JTA — It didn’t take long for the debates on a “critical race theory” bill, opened on March 7 by West Virginia lawmakers, to mention the Jews.
The House of Delegates of the state of West Virginia was thus debating a bill – similar to those considered or already adopted by a large number of American states – aimed at prohibiting, in schools, teaching likely to “ [générer] discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress because of the individual’s race, ethnic origin or biological sex”.
On this occasion, a retired public school teacher spoke out against the bill, citing a hypothetical situation where the law could turn against her.
Receive our free daily edition by email so you don’t miss any of the best news Free registration!
“What will happen if, when I am teaching the Holocaust, a parent disputes what I am teaching the children because he thinks that only 6,000 Jews were killed and not 6 million? Jenny Santilli, an adjunct professor at Fairmont State University and a retired state public school Spanish teacher, asked the House Education Committee.
“But it’s not about race,” the committee’s chairman, Republican Joe Ellington, replied in a recording of the session. “It has nothing to do with race. It’s not about race. »
Santilli then replied that “Jews are considered as such, they are classified as a race.”
“I believe you are wrong on that point,” Ellington replied.
“Well, see, here’s a perfect example that illustrates what I told you,” Santilli said, before Ellington interrupted him to continue the conversation.
Ellington’s voice was identified on the recording by West Virginia reporter Kyle Vass, who was present during the session. Ellington, who is not the author of the law, did not respond to the request for comment from the JTA.
The exchange took place in connection with the Republican-backed “Racism Act” proposal, which would prohibit teachers in the public education system from teaching that a “race, ethnic group or biological sex is inherently, morally or intellectually superior to another race, another ethnic group or another biological sex”.
The proposal also provides for the establishment of a mechanism to report and sanction teachers who make such comments.
The West Virginia bill is nearly identical in wording and scope to more than a dozen other so-called anti-‘critical race theory’ bills that have been debated and sometimes passed in different states. Americans in recent months.
Proponents of these legislations have primarily focused their attention on race and gender theory. In a speech promoting an earlier version of the bill, West Virginia state Senator Mike Azinger, a Republican who attended a rally outside the United States Capitol shortly before the insurgency violence of January 6, 2021, had declared that its main objective was to defeat “Marxism” and “communism”, which, according to him, were the true proponents of “critical theory”.
These debates also directly implicated Jews and Holocaust education. A Jewish lawmaker from Wyoming recently spoke out against a similar bill, saying he “couldn’t ‘accept’ a neutral, non-judgmental approach” to Jewish genocide, and how to teach about the Holocaust in its wake. the adoption of such legislation has also been debated in Indiana, New Hampshire and other states.
“I don’t think this particular piece of legislation has a direct impact on us as Jews (although one would assume, as I do myself, that such a piece of legislation might well have a chilling effect teaching about the Holocaust),” Rabbi Victor Urecki, one of West Virginia’s six rabbis, told JTA by email. He added that legislation like Section 498 “sadly reflects the type of policy being offered in our state. Which is not a good thing”.
Urecki, who heads the Bnai Jacob Synagogue in Charleston, had tweeted about the ongoing debate, saying the issue of Jews and race was “complicated” — and saying that precisely that complexity offered a strong argument against The law project.
“The fact that there is confusion means that we probably need to expand education, not limit it, as our West Virginia lawmakers are trying to do,” he noted in his post.
Discussions about Jews were only a small part of lawmakers’ debate on the bill, which moved forward after the Education Committee passed — almost along partisan lines — an amended version (a Republican voted “for” and the Democrats voted “against”). The House Justice Committee then amended the bill once again – to remove the provision prohibiting teachings that might cause “discomfort”, also removing the definition of “race” included in the bill.
The West Virginia Commission on Holocaust Education, first established in 1998 to promote education and awareness of the Jewish genocide in the state, has spoken out in the past on similar social media bills.
In a 2021 Facebook post referencing the story of a Texas school principal who informed his staff that their state’s new CRT law meant that they would henceforth have to teach “opposing” views on the Holocaust, the commission said, “This incident demonstrates the importance of our work and illustrates the continued need for education in our schools and community.”
The commission issued no statement on Section 498 or on Ellington’s remarks that asserted that Jews were not a race. A request for comment from the JTA to President Marc Slotnick has remained unanswered for the moment, an automatic message which has been sent to us indicating that the latter is not currently in his office.
The larger question remains whether Jews should be considered a race is an important topic, both for this legislation but also much more generally in the United States. Last month, Whoopi Goldberg sparked a fierce controversy and the host was briefly suspended from her job on ‘The View’ after she claimed on air that the Holocaust was not genocide. the race. Hitler had often written and spoken about the Jewish people as a race, and he had clearly stated that his genocide of the Jewish people was a plan for racial extermination.
–
