Introduction

The Zinn Education Project[1] bills itself as a grassroots initiative promoting a more “inclusive” approach to history. However, CAMERA Education Institute’s scrutiny of sections of the curriculum exposes a pattern of radical indoctrination targeting K-12 students. The project distorts history and employs deceptive jargon to advance an anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Israel agenda. Under the guise of social justice, it fosters resentment and division, replacing factual history with an unsubstantiated account rooted in group grievances.

Founded in 2008 and named after the controversial academic Howard Zinn, the project remains true to its namesake’s revisionist history, which portrays the United States as an inherently oppressive nation. By extension, Israel, an ally of the U.S. and a nation that similarly upholds Western principles of individual freedom and representative government, is depicted as the world’s most egregious transgressor of human rights.

Zinn Education Project is a joint project of two U.S.-designated non-profit, tax-exempt organizations, Rethinking Schools[2] and Teaching for Change,[3] an arrangement that helps the project avoid public exposure and scrutiny of its operations and finances by not having to file its own annual tax disclosure.[4] Its promotional materials claim tens of thousands of teachers have accessed its materials.

Not long after the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led Palestinian attack from Gaza on Israel, Zinn Education Project curated a list of resources[5] – including articles, books, films and film clips, podcasts, and calls to action – peddling its pro-Palestinian narrative on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which blamed Israel for the attack.[6] To that end, it cited a selective “history that led to” the attack – a reference to Israeli actions deemed harmful to Palestinians – and called for an immediate ceasefire, which would have preserved Gaza’s terrorist infrastructure and put Israel at risk of a repetition of Oct. 7.

Through a network of radical educators, unions, and activists – including frequent lecturer and writer Jesse Hagopian, an ardent anti-Israel activist based in Seattle – Zinn Education Project instills racial resentment and denigrates America’s progress in fulfilling its founding principles.

Consistent with its critical stance toward Western nations,  the project portrays Israel, the world’s sole Jewish-majority state, through the prism of an abuser, mistreating Palestinians and depriving them of their land and freedom. It omits Israel’s explanation as to why the Jewish state must place constraints on Palestinian movement into Israel and conduct frequent military intrusions into Palestinian-administered territory to interdict imminent terrorist attacks. Years of terrorism, suicide bombers, and Palestinian refusal to live in peace with a Jewish state in any borders are swept under the rug.

Nor does the curriculum discuss the hatred of Jews that permeates Palestinian discourse and has perpetuated the conflict for over a century despite several Israeli offers to accept Palestinian self-rule in most of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in exchange for peace.

Antipathy Towards the U.S. and Israel

The project promotes a historical perspective consistent with that of its founding icon, Howard Zinn.  His widely used textbook, A People’s History of the United States[7], offered a political polemic in place of a careful and balanced distillation of historical evidence.  Zinn’s account of American history is consistently presented through the oppressor-oppressed binary where white Americans are oppressors and racial minorities are perpetual victims. His textbook reduces complex historical interactions and changes to American society in a simplistic account reflecting doctrinal Marxist precepts.  Zinn’s interpretation of the establishment of the U.S. and its founders has been refuted both directly, by critics of his work, and indirectly, by more comprehensive history accounts written by scholars of American history who are not bound to Zinn’s ideological determinism.[8]

Zinn portrays American economic expansion and influence in terms of genocidal conquest; he presents the free-market economy as inherently exploitative, and U.S. foreign policy as an imperialist scheme to subjugate the world.[9]

Similarly, Zinn Education Project materials employ these notions to portray the U.S. government and its institutions as complicit in maintaining white supremacy. Disregarding the enormous progress American society has made in racial matters, in Zinn’s account, systemic racism is as pervasive today as in the past.[10]

The project condemns free-market policies as tools of systemic oppression despite overwhelming evidence that such societies are far freer and protective of human rights than the socialist “utopias” derived from Marxist precepts. Students are encouraged to view capitalism as inseparable from racism and see economic disparities as solely the result of racial exploitation and not many other social and cultural factors.

Zinn Education Project links domestic racial issues to global conflicts, with particular focus on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, arguing that Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians are a continuation of white colonial oppression. Given that half of Israeli Jews are longstanding Middle East inhabitants, it is inconsistent to describe Jews as “colonial” and not describe Palestinian Arabs the same. Record of Jewish habitation of the land extends much further back in history than does Arab habitation.

