The anti-Israel fanaticism that has for years been gaining strength on American college campuses is now making its way into elementary and secondary schools, writes Irit Tratt:

Last year, California became the first state to pass a law mandating that public-school students must complete an ethnic-studies course before receiving a high-school diploma. A small group of self-identified “ethnic-studies experts” were tasked with drafting an ethnic-studies model curriculum. The draft authored by those “experts” was thrown out by California’s governor after thousands of alarmed Jewish Californians and others pointed out its virulently anti-Semitic content. The initial drafters then formed the Liberated Ethnic-Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, with which many union members are affiliated, and are actively promoting all the bad portions that were banned by the California government.

A Wall Street Journal op-ed revealed that embedded in the Consortium’s materials are references to Israel as a “colonial settler state” founded “through genocide.” The authors of that op-ed brought a lawsuit on behalf of concerned Jewish parents and teachers against the Liberated Consortium, the LA teachers union, and others for inserting—admittedly, where necessary by stealth—into public schools the very discriminatory content banned by the state.

But prominent teachers’ unions have overridden parental opposition. These organizations include and the National Education Association (NEA), of which the California teachers’ unions are a part, and the American Federation of Teachers.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.