As Democrats Grapple With The Role of Israel’s Genocide in Election Losses, Campaign Finance Disclosures Show Links Between Marin County Office of Education and pro-Israel JFCS
Indigenous group affiliated with JFCS education program exits; another group had no idea they were listed in JFCS report. And: To heroically desegregate a school district you must first segregate it.
Sometime before 1968, a young Joan Didion trudged through a blizzard that had shut down New York City to interview a Greek shipping heiress. Once Didion finally arrived (she didn’t identify the neighborhood but it was possibly Onassis’ four-story brownstone at Sutton Place), she was ushered into “a sitting room filled with orchids” only to be asked by her oblivious subject, “Is it snowing outside?”
I thought of Didion’s anecdote about the protective, if clueless, sphere that money affords last Tuesday when, in pale imitation of “Saint Didion”, I pedaled 20 miles through the February winds on a second-hand bike (don’t laugh, it’s paid for) to ask questions at the in-person-only Board meeting of the Marin County Office of Education.
My questions were in regard to $8.5 million in state grants the MCOE is tasked with funneling into an exceedingly wealthy, private, religiously-based “nonprofit” organization — the Bay Area’s opaque, 174-year-old “Jewish Family and Children’s Services” — for an “educational program” that reads more like pro-US/Israel propaganda than actual curriculum.
At the end of the meeting, three Board members sweetly inquired as to whether I was going to be able to ride back home safely in the dark. I was stunned. Were they unaware that it had been their decision to ignore repeated pleas from the public to open the meetings to remote participation?
One Board member, a former President of the Board, wasn’t fully reassured when I said I would be fine riding back in the dark.
“Do you have the…” she said, motioning to the back of her head as if she were wearing a bike helmet instead of a mane of perfectly coiffed silver hair, “the light that blinks in the back?”
“Yes,” I assured her, tiredly. “I have the light. That blinks in the back.”
But there is at least some progress toward transparency. Last summer, when I first began asking questions about the monies transferred to JFCS, I repeatedly asked the Board why their meetings were neither recorded nor open to remote participation or even viewing. And I kept asking.
In January, the Board made the meeting viewable on zoom but without remote participation or recording, and the February meeting was upgraded to zoom with an actual recording. Deputy Superintendent Jon Lenz even uploaded it to YouTube. As for zoom participation, I was assured on Tuesday by two different Board members, “it is coming.”
“When is it coming?” I asked.
“We’re working on it,” they told me.
I. Does The NDA Specify “Burn After Reading”?
Two weeks ago, I received a five-paragraph email from a lead within the well-regarded Redbud Resource Group in response to my queries about RRG’s involvement in the Jewish Family and Children’s Services’ underreported $8.5 million state grant for “Holocaust and Genocide education.” My questions concern the ethics of any educational group partnering with the $147-million JFCS to write curriculum that excludes any mention of Palestinians, and which whitewashes US complicity in the Holocaust, as well as US and Israeli complicity in genocides from Asia to Latin America.
The second sentence in Redbud’s email reply stated that the group wished not to be quoted. Redbud notably did not ask for the reply to be off-the-record, nor did they respond to a follow-up email.
The unusual but specific phrasing of the request raised the question of whether the JFCS had required some sort of non-disclosure agreement for its smattering of partnered educational groups, all of whom had dramatically less revenue and assets (and thus less power) than the JFCS.
Without quoting Redbud, I can safely convey three very general points which I confirmed through additional sources.
A. Redbud Resource Group is no longer working with the JFCS/California Teacher Collaborative’s “Holocaust and Genocide” education program. This had been rumored as early as last summer, but it is information that the JFCS declined to provide in its recent report to the California State budget office.
To be fair to the JFCS, which has serially declined to respond to questions about the program, JFCS may not have known at the time they submitted the report that Redbud was considering an exit. And it’s understandable that a group such as Redbud that was involved in helping JFCS develop curriculum might have waited, or been asked to wait, until the report had been submitted to the State Budget Office before separating from JFCS.
But last month I was informed that at least one of the “LEAs (local educational agencies) and schools” that the JFCS report claimed it had reached through its “California Teachers’ Collaborative” had merely received a visit from someone tangentially related to the JFCS. The individual visitor had no stated connection to JFCS’s CTC or the partnered curriculum groups, but is a lobbyist within a separate group that is affiliated with the JFCS. And during that visit there had been no mention of the JFCS/CTC educational program. This unfortunately suggests the possibility that the JFCS is overstating how many groups it “reached”; it seems clear an audit or at least investigation by the State Budget Office of the JFCS program would be advised.)