Portraying Israel as a Colonial Occupier of Indigenous Arabs

Nowhere is Zinn Education Project’s bias more evident than in its one-sided treatment of Israel. It portrays Israel as an imperialist entity engaged in ethnic cleansing while presenting Palestinians strictly as victims engaged in righteous resistance — even when that resistance includes terrorism.

One of the key teaching materials used is Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel by Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor for Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the project. Seeking to justify Palestinian violence against Israelis, the lesson traces what it considers to be the “roots” of the current conflict to the earliest days of Zionist immigration to British Mandate Palestine — placing the onus on Jewish immigration rather than Arab refusal to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.[11]

Consistent with this account, the lesson ignores the parallel migration of Arabs to the land during the time period of Jewish immigration. These materials on the Israel-Palestinian conflict consistently omit facts that don’t jibe with its assignment of blame. Among these are the murderous activities of Palestinian Arab leaders against fellow Arabs who favored an accommodation with the Jews, Arab rejection of the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947 and war against Israel, and Palestinian-led terror attacks against civilians in Israel that began before Israel controlled the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and even pre-dated Israel’s independence.

The materials ignore Israel’s repeated offers of peace in 1947, 1967, 1993, 2000 and 2008 that were rejected by Palestinian leaders or undermined by their subsequent resort to terrorism.  Instead, the materials systematically promote the notion that Israel is a colonial power that “stole” Palestinian land.  Both historical documentation and archaeological evidence confirm the Jewish people’s long connection to the land of Israel.  In contrast, no national entity of “Palestine” has ever existed.  The last sovereign entity on the land was the Jewish state that was dismantled by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago.  Since then, it has been repeatedly seized and controlled by numerous conquering powers, most notably successive Muslim-dominated regimes.

Blaming Israel for the October 7 Attack

Framing Palestinians as victims of an Israeli-led genocide is a key element of the strategy to erode support for Israel among American students. In January 2025, Zinn Education Project posted a joint statement by its co-coordinators, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, urging a ceasefire in the Gaza war. The statement, titled “Teaching About Palestine-Israel and the Unfolding Genocide in Gaza,” expressed hostility toward Israel, framing the nation as a colonial and oppressive force while promoting a heavily one-sided narrative favoring Palestinian victimhood.[12]

The statement portrayed Israel as the aggressor in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, despite a history of Palestinian attacks on Israel, most notably the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. It also alleges the “violent displacement” of Palestinians during the 1948 war resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel but failed to accurately describe what actually took place. Following passage of the UN partition resolution, the Arabs unleashed a campaign of violence and the larger portion of Palestinian Arabs who fled the areas under Jewish control did so to escape the fighting with the expectation of returning after the Jews were defeated or they fled as a response to their own leadership’s scaremongering.[13]

The joint statement smears Israel as an apartheid regime, despite the full legal rights and participation of Israeli Arabs in Israeli society and government and the participation of some Israeli Arabs in Israel’s armed forces.

Contrary to most public school educational policy, the statement rejected a neutral or balanced approach to teaching the conflict, insisting that educators favor Palestinian experiences and critiques of Zionism in their instruction and frame Israel as part of larger global systems of oppression. The statement contends without evidence that most U.S. curricula ignore or distort the history of Palestine and insists teachers have a moral duty to correct this by explicitly teaching the “truth” about Israeli “oppression.”

Teachers are urged to integrate the conflict into larger discussions of imperialism, racism, and settler colonialism, directly linking Israel’s existence to these themes. There is no discussion of Arab and Islamic imperialism, colonialism and racism. Students are never asked to consider how the entire Middle East and North Africa became Arabized and Islamicized, since the Arabs and Islam originated in Arabia.

A core goal is to persuade students to become proponents of change, including as advocates for the Palestinian cause. For example, the article “Teaching About Palestine-Israel” states, “Students need to examine how the current crisis is shaped in large part by settler colonial history…. As educators, we must help our students make historical explanations for today’s violence…. Curricula must put empathy at the center, inviting students to critique policies and practices.” The article offers resources to “help students probe the long history of colonialism and resistance in Palestine-Israel.”

