Contemporary Antisemitism

What’s wrong with Echoes & Reflections?
While, of course, there are legitimate. cases of contemporary antisemitism, the Echoes & Reflections curriculum wrongly teaches that anti-Zionism (opposition to Israel) is the same as antisemitism. This is wrong and brands all Jews as supporters of an ethno-nationalist state built on the graves of Palestinians. Judaism is not Israelism. A closer look at Echoes & Reflections' problems below:
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The Glossary

In Unit 11 on Contemporary Antisemitism, it conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism to chill classroom discussion and intimidate teachers into silence during Israel’s live-streamed genocide:

Under key words, the first word is “anti-Israel bias” with the following definition:

Extreme and/or illegitimate criticism of Israel, including false accusations directed against Israel, often with the aim of delegitimizing the country. Anti-Israel bias does not include legitimate criticism of the Israeli government, its policies, or its politicians.

contemporary antisemitism

A term used to describe a modern-day form of antisemitism that has developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and manifests itself in anti-Zionism and opposition to the State of Israel.

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On its glossary page, it relegates Palestine to the annals of history to deny the existence of over four million people living in occupied Palestine. This is erasure of an entire people.

Palestine

The Roman term for what is now Israel; the name used by the British during World War II to denote the area they held under a League of Nations mandate.

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On its glossary page, it associates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, ignoring the long history of anti-Zionism within the Jewish community:

Zionism/anti-Zionism

Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel. Anti-Zionism is a prejudice against this movement for self-determination and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in the State of Israel. It may be motivated by or result in antisemitism, or it may create a climate in which antisemitism becomes more acceptable.

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The key words also highlight three terms the ADL is promoting as a framework for evaluating whether someone or someone’s statement is antisemitic. These key words all revolve around Israel in an attempt to police discussion of a state built on ethnic supremacy and colonization.

KEY WORDS

delegitimization

demonization/demonize

double standard

Student Hand-Outs/Echoes & Reflections

“A Brief History of Israel.”

This overview sanitizes the founding of Israel–ignoring what Palestinians called “The Nakba” or catastrophe of Zionist militias ethnically cleansing Palestine to make way for a supremacist state.

The handout blames Palestinians, ignoring the context that could explain their actions. When it discusses the 1947 U.N. partition plan that divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab countries, it fails to mention that Jews were only one-third of the population; even the state earmarked for Jews would have been almost half Palestinian. They paint a picture of Jews as reasonable, and Arabs as aggressors: “The Jewish leadership in Palestine accepted the U.N. plan for the establishment of two states. . . . However, the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs and the surrounding Arab states rejected the plan and almost immediately began to attack the Jewish areas.” (“What’s Missing in Holocaust Education”-Rethinking Schools, Fall 2025)

Its section: OCTOBER 7 AND THE CURRENT WAR ignores Israel’s occupation and starvation of Gaza that preceded the October 7th attack. It adopts an ahistorical approach to October 7th, wrongfully presenting it as an isolated incident and failing to mention Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as determined by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry (9/16/25).

This is a fundamentally biased and misleading lesson that conflates opposition to the Israeli ethno-state with Jew-hate, obscures the colonial nature of the State's establishment and the philosemitic Christian Zionists who helped establish it, elides its apartheid character, and excuses the erasure of the people displaced, evicted, and exiled from their ancestral homes in order to cleanse Europe's guilt for centuries of Jew-hate and pogroms. Antizionism is as Jewish and as old as Zionism itself and failure to confront that fact in this lesson turns it into a tool of Israeli propaganda

This curriculum is a really disturbing example of the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Ironically, the handout on history identifies the very trap the rest of the materials fall into: "Over time, anti-Zionism– the opposition to a Jewish homeland in the State of Israel–fueled hatred of Jews as a people and the words ‘Zionist' and ‘Jew' began to be used interchangeably by many.”

Yet instead of teaching students to make that very clear and necessary distinction (not to mention acknowledging the range of meanings attributed to the terms “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism”), the rest of the curriculum doubles down on the idea that to be Jewish is to be aligned with the State of Israel, and that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic. It presents a frighteningly biased history of Israel/Palestine, leaving no room for any nuanced or complex analysis.

At the time when antisemitism is indeed a dire threat, this curriculum is likely to do more harm than good. Scary.