ADL’s August 2026 report on higher education faculty who encourage campus antisemitism deserves credit for documenting syllabi, BDS resolutions, and extra credit for protest attendance in granular detail.[i] But the professors ADL describes were not recently radicalized: they were trained, credentialed, and hired using a curriculum that changed half a century ago, in the 1970s.
“Father of the New Left” and Frankfurt School professor Herbert Marcuse supplied the theory. In his neo-Marxist adjustment, he asserted that since the Western working class had been pacified by consumer comfort, the revolutionary vanguard could no longer be the proletariat. The proletariat would be replaced by an alliance of “outcasts and outsiders” led by an academically trained elite.[ii] The results of his strategy for capturing universities instead of factories are evident today in the overeducated ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America. Marcuse urged followers toward a “long march through the institutions” – Rudi Dutschke’s 1967 phrase, adapted from Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, which ran parallel to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China.[iii]
Marcuse also promoted the idea of the scholar as activist. Political scientists Bradley Macdonald and Katherine Young describe Marcuse’s core claim: Marcus believed that theory which does not continuously engage activist movements retreats into irrelevance.[iv] Marcuse’s most influential student, Angela Davis, said he taught her that being a scholar and being a revolutionary were the same role — and she practiced what he preached.[v] Davis was a member of the Communist Party USA, for which UC’s Board of Regents fired her from UCLA in 1969; she was closely allied with the Black Panther Party; she led the Soledad Brothers defense campaign; she co-founded Critical Resistance in 1997, the organization that built the modern prison-abolition movement; and she has been a leading BDS advocate since a 2011 delegation to the West Bank, helping seed the Black-Palestinian solidarity current that fed directly into Black Lives Matter’s founding framework after 2014.[vi] Davis’s prototype scholar-activist model is precisely what the ADL’s report proves. By the mid-1960s, activists such as Students for a Democratic Society were demanding curriculum change on campus through mass protest.[vii] By 1971, Black Panther co-founder and radical Huey Newton was co-teaching a course at Yale. A movement leader, credentialed by activism rather than scholarship, was given a faculty appointment to train students directly.
This self-perpetuating loop, in which activist academics produce theory, indoctrinate students, and cultivate a new generation of academic activists, brought the postcolonial ideas of intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and later Edward Said into both public discourse and university curricula. Colonialism, settler-colonialism, and Third World liberation became the lens with which to read all political conflict, including Israel’s founding. Columbia literature professor Palestinian-American Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) went from argument to unquestioned axiom within two decades; he was elected president of the Modern Language Association in 1998.[viii]
That postcolonial and Critical Theory vocabulary migrated into other disciplines: comparative literature, sociology, anthropology, and even law,[ix] each field indicting the West’s epistemology, its legal order, and its market economy. In many of these fields, Israel has become the framework’s most convenient teaching example. By 2024, as the ADL reports, a UC Berkeley freshman writing course carried a description praising Hamas’s “revolutionary resistance” against settler-colonialism.[x] Berkeley withdrew it after public attention.
The same radical framework now infects elementary and secondary schools. The complaints center on the same core claims found in the university syllabi: whites and Israel as inherent colonizers, Jews as “white-adjacent” oppressors, and one-sided material omitting Jewish history. California’s ethnic studies mandate has produced a string of legal fights centered on the state, especially the Bay Area. In Santa Ana, a 2023 lawsuit brought by the Brandeis Center, ADL, and the American Jewish Committee alleged the district’s ethnic studies curriculum was antisemitic; the February 2025 settlement halted three courses and stripped a glossary supplied by the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Coalition.[xi] California’s own Department of Education found that ethnic studies teachers at Branham High School in San Jose and in Santa Clara Unified discriminated against Jewish students by teaching Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and its war against Hamas as “genocide” without presenting opposing views.[xii] Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont Unified are separately under civil-rights investigation, and a Los Angeles lawsuit targets the same Liberated Curriculum materials used in Santa Ana.[xiii]
Yet, the state legislature has not appropriated money to enforce against anti-Jewish discrimination, which has left implementation to individual districts and outside consultants tied to the same ideological networks, including groups aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America. Qatar Foundation International, separately, has put tens of millions of dollars into K-12 programs since 2009, including Brown University’s Choices Program used in more than 8,000 American schools, shaping Middle East content without disclosure — a real vector into K-12 curricula, though not the primary driver of the ethnic studies fights, which are homegrown.[xiv]
The Israel-specific consequence is direct and measurable. A 2024–2025 study in American Psychologist, led by Rutgers researchers, found that antisemitism predicts anti-Israel attitudes over time, with anti-Zionist conspiracy theories functioning as the bridge between the two.[xv] Anti-Zionism is not a firewall against antisemitism; it correlates with it, from the graduate seminar down to the ninth-grade classroom. Faculty conduct codes or district apologies correct none of this, because both discipline individuals while the pipeline that trains their replacements, and writes the curricula, stays intact.