Promoting a Dangerous Ideology

Jesse Hagopian teaches high school Ethnic Studies and English Language Arts in Seattle and edits Rethinking Schools magazine.[14] He is involved in Black Lives Matter in School (BLM@School) and, since 2020, has played a lead role at Zinn Education Project’s “Teach the Black Freedom Struggle” campaign.[15] Hagopian’s anti-Israel activism is extensive.

In 2011, Hagopian participated in a trip to Israel and Palestinian-populated areas organized by Interfaith Peacebuilders, now known as Eyewitness Palestine and, upon returning to the U.S., became active with Black4Palestine, which aligns itself with anti-Israeli causes.[16] It also has called for divestment from Israel and for a “Free Palestine.”[17] In November 2023, Hagopian helped organize the first Black4Palestine “teach-in” webinar “in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” carefully vetting participants to include “just…Black folks.”[18]

Hagopian’s views evince hostility towards Israel and the U.S. He disregards evidence-based argument and, instead, encourages students to adopt an emotion-driven worldview that feeds on resentment rather than fostering constructive engagement.

In his book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, Hagopian encourages civil disobedience and the outright rejection of laws he disagrees with. For example, regarding federal immigration enforcement, he stated, “With ICE agents menacing schools, we need to link arms, surround our schools, and refuse to let those ICE agents in.”[20]

Consistent with Zinn Education Project’s stated preference that teachers teach “outside the textbook,” choosing materials and content independent of school leadership, Hagopian urges teachers and students to ignore laws and dictate their own truths regardless of the facts or the divisiveness that results, undermining important characteristics of tolerance and compromise necessary for democratic governance.

At a February 2025 online “teach-in” organized by “Educators for Palestine,” comprised of National Education Association (NEA) members, Hagopian declared, “The need for us to defend Palestinian liberation..is about making sure we all get free, because without a free Palestine, none of us stand a chance of gaining our own liberation.”[21] This application of intersectionality ties the Palestinian campaign to erase Israel and its Jewish population to social justice movements that seek only civil rights.

At the same event, Hagopian again employs intersectionality by falsely equating Israel’s founding to settler colonialism: “There is a long tradition of Black solidarity with Palestine because there is so much overlap in our struggles against settler colonialism.”[22] Hagopian, however, fails to provide any evidence of significant Palestinian solidarity with Black people at any time during the civil rights movement​.

The educator consistently vilifies Zionism, a movement advocating Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland, portraying it as a form of oppression rather than as a national movement that arose from centuries of longing for return and centuries of Jewish persecution.[23]

He advocates the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to economically and politically isolate Israel. Although BDS has been widely rejected by governments, universities, and businesses as discriminatory and antisemitic, he insists on injecting it into educational spaces. He falsely analogizes Israel to apartheid South Africa – a claim repeatedly debunked by historians and international legal scholars.[24]  Hagopian draws flawed parallels between Israeli measures against Palestinians, who engage in violence against Israelis and seek to dismantle the Jewish state, and the experiences of African Americans, who mainly engaged in peaceful protest for their civil rights.[25]

Hagopian promotes resources that demonize Israel’s founding while ignoring the Arab states’ rejection of peace in 1948, frames Palestinian terrorism as justified “resistance,” and refuses to acknowledge Israel’s efforts at peace negotiations.[26] In the Spring 2024 “Teach Palestine” issue of Rethinking Schools, he published a piece, “Israel’s War on Gaza is a War on History, Children, and Education” that ignored Hamas’s deliberate endangerment of civilians and use of schools and hospitals as military bases​.[27]

Politicizing the NEA

Since late 2024, Hagopian has advocated a social justice agenda that vilifies Israel at NEA events and he now wields substantial influence among its leadership. At the NEA’s Minority and Women’s Leadership Training Seminar to Advance Racial and Social Justice in December 2024, Hagopian encouraged educators to embed political activism into classroom discussions, frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an extension of systemic racism, and resist “right-wing forces” that challenge critical race theory and anti-Israel curricula.[28]

NEA President Becky Pringle offered praise for the training seminar’s important role in “making equity central” to NEA’s work in racial and social justice, while NEA Vice President Princess Moss said it created “social justice warriors.”[29]

During the February 2025 NEA “Educators for Palestine” teach-in, Hagopian outlined a strategy to use teacher unions as a political weapon, stating, “The fight against U.S. imperialism and unquestioning support of Zionist occupation requires unions to fight back, and educator unions are the biggest in the country.”[30]

