White supremacists might want you dead, and despite comprising just 2% of the nation’s population, you’re the target of more than half of all religious-based hate crimes. Even so, Randi Weingarten, the boss of the country’s top teachers union, has deemed American Jews as a part of “the ownership class” and therefore not entitled to share ordinary people’s concerns.
In a baffling interview with the Jerusalem Post (yes, that’s right), the American Federation of Teachers president lambasted parents critical of the teachers unions for keeping schools closed even now, when four in five teachers, school staff, and child care workers have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose.
When asked about parents skeptical of union power, Weingarten narrowed her response to Jews who worry about their children’s lack of access to a serious in-person education.
“American Jews are now part of the ownership class,” Weingarten said. “Jews were immigrants from somewhere else. And they needed the right to have public education. And they needed power to have enough income and wealth for their families that they could put their kids through college and their kids could do better than they have done. Both economic opportunity through the labor movement and an educational opportunity through public education were key for Jews to go from the working class to the ownership class. What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it. Am I saying that everything we do is right? No. Are people in Los Angeles fearful? Yes.”
Well, that settles it then. If you’re a Jew, you once had a right to public education. But no more. Now, if you ask teachers to go back and start doing their jobs, you are oppressing them.
Far be it from me to impute anti-Semitic motives to Weingarten, who is Jewish. But is it not bizarre to see her adopt and deploy a trope that could easily come straight off the white nationalist Stormfront website? Even worse, she is doing this to defend a full year now of malingering by millions of teachers who resist returning to school, even though all the science has been telling us since last fall that it is perfectly safe to reopen.
Weingarten knows her base detests “privilege,” so she has to find some way of using this concept to demonize parents who advocate for their children’s right to an education. In the woke parlance of social justice scolds, Jews, just like Asian Americans, don’t get the same oppression points as other members of minorities. Even though Jews and Asian Americans are still victimized to this day, Weingarten has to flagellate her own people so as not to offend the proponents of “equity” whose forebears kept Jews out of elite education a century ago using similar tactics to the ones they now use to keep Asians out under the guise of affirmative action.
More crucially, Weingarten’s diatribe shows that she has no more defenses left. “Privilege” arguments are the last refuge of scoundrels. Private schools and public schools in well-governed states such as Florida have been open for months without incident. In every other Western country, school closings were considered a last resort. We know that we can reopen public schools safely, and with the majority of teachers vaccinated, younger students probably don’t even need masks anymore. Yet, while bars and nail salons and movie theaters all prepare to open at full capacity, children are still stuck getting subpar instruction on Zoom while their parents pay taxes to school districts.
The unions have no defense left for their conduct. Weingarten, forced to resort to such a disgusting explanation, must realize this by now.
