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Gottheimer Hosts Fifth District School Superintendent Call on Combating Anti-Semitism and Hate Following A Series of Recent Attacks

Ridgewood Police at RHS

file photo by Boyd Loving 

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, Following the discovery of anti-Semitic symbols in the Pascack Valley Regional School District, Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) hosted a conference call for school superintendents, featuring experts from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (NJOHSP), as well as Superintendent of Schools Erik Gundersen from the Pascack Valley Regional School District on Tuesday.

Speakers addressed concerns regarding anti-Semitic activity in New Jersey schools and shared best practices in curbing the rising trend. Superintendents from more than thirty North Jersey schools joined the call, including representatives from school districts in Bergen, Sussex, and Warren counties. The ADL was represented by Deputy Director Melanie Robbins, Associate Regional Director for New Jersey Alex Rosemberg, and Education Director for New York/New Jersey Nicole Straker. The NJOHSP was represented by Chief of Staff Patrick Rigby.

On November 6th, Pascack Valley staff members found three Nazi swastikas in Pascack Valley High School. Additional swastikas and a racial slur were found at Pascack Valley High School at the end of November,  followed by anti-Semitic symbols and racial slurs scrawled on a bathroom wall in Pascack Hills High School in early December. A few days later, a similar incident occurred at Ridgewood High School.

The ADL identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated throughout the United States in 2017. This represents an increase of 57 percent over the incidents reported in 2016. New Jersey experienced the third-highest number of those incidents in the nation.

Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) said, “These incidents are completely unacceptable. We cannot ignore the fact that our schools are facing a disturbing uptick in incidents of hate and intolerance. As both a parent and your Congressman, I am ready to work with New Jersey superintendents to ensure that instances of bias, hatred, and anti-Semitism are swiftly addressed and dealt with. Together, we must continue to send a strong and clear message that anti-Semitism and all acts of hate have absolutely no place anywhere in our communities.”

Evan R. Bernstein, Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League New York/New Jersey Regional Office said, “We are grateful to Representative Gottheimer for convening a call today with ADL, NJOHSP, and dozens of school superintendents to discuss how we can collectively address hate, bias, and bigotry in our K-12 schools.  Last year, we at ADL saw a surge in anti-Semitic incidents targeting students across the country, which included an astounding 94 percent rise in incidents at K-12 schools. Unfortunately, elementary, middle and high schools have exceeded public spaces (such as parks and streets) as the locations with the most anti-Semitic incidents, surpassing homes, businesses, Jewish institutions, and college campuses.  We remain deeply troubled by these trends, but are heartened by the outpouring of support from elected officials and community leaders in New Jersey, who remain committed to addressing this very serious problem. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with Representative Gottheimer and others to build a safer and more inclusive learning environment for our young people in New Jersey.”

Superintendent of Schools Erik Gundersen said, “I appreciate that the Congressman and other local elected officials throughout the Pascack Valley area have rallied behind our district in light of these events.  It is important for all elected leaders and faith-based leaders to join their school partners to shed light on how our communities must stand up against hateful actions.  The Pascack Valley Regional High School District can’t do this alone and needs the ongoing support, guidance, and expertise of our community partners and other national organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey as we strive to move forward.  Together, we will be able to inform, take action, and educate our students and communities on how we can stand up against hate. It is my hope that the Congressman’s conference call, where we received a briefing from The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and The Anti-Defamation League, along with learning from Pascack Valley Regional’s experience, will provide superintendents with the tools to more effectively address anti-semitic events – should they present themselves in additional schools around the 5th Congressional District.”

This summer, Congressman Gottheimer led a Synagogue Security Summit with experts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the NJOHSP.

Congressman Gottheimer has also worked across the aisle in Congress to combat disturbing uptick in bias, intolerance, and hate crimes against Jewish institutions. He led 11 other members of New Jersey’s Congressional Delegation in writing a letter to Congressional leadership, requesting a funding measure for the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice for their programs to better secure Jewish Community Centers (JCCs).

In September, the President signed the Protecting Religiously Affiliated Institutions Act (P.L. 115-249), legislation Congressman Gottheimer cosponsored, which criminalizes the intentional obstruction of any person’s free exercise of religious beliefs by threat of force against religious property.

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Anti-intellectualism Is Killing America

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Social dysfunction can be traced to the abandonment of reason
Post published by David Niose on Jun 23, 2015 in Our Humanity, Naturally

The tragedy in Charleston last week will no doubt lead to more discussion of several important and recurring issues in American culture—particularly racism and gun violence—but these dialogues are unlikely to bear much fruit until the nation undertakes a serious self-examination. Decrying racism and gun violence is fine, but for too long America’s social dysfunction has continued to intensify as the nation has ignored a key underlying pathology: anti-intellectualism.

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof’s actions on America’s culture of racism and gun violence, but it’s time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation’s culture of ignorance.

In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are“lies straight from the pit of hell,”(link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panelbrought a snowball(link is external) into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president(link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall.

