![Some see the slogan "From the River to the Sea" as a call for the destruction of Israel. While others see it is as a call for equal rights for Palestinians and Jews.[1]- Wikipedia](https://isranet.org/storage/s-2024-08-18T105748.028.png "Some see the slogan \"From the River to the Sea\" as a call for the destruction of Israel. While others see it is as a call for equal rights for Palestinians and Jews.[1]- Wikipedia")
Emily Wilder
Jewish Currents, July 2, 2025
“Shema’s materials often caution against using certain language to describe Israel’s actions, including “genocide” and “settler colonialism,” because of how such terms might land for Jews.”
In September 2024, Nass Taskin, a Jewish special education teacher at Northampton High School in western Massachusetts, attended an antisemitism training for school district staff. The training—organized in response to parent complaints about various post-October 7th incidents they believed to be antisemitic, including a student-organized walkout for Gaza—was provided by Project Shema, a relatively new educational nonprofit that boasts having run hundreds of workshops on antisemitism for companies, schools, and Jewish communities since its launch in 2020.
The training covered a variety of examples of antisemitic tropes and anti-Jewish violence in history. However, according to video footage provided by Taskin to Jewish Currents, the facilitator also emphasized the connection between Jews and Zionism and advised that many criticisms of the latter are harmful to Jews. Though she opened the training with a disclaimer that the “suffering and pain” of Palestinians “absolutely matter,” the workshop’s focus would be helping the audience “understand our [Jewish] community and where we come from,” she said. She told attendees that because the “vast majority” of Jews have “a relationship with Israel,” statements such as “Zionists are racists,” “Israelis are Nazis,” or “Israel intentionally kills Palestinian children” exclude Jews from “good society,” with the result “that Jews are feeling that we are alone in the world—that we don’t have a place.”
During the Q&A, Taskin voiced his objections to these statements to the facilitator, April Powers, Project Shema’s vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). In an exchange caught on video, Taskin said he felt “deeply uncomfortable” to hear the position that Zionism is racism—a position that for him was “rooted [in] compassion, respect, and rage at genocide and apartheid”—be reduced to “doing antisemitism.”
Powers responded, “Within the Jewish community, we have a variety of voices, and it’s important to listen to those voices.” But she maintained he was in the minority as a Jewish anti-Zionist and that his argument that “Zionism is racism” was still “an antisemitic trope.” Taskin was left with the feeling, he recently told Jewish Currents, that the Project Shema training was “just blatant propaganda dressed up in this woke, DEI veneer.” (Powers did not respond to a request for comment on the exchange.) … [To read the full article, click here]