New Documents Reveal SF JCRC “Study Trips” to Israel for Marin County’s Elected Representatives With Little To No Disclosure
My Meeting With Marin County Office of Education Superintendent John Carroll
Editor’s Note: In early 2024, I submitted a series of CPRA requests to the County of Marin and the City of San Rafael for correspondence from elected officials regarding Israel/Palestine. I have now received thousands of pages of documents, most of which I have managed to read and review, with generous insight from Bay Area reporters and attorneys. (Additional documents are still being processed for release.) The sheer volume of documents has been one thing; quite another is the shock of reading them and learning just how much political pressure has been applied to elected officials in Marin County by the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (SF JCRC).
My intent in making the requests was always to report the matter to the public in a timely fashion. Unfortunately, there is no way to condense the entirety of the released documents into one article. Many of the more revealing documents deserve their own articles. One example is an October 19, 2023 email, which revealed Marin County Office of Education Superintendent John Carroll’s 2023 SF JCRC-paid summer trip to Israel. Carroll’s trip was so quiet that at least two MCOE trustees only learned about it two weeks ago, on June 25, 2024. To his credit, when I contacted Superintendent Carroll’s office, he invited me to MCOE and patiently answered almost every question I asked.
The Identifying Email:
Let’s first examine the CPRA’d email that initially informed me of Carroll’s trip, which was delivered to me on June 13 by the San Rafael City Clerk’s office. It’s dated October 19, 2023, and signed by SF JCRC’s Adriana Lombard, to San Rafael City Councilmember Rachel Kertz, with the subject heading: “Reminder: Marin County Superintendent tonight”. The email, which was sent twelve days after the October 7 attacks, informed Kertz about a slight change to an appearance by John Carroll at the Osher Marin JCC:
“While this meeting was originally planned as an opportunity to hear from Superintendent Carroll about his work in the county and the impact of his recent trip to Israel, we recognize that the events of the last 10 days have shifted the focus and we have adjusted the conversation accordingly.”
Email from SF JCRC’s Lombard to CM Kertz Raises Five Immediate and Obvious Questions
Five questions raised by Lombard’s email:
1. Who paid for the trip?
2. Why would the only known disclosure/presentation of this trip by an elected official be made to a “registered parents only” (see email below) audience of the faith-based nonprofit Osher Marin JCC, which itself has been criticized by Jewish Marinites for its pro-Israel bias?
3. Why was the only known presentation of this trip taken by an elected official apparently being managed/organized by Adriana Lombard of SF JCRC?
4. Why did Superintendent Carroll think traveling to Israel, which had been in continuous violation of international law since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, would not raise questions of bias if it were ever disclosed?
5. What sort of selective information was an elected school official provided during the trip by his Israeli tour guides?
These questions are relevant, not only because there are actual Palestinian (Christian and Muslim) students and families living in Marin who might feel alienated learning that their elected county school board official had traveled to such a contested country. But because, as we have seen for many months now, you needn’t be a Palestinian student or parent to oppose Israel’s apartheid policies. In fact, the overall body of correspondence to the County shows a high proportion of Jewish Marinites in opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza and demanding a ceasefire resolution.
After I received this email, I attempted to locate John Carroll’s 2023 Form 700 Schedule E. But that form turns out to be exempt from posting on the Fair Political Practices Commission website; presumably because school superintendents are exempt from FPPC’s public posting. Nor was Carroll’s Form 700 locatable on the MCOE website. So I called Carroll’s office in search of the Form 700 on June 20, and by the next morning, I had received an invitation to schedule a time to discuss the matter with Superintendent Carroll.
In Marin County, an invitation to an “outsider” reporter like myself is exceptionally rare, and Carroll deserves credit for being open to questions. This is particularly praiseworthy because his position is a powerful one; the MCOE serves over 40,000 students, and has responsibility for overseeing in excess of $450 million in funding countywide.
Meeting John Carroll And Getting The Form 700
John Carroll comes off as genuinely humble, having made his way from various West Marin school districts, where he had previously served as Principal and later became Superintendent of the Lagunitas-Bolinas School Districts. When I asked to record our conversation, Carroll said he preferred not to, and so I wrote as many notes as I could during our 50- minute conversation.
