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For 26 years, Karen Feldman taught history in New York public schools. His specialty: Holocaust education, a difficult subject, but one Feldman taught thoroughly.
“I’ve always prided myself on bringing truth and common sense and a nurturing environment that will spark conversations that will make students really learn from each other,” said Feldman. “I never bring my political beliefs to the classroom. A teacher should be politically neutral. And I always try to present the facts.”
But around 2015, he said he began to see ideological changes in the K-12 education system, more use of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). He saw these as great ideals of the good, but based on the foundation of seeing the world through the narrative of the oppressed and the oppressors.
He said that this trend continues to grow and that in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, the floodgates opened and this history of the “oppressor” and the “oppressed” entered the entire New York City Public School system.
FIRST ON FOX: NEW STUDY SHOWS ‘PRO-PALESTINIAN’ GROUPS PROMOTING VIOLENCE AND AMERICANISM
Anti-Israel students sit on the center lawn at Columbia University in New York City on April 21, 2024, as part of a campus protest. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
“I started to see these horrible and dangerous situations happening. The lack of critical thinking, not only within the student body, but even and especially with the new teachers coming into the program, that affected our professional work environment, our discussions, curriculum design, and more.” Feldman recounts.
Then one day in the school grounds, he was surrounded by 10 angry students who pushed him and threw things at him. Their beef? He was a supporter of Trump and Israel. “It was a very scary and critical moment for me, because I understood that this was thinking about people’s opinions and the crowds that were happening,”
“They knew I was Jewish,” Feldman said. “They knew my children, my husband’s Israel. We go to Israel in the summer. I am a proud Jew and a supporter of Israel. And it was brave. And it had this political connection from the Trump administration to the Israeli government, to all people who are Israeli Jews or proud, they must be racist.”
Soon after, Feldman stopped teaching. He later founded the New York City Public School Alliance, which fought anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism and erasure of Jews in New York’s public schools.
He is currently involved in a group of activist teachers known as NYC Educators for Palestine. “It’s a Palestinian perspective, but I don’t think it’s the only one,” he said. “It’s anti-American ideology. We know it insults Israel. Anything that starts with the Jews doesn’t end with the Jews. Right?”
Feldman is not alone in these allegations.
The federal government has launched a civil rights investigation into the New York Department of Education, the largest school district in the country, specifically targeting NYC’s Palestinian teachers, alleging that classroom members push anti-Israel, pro-Palestine doctrine to six-year-olds, while sowing “hostility and hatred toward Jewish students.”
Anti-Israel students demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York on Feb. 27, 2025, following the expulsion of two students who disrupted a university class in Israel. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP)
“No child should be taught by their teachers to hate their peers,” said Kimberly Richey, the Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Human Rights. “Nor should Jewish children be taught that being Jewish somehow makes them inherently guilty or supporters of hatred and violence.”
An Instagram page attributed to NYC Educators for Palestine shows members holding a banner displaying the group’s name, but the members’ faces are covered in emojis, hiding their identity.
Fox News reached out to the group, but so far no one has responded. The Instagram page says “NYC Educators for Palestine is a group of public school teachers committed to fighting for Palestinian freedom in our school system, and the community at large, by organizing and mobilizing teachers, developing curriculum, divesting our pension funds from Israeli securities, and working with community, family and student organizations.”
FOLLOWS AN OPEN SURVEY OF NEW YORK CITY TEACHERS WHO OPPOSE ISRAEL
Carin Bail, who is Jewish, is concerned about her two children who are enrolled in New York public schools in Queens.
FILE — Students, teachers and anti-Israel activists march in Midtown Manhattan during a student walkout protest Nov. 9, 2023, New York City. (Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket)
“It worries me that there are teachers who, you know, are more focused and focused on sending messages like this than focusing on more important skills like reading and writing and critical thinking. And they’re influencing young people’s minds,” Bail said. “I just want to make sure that…all the ideas are presented to the kids, because they can make up their own mind.”
The groups say they have received numerous complaints that the group trains teachers to bash Zionism and Israel while promoting resistance to Palestinians – even calling Zionists “white genocidals,” and Hamas terrorists “martyrs.”
On the day human rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was honored, NYC Educators of Palestine and the “Teaching While Muslim” organization organized a pro-Palestinian education with resources and proposed K-12 curriculum.
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The investigation comes at a time when antisemitism continues to rise. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in New York schools tripled from 2022 to 2023, from 52 in 2022 to 173 in 2023.
The New York Department of Education would not comment on the investigation, saying only that the group NYC Educators for Palestine is not affiliated with the public school system.