Hagopian explicitly called for tying opposition to Israel into broader discussions on critical race theory, ensuring that anti-Israel narratives permeate all aspects of progressive educational discourse. “One of the most important strategies we need to enlist in gaining the support of our fellow educators is to tie the attack on critical race theory, tie the attack on anti-racist education with the attack on teaching the truth about Palestine,” Hagopian said.[31]

Attacking Western Values

Because Zinn Education Project believes traditional school textbooks fail to account for the experiences of so-called marginalized communities and, instead, reflect the perspectives of Euro-centric, privileged communities, it promotes the idea of “teaching outside the textbook.”[32] It produced a Teaching Outside the Textbook  booklet, which it shares with teachers presenting at conferences, workshops, or on panels for them to distribute.[33]  It claims that this will ensure a “more accurate and comprehensive” understanding of American history than school-approved textbooks provide.[34]

Teaching outside textbooks allows the project to inject unvetted material into its curriculum resources. This material falsely frames the teaching of Western Civilization as being a project of the “right” and any criticism of Zinn Education Project’s efforts as an attack by the “right.”  Zinn Education Project’s partner organization Rethinking Schools wrote, “The push to return to a so-called ‘Western Civilization’ curriculum is about reasserting a white, Christian, nationalist worldview.”[35]

The project tars opposition to its radical agenda as fascist. For example, an article discussing challenges educators face when promoting anti-racist or LGBTQ+-affirming curricula, Rethinking Schools wrote, “Our students need educators… speaking out and risking discipline and dismissal to oppose creeping fascism” and “… [I]t is important to remember that this increasingly fascist mobilization is a white supremacist backlash to the recent rebellion for racial justice.”[36]

By drawing upon outside materials that are not properly vetted, it makes it difficult for parents to know what their children are learning and violates trust parents have that school districts and administrators are monitoring the content used in classrooms.

Extending Its Reach Through Partnerships

To help access a network of activist educators and authors, Zinn Education Project relies on affiliated organizations to support and promote its agenda. Among these partners are Rethinking Schools,[37] whose magazine by the same name has published articles defending anti-Israel educators;[38] Teaching for Change, a non-profit organization that provides teachers resources that promote social justice and equity in the classroom and distributes lesson plans and teaching materials;[39] Voice of a People’s History, a non-profit arts, education, and social justice organization that “gives public expression to rebels, dissenters, and visionaries… to educate and inspire a new generation working for social justice;”[40] and Historians for Peace and Democracy, a collection of American Historical Association (AHA) members who claim to “stand up for peace and diplomacy internationally, and for democracy and human rights at home.”[41]

The project also partners with Chicago’s Haymarket Books to reach more educators. Haymarket is a publisher and distributor of books rooted in revolutionary socialist politics. Haymarket publishes, sometimes free-of-charge, writings of the project affiliates and circulates these at professional educator conferences. In early 2025, Haymarket released Jesse Hagopian’s latest book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education.

Since 2022, Zinn Education Project and Historians for Peace and Democracy have teamed on several initiatives that aim to influence how Israel and Zionism are taught in schools. These initiatives include submitting expert comments to state legislatures on proposed new or amended social studies standards; meeting with local social studies coordinators, high school teachers, and school boards; researching and influencing local school board elections; and writing op-eds and letters to newspapers or meeting with their editorial boards.[42]

In January 2025, Historians for Peace and Democracy orchestrated a successful vote at the AHA annual conference to approve a resolution condemning Israel for committing “scholasticide” in Gaza, defined by Israel’s detractors as the intentional destruction of education infrastructure. Though AHA members overwhelmingly approved the resolution, its leadership vetoed the vote a month later. In an opinion article the same month, CAMERA Senior Higher Education Analyst David Litman exposed the resolution’s factual inaccuracies.[43] Historians for Peace and Democracy also has produced short videos condemning Israeli military action in Gaza, opposing pro-Israel groups’ alleged influence on U.S. politics and policy, and supporting efforts on U.S. college campuses to divest university endowments of holdings linked to Israel, measures all supported by the Zinn Education Project.

Perhaps most concerning is the project’s coordination with professional educators’ unions and teacher-training programs. Through his association with the NEA, Hagopian advocates for a complete overhaul of social studies curricula to reflect the project’s views. He has urged teachers to openly defy legislation restricting critical race theory and use of anti-Israel materials, insisting that the “criminalization of truth” must be resisted.[44]

Others key members of this network include co-director Bill Bigelow and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, an activist known for her work on prison abolition and social justice.