One of the first things we discussed was his 2023 Form 700 (Schedule E), which I did not receive until I showed up at Carroll’s office. The form shows that Carroll accepted only one gift in 2023, it was for a “Study tour of Israel” from June 28, 2023 to July 9, 2023 (12 days), paid for by the SF JCRC, to the tune of $8,000. This is nearly twice as much as the cost of the JCRC-funded trips to Israel that Tiburon Councilmember Holli Thier and San Rafael Councilmember Rachel Kertz had taken earlier in 2023.
Novato Mayor Mark Milberg appears to have been on the same junket to Israel as Thier and Kertz, however, Milberg’s trip cost $6,117.
But before you leap to the conclusion that “the ladies are getting shorted some cash on these JCRC trips!” consider that Thier and Kertz both have close relationships to the JCRC; Kertz is the current co-Chair of JCRC’s “Bay Area Network of Jewish Officials” (BANJO) and Thier is a former JCRC Board Member with a political consulting firm that has done work for the JCRC. It seems possible from her public statements that Thier may still be doing work for the JCRC while in her position as Tiburon City Councilmember. I have repeatedly reached out to Thier, Milberg, and Kertz with questions about their various relationships to the SF JCRC, but none have replied.
CalMatters Reporting Proves Essential Reading Again
The higher amounts paid for Carroll’s and Milberg’s trips caught my eye thanks to sharp reporting in CalMatters, which had informed readers of a general compliance problem with nonprofit-paid junkets. I note that there are considerable loopholes in the 2015 legislation mandating this disclosure, which SF JCRC may be using.
When I contacted the FPPC’s Jay Wierenga about the SF JCRC’s disclosure form, he told me that he would have to look for it, as it does not appear on the FPPC website. Wierenga later erroneously announced that he had located it, and that I could find it on the website. Alas, that Form 807 is not for the SF JCRC, but for something called the California Jewish Legislative Caucus Foundation. (I subsequently received an email response from Wierenga that amounts to over 1,200 words of deflection, which I will have to cover in a separate article — FPPC practices, or lack thereof, deserve an entire series.)
I then contacted Tyler Gregory and Jonathan Mintzer of SF JCRC again about the lack of disclosure regarding the Israel junkets; as always, they declined to respond to any of my queries.
Bear in mind that SF JCRC is not so much about “Jewish community relations” (in which case it might address the concerns of Jewish community members who openly oppose the State of Israel on either religious or political grounds) — rather, it functions mainly as a lobbying group for the Israeli government.
Which is to say: Accepting a gift from the JCRC for any “study tour of Israel” is, without question, a political decision, and this was the basis for the questions I asked of Carroll.
“On The Road” To Tel Aviv:
When we met on June 24, Superintendent Carroll explained that while he was initially nervous about accepting the gift, when he saw the list of other elected officials who had taken similar JCRC study trips, he thought it would be okay. (That list of other elected officials who accepted the paid junkets is exactly what JCRC might have disclosed if they had submitted a Form 807 to the FPPC.)
As Carroll described his motivation to go on the trip, he has a personal interest in the region being a former history teacher, and “having an interest in religious conflict.” Carroll grew up Catholic in Marin, and shared that his grandfather had clear sympathies with the Irish Republican Army. I note that this was a not-unusual stance for Irish Catholics even during the IRA’s most infamous years; Irish Americans having raised large amounts of cash for the IRA. But Carroll seemed uneasy making the link between the IRA and Hamas, despite decades-long support for Palestinian independence from many prominent Irish politicians. The goals of winning one’s independence from a colonial power may be similar, but the politics of each are perceived differently in the US, thanks in large part to lobbying by nonprofits like the SF JCRC and the ADL.
Carroll said his particular trip to Israel included approximately 50-60 people, all or nearly all elected officials, with 12-15 of them having roles in various school districts. He mentioned that over half of the trip participants were from Southern California, which struck me as proportional to Southern California’s larger population.
When I asked Carroll about the $8,000 amount for the trip, he added that he was asked to pay a small percentage on top of the $8,000 from the JCRC. “How much?” I asked. He said it was a percentage, maybe $800, thus approximately 10% of the gift total. “Why were you asked to pay that?” Carroll said he wasn’t sure, but possibly as a kind of deposit, to make sure individuals were committed to actually going on the trip.
