EXCLUSIVE: Largest teachers’ union in Washington state to sponsor anti-Israel ‘social justice’ retreat to ‘Teach Palestine’

The Annual Northwest Teaching for Social Justice Conference, scheduled to be held in late October, will feature some of the most anti-Israel voices on the West Coast for an afternoon keynote address.

The keynote will feature Jesse Hagopian, formerly of Seattle Public Schools, who is now an ethnic studies creator. His social media platforms are filled with posts demonizing the Jewish state, as well as promoting anti-American and anti-cop rhetoric.

He is joined by Samia Shoman, an anti-Israel Palestinian American educator in the San Francisco Bay Area, who is also co-coordinator of the Middle East Children’s Alliance Teach Palestine Project.

Also on the panel is Suzanna Kassouf, a teacher at Grant High School in Portland who is a Prentiss-Charney Fellow of the Zinn Education Project. She also writes for Rethinking Schools, a Marxist publication that is a subsidiary of the Zinn Education Project that is dedicated to “strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism.”

The final panelist is Alice Rothchild, a retired obstetrician-gynecologist who has a long history of demonizing the Jewish state and advocating for Palestine. She helped create a “toolkit” for “educators accused of antisemitism” and is on the steering committee for the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council, a rabid anti-Israel organization with ties to terrorist groups that have been active in campus Gaza camps, antisemitic marches and blocking freeways.

Hagopian, Shoman, and Kassouf are also co-editors of the forthcoming Rethinking Schools book Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices.

The event is sponsored by Puget Sound Rethinking Schools, Portland Area Rethinking Schools, Washington Education Association, the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark College, and Rethinking Schools magazine. The conference counts towards Oregon and Washington teachers’ continuing education requirements which are called “clock hours.”

The event is also hosted by the Seattle Education Association at Chief Sealth International High School, which gained notoriety last school year when Social Studies Chair Ian Golash, who has a criminal record, claimed that the October 7 massacre was justified and suggested there was no evidence that Hamas raped and beheaded innocent victims. He also has a history of antisemitic behavior and even displayed images of terrorists in his classroom. Golash also failed a student on a quiz for saying men can't get pregnant.

Some of the other workshops and panels that will be offered include: Fighting for Trans Lives in Our Schools, Incorporating K-12 Literature about Palestine, Preparing for False Allegations of Anti-Semitism, Teaching Indigenous Enslavement and Decolonizing, How Schools Teach Contempt for Fat People and What We Can Do About It, Young Learners Critically Analyzing Capitalism, and Teaching Climate Change.

Previous conferences have featured presentations on abolishing the police, “Revolutionary Public Education at the Crossroads of Race, Class, & COVID,” and “Why Social Justice Educators Need to Be Union Organizers.” Even before the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, the conference has taught anti-Israel rhetoric as part of its DEI curriculum.

Washington public schools have seen tens of thousands of students leave the system since the pandemic and the biggest district in the state, Seattle Public School, is currently considering closing 17-21 schools because of declining enrollment and massive budget problems.