A Manhattan pre-K teacher is spreading anti-Israel hate to the city’s youngest learners – and offering parents and teachers tips to indoctrinate kids to her left-wing agenda, educators and insiders told The Post.
Siriana Abboud, 29, a city Department of Education teacher at PS 59 in Midtown, offers social-media guides on how to talk to 4-year-olds about “land theft, displacement and ethnic cleansing.”
She encourages parents to take them to pro-Palestinian protests — while blasting Israel as a “fascist ethnostate” in her Instagram stories, even in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks by Hamas terrorists.
Abboud’s exclusive “teach-ins” for educators and activists cover Palestine, Zionism, and the “struggle against colonization.” She proselytized online that “teaching can never be radical or revolutionary, so long as you deny the ongoing and violent colonization of Palestine by Zionism” and that early education can be a “tool for liberation.”
“Justice-informed teaching means breaking down power imbalances I’ve been given as a classroom teacher,” she has said, and that “we aren’t teaching the truth if we’re silent on Palestine.”
On Abboud’s Instagram page are pastel-hued posts about the “genocidal state of Israel” and recommended resources, including a “shout-out” to the website Decolonize Palestine, which is described as an independent, self-funded project founded by two people in Ramallah, in the West Bank. It celebrated the anniversary of the first violent “intifada” riot in 1987 in a post and said it is “fondly remembered.”
A guide on how to talk to kids about Palestine suggests equating it to European colonization, police brutality in the U.S., or how “some people wanted to build a wall in the U.S. to keep families away.”
“There already is a wall in Palestine that hurts Palestinians,” a post “pinned” to the top of the teacher’s Instagram page says.
“This is exactly the anti-Jewish culture that people are seeing throughout the DOE,” said one employee who works closely with Abboud and was “shocked” to see the breadth of vitriol on her colleague’s page.
“This person is molding young children’s minds and really indoctrinating children from a preschool age.”
Abboud also runs a side hustle, Allusio Academy, an online business that provides at-home curriculums for kids and consultations, webinars, and workshops for parents and teachers. Live classes go for $55, personalized daily schedules for $45, and consultation packets with resources and strategies for $75.
Her book recommendations include “P Is for Palestine” by Golbarg Bashi.
Some have argued it is antisemitic for its use of “intifada” for the letter “I” and not recognizing the existence of Israel at all.
In a 2021 post on Allusio Academy’s Facebook page, Abboud wrote that it was a “brutal history of rape that was used to establish the state of Israel.”
She also argues on the page that Palestine is a “children’s issue” and not too political to teach to preschoolers.
But some Jewish parents are frightened by the messages they see on her social media.
“Her account is full of hate,” one mother who recently transferred her child to PS 59 commented in a parents group. “I am scared of sending my kid there.”
“She perpetuates a distorted narrative that blames Israel and ‘Zionism’ — the right of Jews to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, for atrocities that Palestinians may perpetuate against Israelis,” antisemitic watchdog group Canary Mission told The Post.
Beginning this year, Abboud, who earns $70,000 a year with the DOE, according to city records, is in a position to indoctrinate other teachers too.
Last spring, she was chosen as the 2023-24 early childhood recipient of the coveted Big Apple Award, which starts with nominations from the school community but ultimately is determined by DOE stakeholders. That landed her a seat on the Chancellor’s Teacher Advisory Council and gave her a fellowship that included engaging with leadership on policies and programs and sharing teaching practices with colleagues.
Abboud’s Big Apple Award bio praises her as a “liberation-inspired educator” who centers “global consciousness.”
Abboud was a student teacher under Kara Ahmed, now the DOE’s Deputy Chancellor of Early Childhood Education, when Ahmed was the principal of the Living for the Young Family Through Education program in 2016.
Aside from posts about the Middle East, Abboud has taken up other leftist issues such as avoiding gendered terms like “boys and girls” in the classroom and embracing the use of anatomically correct phrases for body parts.
“Way to go! You taught your child the word ‘vagina.’ Maybe you were even more anatomically correct and taught them to say ‘vulva,’” she began one post. “But what did you say, if anything, about the labia and clitoris?”
Abboud and a DOE spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
