Students for Quality Education (SQE) at CSU Sacramento Lobby Lawmakers.

Despite educator opposition to AB 715 (Zbur/Addis), the California Senate and Assembly passed a bill in the middle of the night on Saturday, September 13, 2025, to establish an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to police teachers during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Of course, no one in the state Assembly or Senate said the word “genocide” out loud, nor acknowledged the extent to which AB 715–if signed by the Governor–might chill educators or drive them from the profession during a teacher shortage, screaming, “I can’t take this anymore! Free Palestine!”

During the floor votes, Democratic lawmakers cited a litany of problems with AB 715 legislation that could target teachers for encouraging classroom debate on Israel/Palestine. The threat of false charges of antisemitism comes at a fraught time when The Daily Californian reports UC Berkeley turned over the names of 160 students to the Trump administration investigating alleged antisemitic incidents.

AB 715 co-authors Assemblywoman Addis (D-Morro Bay), Assemblyman Zbur (D-Hollywood), Assemblyman Gabriel (D-Encino) and Senator Wiener (D-SF) promised under pressure from colleagues that they would work with skeptics, like Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, wife of Attorney General Rob Bonta, to “clean up” the bill after passage.

Grassroots activists with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace-Action (JVP-Peace-Action), Arab-Resource Organizing Committee (AROC), the American-Arab Anti- Discrimination Committee (ADC), Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC), and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters amplified those objections, while citing others below:

Objections to AB 715

#AB 715 disrespects Latino, Black, Indigenous and AAPI students by establishing a singular Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator in a newly formed Office of Civil Rights. The bill fails to designate a coordinator to address other forms of discrimination, instead linking to another bill (SB 48) that only “intends” at some indeterminate time–maybe never–to address other forms of discrimination, such as attacks on immigrant students whose families are being disappeared.

The authors of AB 715 reiterated four times the urgency of protecting Israeli students in CA, yet only mentioned once concerns about Black, Brown, Indigenous and AAPI students. The bill never mentions concerns over discrimination against Palestinian-American students whose families are being killed or displaced in Gaza and the West Bank during US-backed Israel ethnic cleansing. The words “Palestine” and “Palestinian” were erased from the final iteration of the bill.

#AB 715 sets up Jewish students for resentment from other students who want and deserve equal protection under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

#AB 715 adopts backdoor censorship by failing to explicitly define antisemitism, while supporting the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, a document that supports the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) conflation of constitutionally-protected criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

#AB 715 threatens to defund California public education by encouraging lawsuits from right-wing extremists who cite the bill’s language requiring all instruction be “factually accurate,” a requirement that could also result in fiction book bans.

#AB 715 requires school districts remove any book, article, film, resource material that the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator deems to be factually inaccurate. School districts that fail to take “corrective action” will be fined; their teachers threatened with dismissal.

#AB715 will siphon money from meeting urgent needs for lower class size, increased nursing staff and additional instructional resources to, instead, defend against lawsuits and implement a bureaucratic nightmare that privileges one group of students over........

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