In January 2025, Zinn Education Project circulated a petition to support two activist teachers who exploited a speaking opportunity at the National Association of Independent Schools’ (NAIS) People of Color Conference to mischaracterize the roots of Zionism and accuse Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians.[45] Major American Jewish organizations condemned the remarks, seeing them as dismissive of Jews’ aspirations to return to their ancient homeland and a defamatory characterization of Israel’s goals and actions in the Gaza war.[46]

After the event, NAIS rebuked the teachers’ remarks as divisive and antisemitic and announced changes to speaker selection and content review for future conferences. The project, however, came to the teachers’ defense, insisting their criticism of Israel not be conflated with antisemitism and circulated a petition.  Groups known for their anti-Israel agitation, including DroptheADL from Schools, American Muslims for Palestine, IfNotNow, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, Jewish Voice for Peace, Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Teaching While Muslim, signed the petition.[47]

Another example of the project’s activism is its support for four teachers suspended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Schools for sharing anti-Israel comments in classrooms. Tilden Middle School World Studies teacher Sabrina Khan-Williams, also a DEI team leader, on Facebook questioned facts surrounding Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack on an Israeli music festival, including whether women were “violated” and that the attack occurred at all. She shared fake videos portraying Israeli soldiers beheading Palestinian children and asserting that Israel sells their organs. She also accused “Zionists” of apartheid.[48] In a letter circulated for signature, Zinn Education Project characterized the statements as “expressions of support for Palestinian human rights.”[49]

The project frequently participates in professional conferences as an exhibitor to showcase and disseminate its materials. At the November 2024 National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) conference in Boston, it hosted seven interactive workshops and two receptions and sponsored a booth. One of its workshops was titled “Teaching the Seeds of Violence in Palestine-Israel,” named after the lesson discussed earlier.[50]   The project notes its November 2024 booth at NCSS was “a haven” for progressive teachers to share stories about using its educational materials. In return, teachers received free .[51] At the conference, the project hosted a dinner reception featuring Rethinking Schools Executive Director Cierra Kaler-Jones.[52]

Zinn Education Project partners with and celebrates others who draw parallels between the Black American and Palestinian experiences, often while portraying Israel in a negative light. For example, it introduces a free activity, “Teaching Palestine-Israel from the Perspective of Civil Rights and Black Power Activists” by quoting a post on X by Palestinian activist Mariam Barghouti:

In the activity, Barghouti’s advice is characterized as based on the experiences of Palestinians in the “occupied territories” and that such “countless expressions of solidarity have reignited ties between the Black and Palestinian struggle for freedom.”[53] The activity was written by School District of Philadelphia teachers, one of whom was placed on leave for months for threatening violence against Jewish families.[54]

Radicalized Curriculum

While it is difficult to gauge the project’s success infiltrating American classrooms, Zinn Education Project claims tens of thousands of teachers have registered for access to its curricular materials, at a rate of 1,000 per month.[55] In New York City, the Movement of Rank and File Educators, a caucus of the United Federation of Teachers, pushed resources for teachers from Rethinking Schools.[56] the project claims teachers “in every state and territory” of the U.S. download lessons from its website and that more than 155,000 teachers have signed up to access its history lessons. The majority of downloads, it says, are middle and high school social studies educators in public, public charter, parochial, private, and home schools.[57]

Operating under a catchy pretense of “teaching truth,” Zinn Education Project encourages educators to reject state-approved curricula in favor of its radical materials, which it frames as more “accurate” and “socially just.” Hagopian advises educators to exercise their own discretion when teaching history, even when school boards and communities assert their legitimate authority over educational content. He celebrates the “many thousands of educators” who defy “bans on honest education” and, instead, are teaching about the “systemic ills” of the U.S. and urges educators to provide students what they believe to be truthful and inclusive lessons on history.[58]

Conclusion

The Zinn Education Project is not about teaching accurate history, but, rather, it promotes a divisive interpretation of social justice. It seeks to indoctrinate students into believing that America is fundamentally evil, that white people are oppressors.  It directs particular vehemence toward Israel, depicting it as an illegitimate and genocidal state. Through its deceptive messaging and aggressive outreach into K-12 education, Zinn Education Project undermines objective fact-based history education and replaces it with ideological indoctrination.

