Feds open probe into anti-Israel NYC teachers

For 26 years, Karen Feldman taught history in New York public schools. Her specialty: Holocaust education, a difficult topic, but one Feldman taught with particular care.

"I always took pride in bringing truth and critical thinking and a nurturing environment that would spark discussions that would enable students to really learn from each other," Feldman said. "I never ever brought my political beliefs into the classroom. A teacher should be politically neutral. And I always try to present the facts."

But around 2015, she said she started to see ideological shifts in the K-12 educational system, more implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). She saw these as big sweeping ideas of good, but ones that rested on a foundation of seeing the world through the binary narrative of the oppressed and the oppressor.

She said the trend kept growing and that by 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, the floodgates opened and this "oppressor" and "oppressed" narrative infiltrated the entirety of the New York City Public School system.

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"I started to see these scary and dangerous trends happening. Lack of critical thought, not only within the student body, but even and especially with the newer teachers that were coming into the system, which impacted our professional workspace, our discussions, curriculum design, and so forth." Feldman recounted.

Then one day on the school grounds, she was surrounded by 10 angry students who shoved her and threw objects at her. Their beef? She was a Trump and Israel supporter. "It was a very scary and serious moment for me, because I understood that this was stereotyping and mob mentality happening,"

"They knew I was Jewish," Feldman said. "They knew my kids, my husband's Israeli. We go to Israel for the summers. I'm a proud Jew and supporter of Israel. And it was a dare. And it had this political connection from the Trump administration to the Israeli government, to all people who are Israeli or proud Jews, must be racist."   

Not long after that, Feldman quit teaching. She later co-founded the New York City Public School Alliance, which fights against Jew hatred, antisemitism and Jewish erasure in New York's public schools.

Right now she is laser focused on a group of activist teachers known as NYC Educators for Palestine. "It is a pro-Palestinian ideology, but I don't think that's all it is," she said. "It's an anti-American ideology. We know it's vilifying Israel. Whatever starts with the Jews never ends with the Jewish. Right?"

Feldman isn't alone in her suspicions.

The federal government has launched a civil rights investigation into New York's Department of Education, the nation's largest school district, targeting specifically NYC Educators for Palestine, alleging that members who are teaching in classrooms are pushing anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian indoctrination on children as young as six, while sowing "hostility and hatred towards Jewish students, potentially creating a hostile environment."

"No child should be taught by his or her teachers to hate their peers," Kimberly Richey, Department of Education Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. "Neither should Jewish children be taught that being Jewish somehow makes them inherently guilty or proponents of hate and violence."

An Instagram page that supposedly belongs to NYC Educators for Palestine shows members holding a banner showing the group's name, but the faces of members are covered with emojis, hiding their identities.

Fox News reached out to the group, but so far no one has responded. The Instagram page states that "NYC Educators for Palestine is a group of public school educators committed to fighting for Palestinian liberation in our school system, and society at large, by organizing and mobilizing educators, developing curriculum, divesting our pension funds from Israeli securities, and working with community, family and student organizations."

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Carin Bail, who is Jewish, is concerned for her two children enrolled in New York's public schools in Queens.

"It worries me that there are teachers that are, you know, so radicalized and so focused on sending messages like this rather than focusing on really crucial skills like literacy and critical thinking. And they are having an influence on young minds," Bail said. "I just want to make sure that...all perspectives are being presented to the kids, because then they can make their own decision about the way they think."

The feds say they received several complaints alleging the group trains teachers to bash Zionism and Israel while touting Palestinian resistance – even calling Zionists "genocidal White supremacists," and Hamas terrorists "martyrs."

On the day that honored civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., NYC Educators for Palestine along with the organization "Teaching While Muslim" organized a pro-Palestinian teach-in with resource materials and suggested lesson plans for grades K through 12.

The probe comes at a time when antisemitism continues to rise. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in New York's schools more than tripled from 2022 to 2023, from 52 in 2022 to 173 in 2023.

New York's Department of Education would not comment on the investigation, and only stated that the group NYC Educators for Palestine is not affiliated with the public school system.