B. Concurrent with but not necessarily due to the departure of Redbud, there is an internal effort to broaden the scope of genocide expertise within the JFCS-partnered groups. But what if any relationship is there between Redbud’s departure and an effort to expand the scope? If there was a meaningful internal effort to broaden the scope, why would Redbud have chosen to exit the partnership?
And why had the Governor essentially compelled Redbud to work with a partisan group such as JFCS merely to get the California Native American educational component into the curriculum?
Why couldn’t Redbud have been given the grant to disperse to other groups, rather than have to be supplicant to the opaque JFCS?
Seeking answers but getting no response from JFCS despite multiple queries (JFCS recently barred me from even viewing one of their recent teacher trainings), I showed the JFCS budget that outlines the spending of the first $1.9 million in state grants to a longtime Bay Area educator, who asked to remain anonymous.
This teacher, whom I will call Teacher 1, immediately noted that over half a million is “for JFCS administrative staff who are not doing curriculum work or conference management work (since those things are elsewhere in the budget).”
To Teacher 1, this made the state grant to the JFCS look more like a payout to a de facto lobbyist as opposed to serious investment in writing curriculum.
Teacher 1 referenced the cost of an actual educator who, with benefits and taxes, might cost $150,000 a year, and questioned why JFCS was doing so little curriculum development for over three times that amount.
Teacher 1 further asked, “Is the statewide administrative function and website really a tool for reaching more people – or a funnel for limiting what people see?”
(Teacher 1 had many more insights into the program, and I will be including these in upcoming articles as I continue to parse both campaign contributions and the hundreds of MCOE documents retrieved through recent CPRA requests.)
C. Governor Newsom commissioned a recent report issued by West Ed on the status of Holocaust and Genocide Education, which I had already obtained and which is available here.
II. What Is “Joint Powers Authority” West Ed? And Who Might Be Its Most Influential West Coast Board Member?
San Francisco-based West Ed is, like JFCS, yet another nonprofit, with hundreds of millions in revenues. But unlike the JFCS, it is also a “joint powers authority”, and is involved in research, development and services in the educational field. This includes a $10 million project to introduce Gen AI into classrooms; separate projects involving charter schools; and a whole department “researching” school policing.
Police in schools, you may recall, were consistently favored by outgoing Marin County Superintendent Mary Jane Burke, who served seven full terms as Superintendent, from 1995 through 2022. Part of Burke’s passion for “school resource officers” may be linked to generous campaign contributions she received from law enforcement machers, including but not limited to notorious former longtime Sheriff-Coroner Bob Doyle and the currently embattled Marin County District Attorney Lori Frugoli.
(For those unfamiliar: Sheriff Doyle had overseen a large part of a 32-year data record of County arrests disparities so extreme that Black people in Marin had been arrested at over eight times their demographic presence in the County on average from 1989-2020. He is the same Sheriff whose deputies engaged in pointless and unnecessary SWAT raids in Marin City, raids which traumatized the very children whose well-being and intellectual development MJ Burke was elected to serve.)
So perhaps it is no surprise that Mary Jane Burke was, upon the end of her final term as MCOE Superintendent, immediately appointed to the Board of West Ed, which has long had an interest in studying, researching and “producing” reports about policing in schools.
Given Burke’s past history as an enthusiastic backer of law enforcement (and the pro-Israel JFCS, from which she also accepted contribution for at least one favored MCOE project), it may also be no surprise that West Ed’s most recent report, the 207-page “Holocaust and Genocide Education in California: A Study of Statewide Context and Local Implementation” makes no mention of any embattled Palestinians. This despite the report being issued last December during the fourteenth month of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The West Ed report refers only four times to “Gaza” and, as one educator pointed out to me, it does so only glancingly, to claim that teachers needed “guidance” or that the topic was “controversial.”
Notably: there is no mention in the West Ed report of any of the teachers in both public and private schools in California who have been harassed, fired, put on suspension, or are still under investigation merely for using approved lesson plans about Palestinians or Palestine.
The West Ed report was commissioned by Governor Newsom who is, ironically, the son of Judge William Newsom, who once had the odious responsibility of shepherding Otto Von Bolschwing during most of 1969 and 1970 under the CIA’s Operation Paperclip.
