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. April 2026

    JIMENA and the Education Policy Project File a Federal Complaint Against the California Subject Matter Project

     

    JIMENA and EPP formally petition the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor to investigate the University of California's CSMP — a program spanning roughly 90 regional sites, 40,000 trained teachers, 1,000 districts, and nearly 6 million students, funded by over $135 million in federal ESEA Title II grants since 2019 — documenting that its instructional materials present contested political claims as fact and erase core aspects of Jewish history, identity, and indigeneity. The complaint calls for suspension of federal funding until violations are corrected.

  2. April 2026

    JIMENA Launches Holocaust Trainings Across California

    JIMENA conducts trainings throughout California for museum staff, public school administrators, and teachers on the often-overlooked experiences of Jews during the Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa — connecting this history to contemporary antisemitism and antizionism.

     

  3. April 2026

    JIMENA Becomes a Vetted Partner of State and District Education Systems

    JIMENA and AIMEE are recognized as vetted partners of the California Department of Education, Los Angeles Unified School District, the National Education Association, the New York State Center for Educational Civil Discourse, San Diego County Office of Education, California Educators Together, with active partnerships and curriculum review processes advancing in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, Iowa, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and additional states. This is an addition to our active partnerships with a multitude of Jewish organizations including AJC, ADL, Jewish Child and Family Services Holocaust Center, and many others. 

  4. March 2026

    JIMENA and AIMEE Reach All 50 States and Thousands of Educators Nationwide

    JIMENA and AIMEE materials are distributed to every state department of education in the nation and directly to teachers nationwide. JIMENA and AIMEE present at the country's leading mainstream education conferences — the California Council for the Social Studies, the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention, the National Council for the Social Studies Annual Conference, and the National Association for Multicultural Education Conference.

  5. January 2026

    AIMEE Launches a Digital Platform for K–12 Educators Nationwide

    JIMENA relaunches AIMEE: Advocates for Inclusive Middle Eastern Education as a national grassroots coalition dedicated to accurate representation of indigenous and minority Middle Eastern and North African histories in K–12 education. AIMEE grows to 37 partner organizations and community leaders representing Amazigh, Assyrian, Coptic, Druze, Jewish, Kurdish, Yazidi, and Zoroastrian communities — the region's indigenous peoples speaking for themselves.

    AIMEE's new platform debuts with 140 classroom-ready resources — lesson plans, curricula, videos, worksheets, bibliographies, and community profiles — giving public school educators across the country free access to accurate, inclusive content on Middle Eastern and North African communities.

     

  6. July 2025

    Distinctions Journal Dedicates an Issue to Education

    JIMENA's journal of Sephardic and Mizrahi thought publishes a full issue on education, bringing scholarly and communal voices to bear on how the histories of Middle Eastern and North African Jews are taught in American schools