By David Bernstein

A recent article in The Free Press exposes something deeply disturbing unfolding in the School District of Philadelphia. Through outreach and research conducted by my organization, the North American Values Institute, we uncovered a district-wide high school curriculum steeped in a rigid oppressed-oppressor worldview. What we found should alarm every Jewish parent, educator and communal leader in Philadelphia.

In a unit ostensibly about the Gilded Age, students are asked to identify modern-day “oppressors” and brainstorm how to “overthrow oppression.” They are prompted to view national myths, like the national anthem, as instruments of domination. The curriculum draws heavily from the radical “liberatory education” model, which teaches students to see history — and the present — through a strict binary: oppressors and the oppressed.
Once you adopt that framework, there’s not much room for Jews to exist as anything but villains.

This is not hyperbole. We’ve seen, time and again, that when radical identity ideologies take root in schools, Jews quickly find themselves miscast as powerful and privileged — regardless of our real histories, diverse experiences, or continued vulnerability. And when Israel enters the conversation, the script flips from miscast to maligned. Zionism becomes shorthand for colonialism. Jewish self-determination is framed as oppression. The line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism blurs — and then vanishes.

We cannot afford to treat this as someone else’s issue. The ideology embedded in Philadelphia’s curriculum has direct consequences for Jewish students and for the broader Jewish community. Last year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights found that the Philadelphia school district failed to adequately address incidents of antisemitic harassment. This isn’t just about vague trends — it’s happening right here, right now.

Fighting antisemitism means more than calling out swastikas or confronting threats of violence — though those are essential. It also means challenging the ideological frameworks that normalize Jew hatred under the guise of social justice. We cannot allow a worldview to take root in our schools that teaches students to sort the world into binary categories of good and evil, and then drops Jews and Israel squarely into the “evil” camp.

Some argue that schools should teach students to question authority and recognize systemic injustice. And of course, people of good will agree that moral atrocities like slavery and Jim Crow must be studied and understood. But ideologically driven educators often perform a sleight of hand — treating their entire worldview as an extension of that moral clarity. They impose a rigid oppressor-oppressed framework onto the present, and in doing so, indoctrinate children into a worldview that casts entire groups — especially Jews — as moral liabilities.

The danger is not just theoretical. Once this binary lens becomes the dominant way young people interpret history and society, it reshapes how they see Jews and Israel. And it does so at a time when antisemitism is already surging, when Jewish students are being harassed on campuses, when synagogues need armed guards, and when Hamas apologists are finding sympathetic ears in American classrooms.

Philadelphia’s Jewish community must take this seriously. Our schools are not immune from ideological capture. In fact, as this curriculum shows, they may already be captured.
So, what do we do?

We need to demand accountability from the School District of Philadelphia. Curricula should be transparent, ideologically balanced and historically grounded. Parents have a right to know what their children are being taught — and to object when that teaching veers into political indoctrination.

Jewish organizations should react not only to surface-level incidents but start engaging at the level of ideas. This means monitoring curricular materials, pushing back against ideological extremism and offering alternative educational resources that promote critical inquiry without demonizing whole groups.

And we need community leaders — rabbis, heads of day schools, JCC directors, federation officials — to speak out with moral clarity. This is not the time to hedge. If we want to safeguard Jewish life in Philadelphia, we must confront the ideological currents that are corroding the institutions meant to educate our children.

We’ve seen where this goes. In district after district, in university after university, the same worldview that claims to uplift the marginalized ends up marginalizing Jews. Not because it sets out to — but because it carries within it a rigid moral coding that simply doesn’t know what to do with us except to make us the enemy.

Philadelphia Jews have always been deeply invested in the promise of public education — as a means of social mobility, civic integration and shared American identity. But when that promise gets hijacked by ideological extremism, we have a duty to act.

Don’t look away. Don’t assume this will sort itself out. What happens in the classroom doesn’t stay in the classroom — it shapes how an entire generation will see the world. And us.

David Bernstein is the founder of the North American Values Institute.