The use of Zinn Education Project is a warning sign for parents who want their children to be taught real history and exposed to a fair representation of world events. Left unchecked, it will continue to influence students to reject their own nation’s founding principles and embrace racial and ethnic division. And it will continue to sully young minds with falsehoods about the State of Israel. Its vilification of Zionism, the movement to restore the Jewish homeland and provide a haven for the world’s Jewish population, is widely understood as a new version of antisemitism.

 

[1] https://www.zinnedproject.org/

[2] https://rethinkingschools.org/

[3] https://www.teachingforchange.org/

[4] Teaching for Change acknowledged the partnership on its 2022 federal tax return and reported that Zinn Education Project offers “hundreds of free, downloadable teaching activities to middle and high school classrooms and coordinates teachers study groups, workshops, and campaigns. While Zinn Education Project claims tens of thousands have registered for its materials, its success at infiltrating schools is difficult to confirm. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/521616482/202441079349300419/IRS990

[5] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/teaching-palestine-israel

[6] https://x.com/ZinnEdProject/status/1715776433937691047

[7] Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States [1980]. Harper & Row

[8] For example, Wilentz, Sean, “America Made Me a Democrat,” The New Republic, October 2004; Wilentz, Sean, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, W.W. Norton, 2005; Schweikart, Larry and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror. Sentinel HC. 2004. See also, “The Howard Zinn School of History Writing,” September 5, 2023, by Mary Grabar, https://docemetproductions.com/howard-zinn-school-of-history-writing/

[9] For example, chapter 7, “As Long As Grass Grows or Water Runs, details policies like the Indian Removal Act and events such as the Trail of Tears, portraying them as deliberate efforts to exterminate indigenous cultures for economic gain. Chapter 11, “Robber Barons and Rebels,” portrays industrialists as having amassed wealth at the expense of workers while tolerating poor working conditions, offering low wages, and prompting labor unrest. Chapter 12, “The Empire and the People” portrays U.S. foreign policy as driven by imperialism to expand U.S. influence and control.

[10] In “Water and Environmental Racism,” Zinn Education Project contributors Matt Reed and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca discuss and present the water crisis in “majority-Black” Flint, Michigan, in 2014-2016 as an “egregious example of environmental racism.” “In every corner of the country,” they write without offering evidence, “poor people and people of color are disproportionately burdened by environmental contamination.” Reed and Wolfe-Rocca offer educators an activity so “students see that water crises are not simply accidents that could happen anywhere; they are manifestations of racism, past and present.” https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/water-and-environmental-racism/

Zinn Education Project lessons and program associates characterize public policy as systematically and intentionally segregating communities. “The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated the United States,” asserts that practices like redlining – denying financial services to people based on their race or ethnicity – were sanctioned by federal authorities, leading to enduring racial divides. https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/forgotten-history-government-segregated-united-states/

[11] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/new-lesson-on-palestine-israel/

[12] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/teaching-palestine-israel

[13] The exodus of Palestinians in 1948 was due to a combination of factors including voluntary flight, Arab leadership failures that caused panic, and Arab aggression. See Karsh, Efraim. Palestine Betrayed. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010.

[14] https://rethinkingschools.org

[15] Hagopian has written two books on teaching black history and activism in schools and edited another opposing standardized testing. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/teach-black-freedom-struggle-classes; https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/618-more-than-a-score

[16] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/black-for-palestine/; In Spring 2024, Black4Palestine posted to Instagram that it “stands in solidarity” with anti-Israel protests at U.S. university campuses and “will serve as an anchor to their cause.” https://www.instagram.com/p/C6CzfdpNXIv/

[17] https://www.instagram.com/p/C6CzfdpNXIv/

[18] https://www.instagram.com/p/C0FOhs4R-GX/

[19]https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2493-teach-truth

[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bksSv9vzgyg

[21] National Education Association Educators for Palestine online “teach-in,” February 1, 2025, video recording obtained by author.