The quote in the San Jose Mercury when Bollschwing’s identity was finally revealed is difficult to take at face value:
“I’m nonplussed,” Justice Newsom said. “I thought, if anything, Otto had been pro-American during the war.”
III. How Mary Jane Burke Became A Heralded Desegregationist (By First Letting A Marin County School District Segregate Under Decades of Her Leadership)
Mary Jane Burke remains much lauded for advancing, in her final years as Superintendent, a complaint against the Sausalito Marin City School District that resulted in a historic desegregation order by then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra.
But the county’s narrative that Burke was a champion of desegregation demands that we ignore that “MJ”, as she is affectionately known in Marin County, had been the elected Superintendent of Schools who blithely oversaw 23 years of that racial segregation before the desegregation order was issued.
What was Burke doing with regard to the Sausalito Marin City School District for 23 years prior to the order? Probably nothing the County didn’t want her to do, especially in the last decade of her role as Superintendent. That was when the charter school in the district, Willow Creek, began to pull vast sums of money out of that district’s nearly all-Black public school.
Burke, after all, ran unopposed in six of her elections to Superintendent, despite the challenges faced by Black and Latino students in the district’s poorer schools. Burke was challenged only in her final race by a younger rival, a much-loved school principal from West Marin, Matt Nagle, who repeatedly raised concerns about the County’s lack of resources for the County’s working-class Latino students. The rebuke of Nagle merely for challenging Burke was swift and severe: After losing to Burke by a wide margin, Nagle was demoted from his position. Nagle subsequently sued the school district, claiming the demotion was in retaliation for challenging Burke, and won a hefty settlement.
IV. JFCS-linked Donations To MJ Burke’s Campaigns Pre-Date the $8.5 Million in CDE Grants Moved To JFCS
$3,500 is one of the larger (if not the largest) donations to former MCOE Superintendent Mary Jane Burke’s re-election campaign in 2018, before the first $2 million in grants were awarded to JFCS. That hefty donation came from the late Phyllis Friedman, resident of Hillsborough who established the Phyllis Friedman Endowment Fund for Children and Families at JFCS. Friedman is the daughter of the first woman President of the Jewish Family Service Agency, which later became the Bay Area’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services, or JFCS. Friedman’s father was a Koshland, a venerable name in San Francisco dating back to the 19th century. Their family patriarch is Simon Koshland, who childrens’ marriages established the powerful Koshland Haas family of San Francisco.
Friedman’s campaign contributions to MJ Burke date back to at least 2013; records for earlier campaigns are not available through the County’s election portal.
In 2022, there was also a $2,500 donation from the JFCS on MJ Burke’s “behalf” to “Dedication to Special Education”, a nonprofit under the fiscal and legal sponsorship of the MCOE. It is signed by Morgan Blum Schneider, Director of the JFCS Holocaust Center.
But would an elected official necessarily be influenced by such donations?
Would they necessarily not be? Consider this:
One of the stranger documents retrieved via CPRA from MCOE is a 2022 presentation apparently given by then-Superintendent Burke and JFCS Executive Director Anita Friedman about “hate and anti-semitism”.
As several Black and Latino Marinites pointed out to me, the presentation slides make no mention that antisemitic incidents in the district were minimal compared to more overt acts of anti-Black and anti-Latino discrimination within Marin County schools. The issue of anti-Black, anti-Latino, and anti-Asian incidents is a problem that has been ongoing for decades in Marin, which was ranked the most racially segregated county in California in 2017. Nor is there any reference in the presentation slides to any of the Islamophobic incidents in Marin.
That matters because MCOE has largely turned a blind eye to hate incidents against Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and Muslim students in the County.
The presentation lists nine incidents, many of which do not appear to have occurred in Marin County. Seven of the nine listed incidents concern antisemitism. The slide includes only one citation of discrimination against Native Americans, and one incident of assault against an Asian driver. There is zero reference in the slide to a single anti-Black or anti-Latino incident, even though these incidents were unfortunately regular occurrences in schools overseen by the MCOE.
In the slide above, the list of incidents is preceded by 13 partnered groups. That grouping excludes any Black, Latino, Asian, Muslim or Indigenous groups from Marin County.
