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Text Messages: As Fights Over Textbooks Simmer, Jewish Groups Enter

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  • Text Messages: As Fights Over Textbooks Simmer, Jewish Groups Enter

    TEXT MESSAGES: AS FIGHTS OVER TEXTBOOKS SIMMER, JEWISH GROUPS ENTER THE FRAY
    By Marissa Brostoff

    Tablet Magazine
    http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religio n/14816/text-messages/
    Sept 1 2009

    In 2001, when the Virginia Department of Education was revising
    its history and social science curriculum standards, including
    coverage of the Armenian genocide, the Board of Education heard from
    Armenian-American groups, as well as their Turkish counterparts. That
    was also a year when groups concerned with representations of the Civil
    War called in. In 2008, as the state's cycle of curriculum revision and
    textbook adoption--which takes place every seven years--began anew,
    members of the Indian-American community called up with concerns
    about the representations of Indian history and Hinduism.

    This year, as Virginia prepares to recommend new textbooks, the Jews
    are finally weighing in.

    Reviewing textbooks and state-imposed curriculum standards for
    content offensive to one's community has been standard practice among
    minority advocacy groups at least since the 1980s. Given the elaborate
    network of Jewish communal organizations that attempt to fend off
    group defamation, it's surprising that the first Jewish organization
    dedicated to reviewing textbooks and state curriculum standards was
    founded only four years ago.

    "The Jewish community was kind of asleep at the switch on this issue,"
    said Aliza Craimer Elias, the director of program development and
    national outreach for the Institute for Curriculum Services, a Jewish
    group that formed in 2005. The group claims to have successfully
    lobbied for nearly 2,000 changes in textbooks and to have worked its
    way up from weighing in only at the tail end of the process, when
    textbooks are approved by boards of education, to working directly
    with publishers. But despite these successes, Jewish and Muslim
    education groups alike indicate that on one of the most contested
    issues for both communities--the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--the
    Muslim groups have succeeded in shaping the terms of the debate.

    Like many textbook review organizations, ICS is based in California,
    the most important state in the country for textbook publishers. Not
    only does the state have 6 million public school students--more than
    any other state--it's also one of 21 states with a "textbook adoption"
    policy, according to which the state's board of education produces
    a list of recommended textbooks every few years. (Texas, with over
    4 million public school students, and Florida, with 2.5 million,
    are important textbook battlegrounds for the same reason.) Indeed,
    textbook publishers, and the groups that monitor them, now organize
    much of their output around California's adoption cycle.

    But because of the financial crisis faced by California's public
    school system, its next textbook adoption is currently on hold. In the
    meantime, ICS is focusing on Virginia, where it's currently reviewing
    textbooks in partnership with local Jewish Community Relations Councils
    and the Virginia Holocaust Museum, and preparing to open an office in
    Texas, which will determine new social studies curriculum standards
    this fall.

    History primers certainly aren't the only kind of textbooks that spark
    controversy; in fact, some of the most heated debates in the field
    have been waged by Christian groups opposed to the presentation of
    evolution in science classrooms. But ICS, like most special interest
    groups, focuses on social studies curricula, with world history and
    geography being "the meatiest," Elias said. They got meatier after
    federal legislation in 1989 that allowed public schools more leeway
    in teaching about world religions.

    "Over the next number of years, we began to see shocking problems,"
    said Doug Kahn, the executive director of San Francisco's branch of
    the Jewish Community Relations Council and a founder of ICS. He and
    the organization's cofounders, Council staffers with a background
    in education, noticed that textbooks were discussing Judaism using
    anachronistic Christian frameworks: employing the language of
    "replacement theology," in which Judaism fades from history after
    the rise of Christianity, or blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.

    They also noticed, Kahn said, that textbook review groups representing
    Muslim interests "had a lot of success in addressing representations
    of Islam, sometimes in areas that sort of overlap [with ours],
    such as the Arab-Israeli conflict." These groups--among them, the
    Council on Islamic Education, Arab World and Islamic Resources, and
    the Middle East Outreach Council--were all founded in the 1970s and
    1980s. Indeed, Shabbir Mansuri (whose group is now called the Institute
    on Religion and Civic Values) and Audrey Shabbas, the head of AWAIR,
    both say their groups developed relationships with publishers years
    ago and no longer have to review every new textbook that comes out,
    only to join what Shabbas calls "the zoo" of interest groups every
    time a state board of education has a public hearing.

