Sephardic and Mizrahi History in Public Education: JIMENA's Advocacy Record

In 2016, California passed legislation requiring the State Board of Education to adopt an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) for high school students. When the first draft was released in August 2019, it contained antisemitic content and erased the histories of Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities of the Middle East and North Africa — the very communities Ethnic Studies claims to represent.

JIMENA organized immediately, and we never stopped. As content experts on the histories, identities, and experiences of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, we brought subject-matter authority that public education systems lacked. Over four drafts of the ESMC, we mobilized Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, co-founded coalitions of Middle Eastern minority communities, authored the lesson plan on antisemitism and Jewish Middle Eastern Americans now adopted by the California Department of Education, and secured meaningful revisions to the final curriculum.

Our approach is systemic, not local. Rather than addressing bias one classroom or district at a time, we work from the top down — shaping state and federal policy, content standards, curriculum frameworks, and the teacher training pipelines that determine what millions of students learn. When the problems we identified in the curriculum moved into teacher trainings, grant programs, and federally funded professional development, our work moved with them: responding to state antibias grant programs, contributing to the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, training public school educators across the country, and, in 2026, filing a federal complaint with The Education Policy Project regarding the University of California's California Subject Matter Project.

The timeline below documents this record — seven years of formal submissions, public testimony, coalition-building, and partnership with state and federal officials to ensure students learn accurate, complete history of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa.

Hear the Story Behind California's Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Debate

Timeline of JIMENA’s Activities

  1. August 2019

    JIMENA Sounds the Alarm on the First ESMC Draft and Unifies California's Sephardic Institutions

    JIMENA leads twelve Sephardic institutions across California in delivering formal objections to the Instructional Quality Commission (IQC) and the California Department of Education (CDE) — putting the state's entire organized Sephardic community on the record. Within weeks of the draft's release, JIMENA issues a national call to action, mobilizing Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish Americans to submit formal written feedback documenting the curriculum's antisemitic content and its erasure of Middle Eastern Jewish history.

  2. July 2020

    JIMENA Co-Founds AIMEE

    JIMENA becomes a founding member of AIMEE: Advocates for Inclusive Middle Eastern Education, a coalition of Middle Eastern minority communities demanding that the ESMC represent the region's full diversity — not a curated slice of it.

     

  3. July 2020

    JIMENA Authors the First Lesson Plan of Its Kind

    JIMENA writes and formally submits Antisemitism and Jewish Middle Eastern Americans to the CDE — original curriculum content produced by the content experts on these communities, not a request for someone else to write it.

     

  4. August 2020

    JIMENA Publishes Four Principles of Ethnic Studies and Responds to the Second Draft

    JIMENA issues a detailed public analysis of the second draft's continuing deficiencies and publishes four principles defining what a representative, equitable, bias-free Ethnic Studies curriculum requires — a framework adopted as a rallying point by communities across the state.

  5. November 2020

    JIMENA Demands Equal Treatment and Brings In Public Voices

    Through a statewide campaign, JIMENA drives public demand that the CDE adopt its four principles of ethnics studies. JIMENA formally calls on the IQC and CDE to treat Jewish Middle Eastern Americans as it treats every other Middle Eastern community — by placing the antisemitism lesson in the Asian American Studies section alongside its peers. JIMENA turns out public callers to the IQC meeting in support of including Antisemitism and Jewish Middle Eastern Americans in the ESMC.

  6. December 2020

    15,000 Californians Answer JIMENA's Final Call to Action

    JIMENA's final email campaign generates 15,000 public submissions demanding the antisemitism lesson be placed in the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies section.