Who is on the partnered list? The infamous Anti-Defamation League and three other pro-Israel groups including the “Institute for Curriculum Studies”; Marin County billionaire Tom Steyer’s older brother’s controversial “Common Sense Media” group; two East Bay DEI consultants who likely got a check before being shown the door before they got the nerve to ask any relevant questions; the dysfunctional Marin County District Attorney Office; the “Northern California Computer Crimes Task Force” which for some reason is under the fiduciary agency of the Marin DA; and so on.
Current Marin County School Superintendent’s Largest(?) Campaign Donor:
In addition to the campaign donations received by Mary Jane Burke, John Carroll’s largest campaign donor for the 2022 Superintendent race appears to be a couple in Nicasio, who each donated $4,900 each, or a total of $9,800.
The same Nicasio couple has also donated thousands of dollars to the pro-Israel Osher Marin JCC through their Endurance Fund. Osher Marin JCC is where, with the assistance of Bruce Raful, Carroll had been scheduled to discuss his 2023 trip to Israel funded by the JCRC Bay Area. Raful, who improperly asked for John Carroll for a commission of the MCOE funds, is now appointed by the State Legislature to the California Accountancy Board,
(I wrote about Raful’s email asking Carroll for a cut of the the state grant to MCOE in this February 2025 article.)
The couple who donated that much money to John Carroll’s campaign also give generously to a range of different nonprofits beyond the Osher Marin JCC. It does not mean there is a quid pro quo, but it is worth asking how difficult it may be — when people with particular views give you so much money — not to be unconsciously guided by their wishes.
The JFCS Origins As The Eureka Benevolent Society
Today's JFCS got its start in the fall of 1850 as the Eureka Benevolent Society. Historian Fred Rosenbaum has described EBS as San Francisco’s largest Jewish organization during the second half of the nineteenth century, with more than 500 members in the late 1870s. But, per Rosenbaum, even as early as the end of the 1850s, it was already the largest Jewish organization in the West, with 300 members — in a city where power was split between a new aristocracy of Jewish, WASP (and not a few Northern Italian) power brokers.
Like the Italians immigrants who arrived in San Francisco without ever touching Ellis Island, Jewish San Franciscans historically occupied a separate class from New York, they were wealthier and more assimilated into political power.
Meanwhile, during more than the first half of California’s history as a state, Indigenous, Asian, Black, and Mexican San Franciscans, who had provided critical labor for everything from ship crews to mining and railroad construction, labor that built the wealth of the state’s first oligarchs, were almost entirely excluded from participation in government. Besides being restricted from voting, Black, Chinese, and Native American people were barred even from testifying against white defendants under any circumstances from 1850-1863.
Even in “liberal”California, Chinese Americans, who had provided so much critical labor in early California, only began to secure the right to vote in 1943. That delay was due to the Chinese Exclusion Act and its extensions, which Jewish San Francisco leaders, against the wiser and kinder advice of Jewish leaders in the rest of the US, had been principal in promoting.
But the Chinese Exclusion Act didn't affect only Chinese Americans. It had dire consequences for many other nonwhite groups — and fatal consequences for countless Jewish refugees in the Immigration Act of 1924, which used the Chinese Exclusion Act as its rationale.
That is a history that the JFCS does not include in its curriculum because it violates the central premise of the Israel lobby’s core belief: that Jewish suffering exists outside of the possibility Jewish leaders ever being the cause of suffering of others. It is a premise that denies both human nature and history, and insists that Jewish people are somehow different or exceptional when in reality, they are like any other group, deserving of the same rights and obliged to grant those rights to others when they hold power.
And any lessons the State of California approves regarding “Holocaust and genocide” cannot be issued from within an institution that is actively in denial of Israel’s current genocide: On Sunday, Reuters reported that the US had resumed shipment of thousands of MK-84 bombs to Israel. Two-thousand-pound unguided missiles that tear through buildings and vaporize civilians.
If nothing else, even those Americans who claim not to care about Palestinian lives should realize that rival nations have gained more trust specifically because the US has been so flagrant in its support for Israel’s genocide. The consequences to the US for continuing to fund and arm Israel’s slaughter will be severe. We must change this dynamic.
One last update: Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Seth Morrison, who so capably helped organize schoolteachers and activists to support ethnic studies in sweltering Sacramento last August, is running to be a Democratic delegate in AD-14 on the Progressive-Labor slate, and there is still time to vote.
And there is much more to report from the last two weeks in Marin, I hope to have another article later this week. Thanks as always to readers for their patience.
©️2025 Eva Chrysanthe