator, Oren Jacobson, has appeared prominently at multiple ADL-led events. In March, he and his organization’s vice president of partnerships, Kiyomi Kowalski, were the main attractions at the League’s annual Never Is Now conference. Jacobson was a lead speaker alongside ADL’s director of Israel affairs, Shaya Lerner, and Karen Milner, a senior figure within several Zionist lobby outfits, at a breakout session – What Does it Really Mean? The Mainstreaming of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Israel Slogans Post-10/7.
During the talk, the trio discussed the “problematic” rise of “anti-Israel” sentiment in “public discourse” following October 7, 2023, including protests, “accusations of Israeli ‘genocide’” and “hate-filled statements about Zionism,” such as the slogan “from the river to the sea.” These are all vile slanders and distortions the ADL has aggressively peddled since Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza began to stifle, if not outright criminalize, Palestine solidarity activists and movements.
Placing the term genocide in inverted commas further underlines the ADL’s malign agenda and Project Shema’s by extension. There is little room for doubt that, based on historical legal precedents, the Israeli Defense Force’s indiscriminate mass murder in Gaza and untold statements and declarations by Israeli political and military chiefs are all indicative of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people. Moreover, International Criminal Court prosecutors are actively seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Security Minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity.”
Likewise, “from the river to the sea” is not a murderous antisemitic chant but a clarion call for an end to the West’s settler colonial project in Palestine and a return to harmonious coexistence between Christians, Jews and Muslims there. Followers of all three religions cohabited the land comprising modern-day Israel in peace for millennia. The ADL has long been at the forefront of efforts to demonize, if not outright proscribe, this stirring slogan, including on social media.
Fraudulently conflating legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism with antisemitism while libeling proponents of those positions as rabid Jew-haters is the ADL’s core raison d’etre. Despite Rabbi Seidenberg’s claims to the contrary, it is indisputably clear Project Shema chief Jacobson shares this objective. In November 2021, he wrote an op-ed for Detroit Jewish News, unsubtly headlined To My Fellow Progressives: Anti-Zionism is Antisemitism. In it, Jacobson proclaimed:
For the average Jew, Zionism has become simply the idea that Israel has the right to exist, rather than an embrace of the policies of its government…That’s why when people attack Zionists, we hear ‘Jews’.”
‘Enraged and Disgusted’
Furthering that fallacious proposition, along the way, Jacobson repeatedly claimed that “80 – 90% of Jews” believe Tel Aviv has a “right to exist.” This mephitic fiction is a central component of “liberal” Zionism, frequently promulgated by Israel’s defenders. After all, if Jews globally support Israel nigh-unanimously, then Israel can claim to represent them, and therefore be the world’s Jewish state. In turn, any condemnation of Israel, by definition, becomes antisemitic.
Any suggestion the vast proportion of international Jewry supports Zionism unconditionally is amply belied by a 2021 survey conducted by the Jewish Electorate Institute. The polling found that 25% of Jews agreed “Israel is an apartheid state,” while 34% believed “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the U.S.,” And 22% agreed “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians.” Most strikingly, perhaps, less than a third of respondents deemed these perspectives antisemitic. Those figures may well be even higher today.
Yet Project Shema representatives at the September 3 N.H.S. training repeated the falsehood that “the majority of Jews believe Israel has a right to exist.” The organization’s representatives also endlessly sought to conflate the Jewish people with the state of Israel while framing opposition to Tel Aviv’s actions and political ideology as antisemitic. The phrase “from the river to the sea” was also, predictably, declared to be antisemitic.
In other words, the training’s content was a manipulative patchwork of ADL-endorsed liberal Zionist talking points, presented in a more benign, democratic light than that organization typically would. For example, MintPress News has been informed that Project Shema’s trainers paid lip service to the right of concerned citizens to condemn the actions of the Israeli government – but not the ideology or project of Zionism, which, of course, undergirds the Israeli state, and its slow-motion genocide of the Palestinians in the first place.
