California Ethnic Studies Bill Aims to Censor Palestine-Related Education

A new bill proposed in the California legislature threatens to undermine the rollout of ethnic studies classes in the state’s high schools. Assembly Bill (AB) 1468 is the latest installment in a series of legislation backed by pro-Israel organizations seeking to intervene in ethnic studies classrooms and silence Palestine-related speech in California schools.

“This latest bill is part of a continued effort by the [California] Legislative Jewish Caucus to impose ideological constraints upon ethnic studies as a field to disallow the critical teaching of Palestine within K-12 education in California,” Christine Hong, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz and co-chair of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council (UCESFC) told Truthout.

The California Legislative Jewish Caucus is a pro-Israel group of lawmakers comprising over 16 percent of the State Assembly and 12.5 percent of the State Senate, enough to exercise leverage as a bloc of votes on the floor. Caucus members Sen. Josh Becker and Assemblymembers Dawn Addis and Rick Chavez Zbur introduced AB 1468 in February 2025.

While AB 1468’s authors are Democrats who have condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on public education, Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), said the proposed bill would have similar effects as efforts in Republican-controlled states and on the federal level seeking to whitewash K-12 and college curricula and turn back the clock on civil rights progress.

“The Democrats and others who are championing these bills may not explicitly say themselves or even identify as part of the far right MAGA agenda, but it’s indisputable that what they are doing is in alignment with the broader attack on public education and the attack on anti-racist education, in particular,” Kiswani told Truthout.

AB 1468’s lead sponsor is the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC), one pillar of whose policy framework is to “maintain a strong California-Israel relationship,” including through “combat[ing] campaigns to delegitimize and demonize Israel.” JPAC lists the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist organizations among its members.

Last year, members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus proposed a raft of bills meant to stifle Palestine-related speech in public schools and on college campuses. Among those was AB 2918, a predecessor to AB 1468. When a diverse coalition of educators and advocates mounted a pressure campaign and succeeded in having it shelved, sponsors vowed to reintroduce it this year. “AB 1468 is AB 2918, but on steroids,” Guadalupe Cardona, a high school educator and member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, told Truthout.

The new bill would require all ethnic studies curricula, instruction and instructional materials to undergo public hearings, be vetted by the state, and be posted on the Department of Education’s website. AB 1468 also outlines standards according to which ethnic studies materials should be reviewed, including mandating that instruction focus on “domestic experience and stories” and not cover “abstract ideological theories, causes, or pedagogies.”

In the proposed legislation, “there are so many layers of policing and surveillance that no other academic area has,” Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, co-chair of the San Diego Unified School District Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and a lecturer in critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, told Truthout. “It’s absolutely unprecedented overreach, and it’s an arm of the state trying to censor what our children are learning [and] censor the truth of our students’ realities.”

Under AB 1468, the body responsible for vetting ethnic studies materials would be the California State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission, whose current members include Sen. Ben Allen and Anita Friedman. Friedman is a board trustee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and executive director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services, an organization known for its efforts to silence discussions of Palestine and anti-Zionism in schools.

“It’s absolutely unprecedented overreach, and it’s an arm of the state trying to censor what our children are learning [and] censor the truth of our students’ realities.”

The proposed legislation is the newest front in a yearslong attack on ethnic studies in California, which became the first state to mandate an ethnic studies graduation requirement for high school students with AB 101 in 2021. That law requires public high school students to take ethnic studies to graduate, beginning with the class of 2030. Starting this year, all schools must offer the subject.

As a field, ethnic studies emerged from the student and social justice movements of the 1960s. When students of color went on strike at San Francisco State College in 1968, they demanded that the school strengthen its Black Studies Department and establish a School of Ethnic Studies to teach the histories and cultures of groups that had historically been ignored or erased from curricula. The students recognized that erasure as “an integral part of the racism and hatred this country has perpetuated upon nonwhite peoples.”

From the start, the field linked racism in the U.S. to the nation’s acts of colonialism, imperialism and foreign militarism, making it a target of political reactionaries. “This powerful analysis of racism, white supremacy, [and] the consequences of U.S. foreign policy is something that will lead to social justice, social change, and social movements and activism — and that is something that, for many, really makes them quite uncomfortable,” Natalia Deeb-Sossa, a professor of Chicana/o/x studies at UC Davis, told Truthout.

But it has also been a boon to students. Research shows that students who take an ethnic studies class engage more in school and are more likely to graduate and attend college. The classes have also been shown to boost the attendance and academic performance of students at risk of dropping out.

