SCOOP: Ethnic studies workshop at UC Berkeley to feature teacher, who said ‘ethnic studies means free Palestine’

The University of California, Berkeley’s history-social science project, a regional site of the public school system’s California Subject Matter Project, said that it is partnering with Joemy Ito-Gates, an ethnic studies teacher who has said that “ethnic studies means free Palestine,” in an Aug. 22 workshop.

The public school’s project said that the event will be a “professional development session” for Bay Area elementary educators.

“You’ll explore practical ways to weave an ethnic studies lens into your existing curriculum through ready-to-use lessons, sample units and classroom strategies you can implement right away,” it stated.

In May, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, a nonprofit, and the consultancy Education Policy Project called on the House Education and Workforce Committee and the U.S. Departments of Education, Labor and Justice to investigate and suspend federal funding to the California Subject Matter Project over alleged bias against Israel.

The two groups called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, in June to veto a provision in the Budget Act of 2026 that included a $3.41 million appropriation to the project from a federal grant. They also asked him to suspend funding. (Newsom signed the bill into law).

The California Subject Matter Project operates at more than 90 regional sites and provides instructional materials and training to some 40,000 K-12 teachers in 1,000 school districts, according to the two groups.

Ito-Gates is an ethnic studies teacher on special assignment for the Berkeley Unified School District, which educates some 9,400 students in 11 public elementary schools, three middle schools and two high schools, per the district’s site.

She stated on a personal social media account in November 2023 that “ethnic studies means free Palestine,” and her name appeared among the signatories of a letter, in which ethnic studies teachers demanded that Newsom and Tony Thurmond, the California state superintendent of public instruction, “stop the censorship of teaching Palestine, the concepts of settler colonialism and Critical Race Theory.”

Ito-Gates also stated in a May video that the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs and Davis Polk and Wardwell’s February lawsuit, which alleges that California has failed to properly enforce its antidiscrimination laws against Jew-hatred in K-12 schools, could make ethnic studies “unrecognizable.”

“Erasing Palestinian history from California classrooms is erasing American history,” Ito-Gates said in the video, while wearing a keffiyeh.

In October 2024, Ito-Gates shared pictures and videos from an anti-Israel rally that included a video of a rapper stating, “long live the intifada” and another video showing rally attendees while a speaker can be heard saying, “glory to the resistance.”

Oleg Ivanov, executive director of the Northern California region for StandWithUs, told JNS that “the UC Berkeley history-social science project has a record of promoting anti-Israel and antisemitic agendas in K-12 classrooms.”

“We are deeply concerned that the same thing will happen in this training,” Ivanov said. “The state of California funds HSSP and must ensure that its instructional materials and professional development programs are accurate, balanced and free of hate.”

Robert Trestan, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s western division, told JNS that “ethnic studies has the potential to enrich a student’s learning experience.”

“However, its use as a platform to fuel antisemitism and a political agenda is wholly unacceptable,” he said.

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