Such dishonesty was hardwired into the training before it was even convened. One N.H.S. student’s parent who attended Project Shema’s training told MintPress News, “We were told by people who organized this that it would not include anything about Zionism, Palestine, or Israel when in truth this content was all central to the presentation.” This pledge was reiterated when the talk started on September 3. Before long, though, attendees were being lectured about Israel’s political and cultural virtues.
An anonymous N.H.S. teacher who attended Project Shema’s event bitterly informs this outlet, “I’m just so enraged and disgusted this is assigned training for every public educator in the city. It’s such a harmful choice that could ripple to every child in this area.” A Jewish school staffer suggests, “It was clearly assumed there were no Arabs or Palestinians in the audience.” A Palestinian resident of Northampton fears, “We will never be safe if these trainings and curriculums are being used in schools.”
In a statement provided to MintPress News, Jewish Voice for Peace branded Project Shema’s training a “dangerous” attempt “to silence dissent towards the ongoing daily murder, starvation, and displacement of Palestinians.” The anti-Zionist organization added that the talk “alienated many parents, staff members, and children within the community and mislabelled them as antisemitic” – “a purposeful way of silencing dissent, which is the most dangerous part of this training.”
‘Generational Problem’
The mainstream media has remained entirely silent on the fracas caused by Project Shema’s arrival in Northampton. However, we can surely expect similar local controversies to explode in the months ahead. For one, as mentioned, the organization is already embedded with the ADL in many U.S. states, and Project Shema openly advertises “campus and school” training programs. But the circumstances – one might call it subterfuge – by which the organization infiltrated N.H.S. may also be instructive.
The Daily Hampshire Gazette reports that Project Shema was invited into N.H.S. by its superintendent after a letter was sent to the school in May by concerned Jewish parents, who claimed their children were being subject to antisemitic “bullying and harassment” within and outside of the school. As such, they demanded school authorities summon Project Shema to challenge this purported climate of widespread, rabid hatred.
It is self-evidently of the utmost urgency to condemn and challenge any antisemitic abuse, particularly if the victims are vulnerable Jewish youth. Yet, concrete instances of the phenomenon at N.H.S. cited in the letter were lacking. Pupils “using ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jew’ interchangeably” and indeterminate “hateful stuff posted on social media” were two reported examples. Another was the distribution of a flier that “contained statistics on the violence in Gaza, but framed them using antisemitic rhetoric.”
The nature of that “antisemitic rhetoric” is left to our imaginations. Nonetheless, if we use definitions of antisemitism evangelized by the ADL and Project Shema as a guide – as teachers and pupils at N.H.S. may now be compelled to – this could mean almost anything critical of Israel or Zionism. Perhaps the leaflet contained references to “from the river to the sea”?
By perpetuating false claims of antisemitism and antisemitic abuse on U.S. university campuses, the ADL has successfully bullied numerous higher education facilities to implement policies cracking down on Palestine solidarity. For instance, the prestigious NYU has introduced new guidelines making “Zionists” and “Zionism” protected categories, effectively outlawing criticism of Israel and Israelis by their students as harassment. There is no question of Palestinians, let alone anti-Zionists of every extraction, being extended the same privilege.
Elsewhere, as MintPress News has exposed, the ADL and other Zionist lobby groups were instrumental in the U.S. government seizing control over TikTok in March. In November 2023, the League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, was caught on tape despairing how public sympathy for the Palestinian struggle was surging and expressing disgust at how terms such as “Zionist entity” were proliferating. He singled out a specific social media app and demographic as responsible:
“We have a major, major, major generational problem…all the polling I’ve seen, ADL’s polling, ICC’s polling, independent polling, suggests the issue of US support for Israel is not left and right, it is young and old…We really have a TikTok problem, a Gen Z problem.”
No doubt emboldened by its success, it appears U.S. public schools are the next frontier in the ADL’s crusade to fix the “major generational problem” of young Americans embracing the Palestinian cause and exposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Operating as its cutout, Project Shema can extol the League’s perverse teachings under a liberal, “progressive” chimera. The organization’s N.H.S. training going ahead despite such strident opposition from parents and students alike shows the fight is well and truly on.
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.
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