    Kahn and Elias avoid explaining ICS's mission as an attempt to
    counteract the success of Muslim textbook review groups. But Sandra
    Alfonsi, the chair of a Hadassah committee called Curriculum Watch,
    established in 1992, is less reticent. Though the group isn't an
    independently funded organization with fulltime staffers like ICS,
    it takes a more aggressive approach. "We do not shy away from the
    question and problems of teaching about Islam," Alfonsi said. "We
    do the exact same thing [as ICS], but we are finding that with the
    Islamicization of the textbooks, both Judaism and Christianity are
    being delegitimized." Alfonsi believes that Muslim textbook review
    groups have succeeded in pushing textbooks toward anti-Zionism and
    even anti-Semitism. "The American history textbooks are judenrein,"
    thanks to these organizations, she said. "They're free of any mention
    of contributions of American Jews." Though publishers are still
    relatively amenable to her suggestions about pre-1948 Jewish history,
    she said, on the topic of Israel "we hit a wall about 10 years ago."

    ICS has had at least some success making both less controversial
    changes about the distant past and more controversial ones about
    the Israeli-Arab conflict. In the former category, for instance,
    one textbook (the group won't divulge which one) offered this
    description of Passover: "The last plague God sent killed all
    first-born children, except for those of Israelites who marked their
    doorway with lamb's blood. This plague convinced the pharaoh to let
    the Israelites leave. Jews today celebrate a holiday called Passover
    to remember this event." So that no one will get the idea that Jews
    are celebrating the slaying of Egyptian babies, the text now reads,
    "The Israelite escape from Egypt is known as the Exodus. Jews today
    celebrate a holiday called Passover to remember the event."

    The group has also successfully lobbied for questions about the
    Arab-Israeli conflict it considers biased to be deleted entirely:
    "How did violence lead to violence from both sides?" and "What
    reaction might Israel's Muslim and Christian population have to
    Israel's flag?" were once textbook discussion questions but aren't
    any longer. In another instance, a textbook argued that "resolving
    the problem of the occupied lands remains an important foreign policy
    issue"; ICS successfully got it replaced with the claim that "Israel
    removed settlements completely from Gaza in 2005, but peace has not
    followed." The difference between Elias's and Shabbas's perspectives
    on this change is typical of the semantic battles that characterize
    textbook disputes, just as they characterize larger foreign policy
    battles.

    "'Occupied lands'--that's an internationally recognized legal
    term," AWAIR's Shabbas said, when asked about the change ICS had
    made. "'Settlements'--do we all know what that means? The original
    statement--if you specify that you're talking about U.S. foreign
    policy--that's a correct statement. That's what I would want my
    students to be looking at." Elias countered that ICS's edit needs to
    be seen in the larger context of a tendency in some textbooks to put
    the brunt of the blame for the Israeli-Arab conflict on Israel. "One
    thing we see is that the textbooks will come back over and over to
    one issue," she said. "So the settlements may be one factor, but the
    problem is when textbooks make that the whole and the only issue."

    A complementary problem occurs, Elias said, when Israel comes in for
    criticism (or implied criticism) but other countries are not treated
    in a parallel way. The flag question, for instance, had no parallel
    in discussions of Muslim countries that have a religious symbol on
    their flag. "They don't ask these questions anywhere else across the
    board," she said. Shabbas agreed that Israel is treated differently
    from other countries--but in the sense that it's often granted a
    whole chapter with a name like, "The Birth of Israel," whereas other
    occupying powers are relegated to the chapter on colonialism.

    Just as Hadassah's Alfonsi thinks textbooks have gotten worse
    over the years, Shabbas thinks they've improved. "I think textbook
    publishers understand now what authentic voices mean," she said. "If
    they're writing a chapter on Native Americans, they won't quote the
    Daughters of the American Revolution." The free market has been good
    for textbook publishers, she suggested: "There's a competition between
    them, and they have to put out a pretty sterling product if they want
    to succeed."

    Despite these groups' differences, some education advocates
    believe that the entire complex of textbook review groups have had
    a more pernicious effect on education than any lobby has alone,
    by intimidating publishers into diluting the history out of history
    books. Taken together, for example, the critiques of the Jewish and
    Muslim advocacy groups have left textbooks with "even-handed and
    skimpy" coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that "tiptoe
    around the issues so as to avoid controversy," education historian
    Diane Ravitch wrote in an email.

    "I've been through endless debates with the Christians and the Jews;
    fewer debates with the Muslims and Hindus because they won't talk to
    me," said Gil Sewall, a former education editor for Newsweek who now
    runs the American Textbook Council, which reviews both textbooks and
    other textbook review groups. "All religious textbook activists,
    including Jews, have a point of view. They want to put certain
    things in textbooks and keep other things out. For a historian,
    that's a problem."

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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