The primary lever against this phenomenon is funding. At private colleges, donors are not obligated to keep funding departments whose curriculum they reject. Alumni giving, endowed chairs, and named centers can be conditioned on demonstrated viewpoint balance — reading lists that present classical liberal, market, and constitutionalist frameworks alongside critical theory and Marxism, not as afterthoughts. Donors who do not audit funding from a gift are subsidizing a specific ideological outcome by default.
At public institutions and school districts, the lever is political. State legislatures appropriate the budgets; state boards of education approve curricula; state and federal lawmakers set accreditation and disclosure standards. Jewish communities and their allies need to lobby state governments the way other interest groups already do: for curriculum transparency and foreign-funding disclosure at every level from kindergarten through graduate school, for social science and ethnic studies standards that mandate balance rather than critical theory’s near-monopoly, and for hiring practices that do not systematically exclude non-Marxist frameworks from social science faculties.
The curriculum did not become political recently. It became political in the 1970s, and the people writing it have been reproducing themselves in classrooms from graduate seminars to ninth grade ever since. Reversing that requires acting directly on the curriculum and the pipeline, rather than waiting for the next incident report.
Notes
[i] Anti-Defamation League, “Antisemitism Among College Faculty and in Classrooms,” Center to Combat Antisemitism in Education, published August 11, 2026, https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitism-among-college-faculty-and-classrooms.
[ii] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1965).
[iii] Douglas Kellner, introduction to Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 3 (London: Routledge, 2005), noting Marcuse’s 1970s calls for “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase originated by Rudi Dutschke in 1967.
[iv] Bradley J. Macdonald and Katherine E. Young, “Adorno and Marcuse at the Barricades? Critical Theory, Scholar-Activism, and the Neoliberal University,” New Political Science 40, no. 3 (2018): 528–541.
[v] “The Man Who Made Cultural Marxism,” Chronicles, May 1, 2024, https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/sins-of-omission/the-man-who-made-cultural-marxism/ .
[vi] National Archives, “Angela Davis,” biographical note, on her Communist Party USA membership and 1969 dismissal from UCLA by the UC Board of Regents; on Critical Resistance, co-founded 1997–98, see Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003); on her BDS advocacy and the 2011 West Bank delegation, see “Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the Future of Radicalism,” Literary Hub, 2025; on the Black-Palestinian solidarity current following the 2014 Ferguson protests, see Democracy Now! “Angela Davis Speaks Out on Palestine, BDS & More,” January 11, 2019.
[vii] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/22/specials/erikson-common.html
[viii] Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (University of Washington Press, 2011), pp. 3–9.
[ix] Tirza Shorr, “The Impact of Radical Legal Ideology: From the Classroom to the International Forum,” Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, September 4, 2025, https://jcfa.org/the-impact-of-radical-legal-ideology-from-the-classroom-to-the-international-forum/, on TWAIL’s founding at Harvard Law School.
[x] Anti-Defamation League, “Antisemitism Among College Faculty and in Classrooms,” section “One-Sided Framing and the Blurring of Education with Advocacy”; “UC Berkeley Pulls Lit Course Description Calling Hamas ‘Revolutionary Resistance’ Force,” J. The Jewish News of Northern California, November 18, 2024.
[xi] “California School District Halts Ethnic Studies Courses Following Lawsuit Over Alleged Antisemitism,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, February 21, 2025; “California Public School District Settles Lawsuit, Agrees to Retool Antisemitic Ethnic-Studies Courses,” JNS, February 21, 2025; “Santa Ana to Drop Contested Ethnic Studies Courses to Settle Closely Watched Lawsuit,” EdSource, February 2025.
[xii] “California Department of Education Finds Antisemitic Bias in Lessons on Gaza Conflict,” Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, June 2, 2025; “California DOE Finds School’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum Discriminated Against Jewish Students,” Forward, April 10, 2025.
[xiii] “Can Ethnic Studies Survive in California Schools?” Westside Observer; “Frustrated Families Sue the State to Stop Antisemitism in California Schools,” EdSource, 2026; “Jewish Advocacy Groups Sue California Over K-12 Antisemitism,” J. The Jewish News of Northern California, February 26, 2026.
[xiv] “Qatar, Already the Largest Foreign Financier of US Universities, Tripled Its Funding in 2025,” Washington Free Beacon, February 20, 2026; “ISGAP Calls for Federal Investigation of Qatar Foundation International Following Report on Its Vast Influence Network Penetrating U.S. K-12 and Higher Education,” ISGAP, May 27, 2026, on Qatar Foundation International’s funding of Brown University’s Choices Program.
[xv] Kent Harber et al., study on the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, American Psychologist, 2025, as reported in “Relationship Between Antisemitism and Hostility to Israel ‘Substantial,’ New Study Finds,” The Jewish Chronicle, 2026.