In considering the senseless loss of nine lives in Charleston, of course racism jumps out as the main issue. But isn’t ignorance at the root of racism? And it’s true that the bloodshed is a reflection of America’s violent, gun-crazed culture, but it is only our aversion to reason as a society that has allowed violence to define the culture. Rational public policy, including policies that allow reasonable restraints on gun access, simply isn’t possible without an informed, engaged, and rationally thinking public.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201506/anti-intellectualism-is-killing-america

 

 

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Scholars Protest New AP U.S. History Standards

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Daniel Lattier | June 12, 2015

This week, an impressive list of scholars across the nation published a letter opposing the new framework for the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History. You can read the full letter here.

As you may know, millions of U.S. high school students take an AP U.S. History course and exam each year in the hopes of earning college credit. The new framework of the exam is designed to shape the course curriculum.

The scholars’ problems with the new framework include the following:

It takes away teachers’ previous freedom with the curriculum and “centralizes control, deemphasizes content, and promotes a particular interpretation of American history.”
The historical view it promotes “downplays American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.”
The framework is organized around the theme of “identity-group conflict… while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution.”
It shifts away from the previous framework’s emphasis on American exceptionalism and national character in favor of an emphasis on “the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.”

Those with similar concerns are often met with the straw man argument that they wish to turn a blind eye to the past sins committed by Americans. Fortunately, the scholars anticipated this argument in their letter:

“We do not seek to reduce the education of our young to the inculcation of fairy tales, or of a simple, whitewashed, heroic, even hagiographical nationalist narrative. Instead, we support a course that fosters informed and reflective civic awareness, while providing a vivid sense of the grandeur and drama of its subject.”

The concerns raised in the scholars’ letter are not new to me. I brought up similar ones in an article last year on Minnesota’s U.S. history standards, which you can read here. I have provided these standards below:

https://www.better-ed.org/blog/scholars-protest-new-ap-us-history-standards

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How To Escape The Age Of Mass Delusion

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By Stella Morabito
JUNE 8, 2015

Mass delusion is an important tool of oppressors because they can’t survive free expression. That’s why the First Amendment’s a target.

Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about “the manufacture of consent” in his classic work, “Public Opinion.” On the heels of that book, Edward Bernays penned a little volume called “Propaganda,” in which he stated that an elite would always be responsible for making the public aware of “new ideas” which the public would then act upon as the elite nudged them into it. Related, but more in-depth is Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.”

Political propaganda aims to mobilize the masses to move an agenda forward. That’s most effectively done when the masses are unaware of the process. It’s what “community organizers” work towards, whether they know it or not. Once the masses are mobilized to push for a cause, the propagandists’ goals can be put into law.

In fact, many newly propagandized ideas seem to have taken America by storm just in the past decade or so. Same-sex marriage is only one of those ideas. Transgenderism is now eclipsing that notion, and its propaganda techniques—wrapped in the language of civil rights—are getting Americans on board with the idea of erasing all sex distinctions in law, including theirown. It’s as though Americans are buying into a fast-talking sales pitch without being allowed to read the print, whether it’s large print or small.

There’s more on the horizon: a singles’ rights movement that promises to end legal recognition of all marriage. Then there is transhumanism, which includes a push to end “fleshism” by enacting laws that protect non-biological entities from discrimination.

Propaganda Is Directing Us Leftward

American conservatives are by and large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows. There are virtually no conservative social psychologists around. You’d think once a liberal social psychologist hits the public over the head with this factsome on the Right would take notice and at least try to get clued in.

American conservatives are by and large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows.

Meanwhile, the Left has been employing social psychology and depth psychology on the masses for decades. President Obama’s campaign staff was filled with social psychologists. In this context, those who believe conservatives can subsist on reason and logic alone are kidding themselves. It’s no wonder GOP leaders are caving on so many principles, and being absorbed so easily into the Left’s machine.

A lot of people are scratching their heads today, wondering how life got to be so surreal, so fast in the United States of America. Based on the silencing tactics revealedby the LGBT lobby, many observers are likely now thinking: “Gee, I thought marriage equality was merely a gay rights movement. I didn’t realize that fascism was part of that package.” The Great Unraveling continues at a rapid clip when slipping on a pronoun in these days of transgender rule could cost you your career or earn you massive social media rallies chanting “hater” at you.

Even benign reminders of the First Amendment—embodied in Religious Freedom Restoration Acts—are quickly dispatched by mob hysteria. One day a supposedly principled leader like Indiana Gov. Mike Pence promotes the RFRA, and the next day he folds and essentially signs on with the mob.

Even benign reminders of the First Amendment are quickly dispatched by mob hysteria.

There seem to be few independent thinkers left. But even they don’t seem to know what hit them. A woman getsbanned by her gym and labelled a bigot because she told management that a man—who she only later learned “identified as female”—entered the locker room while she was getting undressed. Comedians who dare tread into trans territory are shut down. Never before have the media and pop culture dictated in such a draconian manner how each and every one of us is supposed to think about identity. Our own identity.

The list goes on. The unrest and rioting from Ferguson to Baltimore seem to be happening on cue also, with media propaganda that urges it on. There is no real debate on the merits of policies that depend on a blind faith in man-made global warming: those who disagree are labelled “deniers.”

https://thefederalist.com/2015/06/08/how-to-escape-the-age-of-mass-delusion/