Ashlyn Bautista, a fourth-year undergraduate student at UC San Diego, experienced what she described as the life-changing effects of ethnic studies coursework when she first encountered the subject in college. “Never before did I think that my classrooms could be spaces of liberation and finding myself and reclaiming my own identity,” Bautista told Truthout.

There are four core disciplines within ethnic studies, each corresponding to a racialized group in the U.S.: Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chicanx or Latinx Americans, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which is meant to include Arab Americans. However, the inclusion of Arab American and Palestinian American histories and experiences in California’s ethnic studies curricula has been challenged since before AB 101 was even signed into law. A 2019 draft of the state model curriculum garnered pushback from pro-Israel groups, which claimed its inclusion of Israeli persecution of Palestinians was one-sided and that the mention of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement was antisemitic. A final revised model curriculum was published in 2021 — scrubbed of any mention of Palestine.

This erasure is problematic not only because Arab American histories and communities are linked to Palestine, but Hong explained, “Settler colonialism is an absolutely key analytic of ethnic studies.” The framework can help students understand the power structures that perpetuate the repression of Indigenous peoples and cultures, including Native Americans.

While the inclusion of Palestine in ethnic studies has garnered pushback from the start, attacks on the field and its educators have ramped up since Israel invaded Gaza in 2023. “Because we have elements in the legislature who want to defend Israel, they are willing to go so far as to censor curriculum for California students and teachers in defense of a foreign country that is currently committing a genocide,” Sean Malloy, a professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Merced, told Truthout.

According to Gallagher-Geurtsen, the attacks are already chilling speech. “I’ve spoken with high school and middle school teachers who are teaching ethnic studies in San Diego Unified [School District], and they say they’re afraid to teach the truth in their classrooms because of all this pressure from Zionist groups [and] racist, white-supremacist groups,” she told Truthout.

Hong and other UCESFC members have also “been on the receiving end of a pretty much endless barrage of hate mail,” Hong told Truthout. Jennifer Mogannam, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, and Dylan Rodríguez, a distinguished professor in the Department of Black Study and the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, shared anonymous emails they had received, which threatened them or members of their families with harm and included racist slurs and disturbing images. “My experience with the reaction against advocacy for Arab American studies to be included in the ethnic studies curriculum has been nothing short of violent,” Rodríguez said. Mogannam told Truthout she is targeted both as a practitioner of ethnic studies and as a Palestinian American.

Other educators have been subject to doxxing campaigns and even lawsuits, including Cardona, who was a named defendant in a lawsuit filed in 2022 by the Deborah Project on behalf of teachers and parents who accused Cardona and other defendants of using antisemitic content in their classrooms. The case was dismissed in November 2024 in a ruling that criticized the plaintiff’s lack of evidence and unpersuasive arguments.

Whether or not AB 1468 becomes law, Cardona told Truthout that the atmosphere of surveillance and harassment to which it is contributing is already hurting students and the field. “To be constantly bombarded with these negative messages and attacks, it takes a huge toll,” she said, noting that she knows educators who have chosen to stop teaching ethnic studies to protect themselves. She said she has also heard from parents whose children are now afraid to major in ethnic studies in college. “This is having a chilling effect, even on the next generation of classroom educators.”

Whether or not AB 1468 becomes law, the atmosphere of surveillance and harassment to which it is contributing is already hurting students and the field.

Groups including AROC Action, UCESFC, the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies and Jewish Voice for Peace California are anchoring the opposition to AB 1468, building on years of organizing that succeeded in having AB 2918 shelved last year. Still, the group faces an uphill battle. Kiswani, Hong and Cardona each told Truthout that legislators seem unwilling to listen to their perspectives and expertise. “The Zionist perspective on what ethnic studies should be is what keeps getting centered over and over and over again,” Cardona said. “They’re just not listening, and they won’t move even an inch.” Neither Assemblymember Addis nor Assemblymember Zbur responded before deadline to Truthout’s requests for comment.

Nonetheless, Kiswani told Truthout that the coalition remains committed to quashing AB 1468 and seeing ethnic studies implemented without draconian restrictions so it can continue to benefit California students. “Many young people tell us every day, ‘Ethnic studies saved my life. I began to see myself differently, understand my history and my potential as part of my community and social movements,’” Kiswani said. “That’s what ethnic studies offers us, [and] we need that now more than ever.”

Note: A correction has been made to change “California Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies” to simply “Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies.”