[22] https://k12trackers.substack.com/p/national-education-association-educators-e4a

[23] In his article, “Erasing Palestinian History: The Propaganda of PragerU’s Israel Series,” Hagopian champions “anti-Zionism” as challenging the “ideology of imposing a Jewish nation-state on land that Palestinians lived on for generations. https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/erasing-palestinian-history-the-propaganda-of-pragerus-israel-series

[24] On the social media platform X, Hagopian compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and advocated for divestment. https://x.com/JessedHagopian/status/1790498142523425066

[25] In an article posted to Progressive.org, Hagopian gave examples of perceived anti-Black actions in schools: “The colonial refrain of Israeli settlers that Palestine was a ‘land without people for a people without land’ mirrors the delusion of Manifest Destiny, where American settlers claimed that God gave them the right to steal land for their own project of colonization. These master narratives, which have informed much of the colonial education of both nations, are the frameworks that allow so many people to accept the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land and the brutal violence against its inhabitants.” https://progressive.org/latest/israels-war-on-gaza-is-also-war-on-history-hagopian-231127/

[26] https://www.instagram.com/p/C6WXdUKLxa9/?img_index=1

[27] https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/israels-war-on-gaza-is-also-a-war-on-history-education-and-children/

[28] Critical race theory has been defined as an “academic concept [whose] core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice but also embedded in legal systems and policies.” It has been particularly divisive in schools, focusing attention on group identity rather than individualism, dividing people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups, and engendering curricula with racist assertions or undertones. By allowing CRT in classrooms, schools are “indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset.” https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05

[29] https://k12trackers.substack.com/p/nea-invites-anti-zionist-jesse-hagopian

[30] https://k12trackers.substack.com/p/nea-invites-anti-zionist-jesse-hagopian

[31] ibid.

[32] In June 2021, Zinn Education Project held a workshop titled “Teach Outside the Textbook: Resistance to Enslavement,”[32] which provided educators with alternative resources to teach about “resistance to slavery.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLra5R__o2o

[33] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/teaching-outside-the-textbook-booklet

[34] https://www.teachreconstructionreport.org/about-the-report

[35] https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/right-wing-legislators-are-trying-to-stop-us-from-teaching-for-racial-justice-we-refuse

[36] https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/love-solidarity-and-defiance-healing-our-schools-and-communities

[37] https://rethinkingschools.org/

[38] Defenders of Israel Attempt to Silence Anti-Racist Educators in Philadelphia – Rethinking Schools (undated)

[39] https://www.teachingforchange.org/

[40] https://www.peopleshistory.us/

[41] https://www.historiansforpeace.org/

[42] https://www.historiansforpeace.org/activities/

[43] https://www.camera.org/article/camera-op-ed-the-american-historical-associations-set-of-anti-israel-lies/

[44] https://truthout.org/articles/teachers-turn-to-study-groups-for-anti-racist-learning-as-history-is-whitewashed/

[45]https://jewishinsider.com/2024/12/national-association-of-independent-schools-people-of-color-conference-denver

[46] https://www.ajc.org/news/jewish-groups-urge-national-association-of-independent-schools-to-reject-antisemitic

[47] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/call-on-nais

[48] https://www.dailywire.com/news/dei-teacher-in-jewish-area-says-jews-kill-palestinians-to-sell-their-organs

[49] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/open-letter-to-mcps

[50] https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/teaching-the-seeds-of-violence-in-palestine-israel

[51] The free books included Half American by Matt Delmont and The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis. Delmont’s book asserts a paradox of Black soldiers during World War II risking their lives for a nation that had yet to extend them full rights, thereby challenging the traditional narrative of the “Good War.” Theoharis’s book portrays Parks as a life-long civil rights activist, underscoring that her defiance of an order to sit separate from Whites on a bus was not an isolated incident but part of a broader, sustained struggle against alleged systemic oppression.

[52] https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/ncss-in-boston

[53] https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/teaching-palestine-israel-black-power/

[54] https://www.jns.org/philadelphia-teacher-reassigned-offsite-while-public-school-district-investigates-alleged-jew-hatred/

[55] https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/gaza-and-the-growing-attack-on-social-justice-teaching

[56] It’s Time To Boot Activist Agendas From Our K-12 Schools, U.S. Rep. Aaron Bean, The Daily Caller, May 8, 2024.

[57] https://www.zinnedproject.org/about/faq/

[58] https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-education-agenda-for-teachers-sanitize-us-history-or-leave-the-field; https://truthout.org/articles/teachers-turn-to-study-groups-for-anti-racist-learning-as-history-is-whitewashed/