But circling back to an earlier public statement by San Rafael City Councilmember Rachel Kertz, the personal cost may be so that public officials can claim they paid for the trip themselves “through a gift from JCRC”. Video below is of Kertz’ not-quite transparent statement at the April 4, 2023 San Rafael City Council meeting regarding who paid for the trip:
A Handover to the Palestinian Authority At the Checkpoint:
Carroll was not terribly specific on sites visited when pressed, but did give a basic outline. Most of the trip was spent in Israel, most of the officials he met were Israeli. He was not permitted to visit Gaza, but he did visit the West Bank, being handed over with the group to the Palestinian Authority at a checkpoint. Carroll describes the handover as a big change, and said that the PA officials declared to the group that they were now going to hear an entirely different story than what their Israeli tour guides had told them. (Since the PA is considered untrustworthy by many Palestinians due to its partnership with the Israeli government, it’s worth asking how full a story the tourists received from the PA.)
MCOE overseeing $3.8 million in grants to Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Education Program:
Another item that came up in the CPRA’d documents was funding the Jewish Family and Children’s Services had received from MCOE for its Holocaust Education Program: $1.9 million, an amount that had previously been underreported in the Marin I-J. Carroll explained that the initial grant came in 2019, before he was sworn in as Superintendent in 2022. But he also explained that another grant for almost the same amount had just been announced, which brought the total to nearly $4 million in a five-year period for Holocaust education.
Before the meeting, I had received a tip from pro-Palestinian Jewish activists to check the groups involved in the JFCS Holocaust Center program. And there it was: the ADL, involved in JFCS Holocaust Education Center’s “California Teachers’ Collaborative”, established “with support from the California Department of Education, Marin County Office of Education, and the State of California.”
I raised concerns about the ADL’s decades-long malfeasance to Carroll, but he seemed unaware of ongoing issues with the powerful nonprofit. (Emmaia Gelman’s terrifying 2019 exposé of the ADL is a necessary read, but even in the last month, the ADL has been rejected by Wikipedia editors as an unreliable source, and exposed for having targeted yet another Black activist.)
Carroll was forthright in explaining that he was largely unaware of the “People vs. Margoliash” case, in which a Jewish resident of San Rafael violently attacked the Islamic Center of North Marin on the first night of Ramadan last March. (Both the victim and the defendant in that case appear to have attended local schools in Marin County.) As I have previously reported, in that ongoing case, defendant Margoliash was grossly undercharged, and was subsequently given a day pass out of jail to locate exculpatory evidence in his own case, which is virtually unheard of. The favorable treatment granted to Margoliash by the DA and Judge Kelly Simmons has done little to dispel the perception that the County continues to exercise an institutional bias against Muslim victims of white violence.
Meetings For Jewish Students, But Not For Arab and Muslim Students
Carroll told me that, post-October 7, he had taken meetings with groups of Jewish students at all of the high schools at their request. He said he had not met with any groups of Muslim or Arab students because none had made such a request.
“But you’re the Superintendent,” I said. “Don’t you have a responsibility to reach out to students who might be too intimidated to speak up for themselves?” It seemed painfully obvious to me that Muslim, Arab and other students who were in opposition to Israel's policies lacked the protection of well-funded nonprofits like the SF JCRC that propelled pro-Israel Marin students’ concerns to the forefront.
I suggested to Carroll that there was a bias in the County — that serious but still lesser antisemitic acts, such as a lone man affixing swastika stickers in Fairfax, or racist and antisemitic flyers tossed from a car, were given outsized attention by local media and local elected reps, while far more serious violence and discrimination against Muslim and Arab residents was downplayed. Carroll had been genial if serious throughout the conversation, but at this suggestion, he appeared genuinely annoyed.
I pointed out that not only was the ADL’s involvement in the JFCS Holocaust Education program problematic, but the involvement of something called TWIGE for Guatemalan genocide awareness was deeply ironic, given Israel’s role in training the Guatemalan military in that genocide. (Physician Howard Waitzkin has recently written about this from a local perspective.) Superintendent Carroll seemed nonplussed by this suggestion.
We did discuss complaints made by high school students in the County that their own pro-Palestine teach-ins and posters had been banned by their schools even as JFCS’ Holocaust education was mandated. Carroll mentioned that he was aware of some of these complaints, but that these were the domain of the individual high school districts, not the MCOE.
Philip Roth’s “CounterLife” As Prompt:
In response to the general theme of my concerns, Carroll cited the stated purpose of JCRC’s study tours of Israel. As he put it, the purpose was “to learn enough about Israel to create support for the Jewish community back home and fight anti-semitism.”
I had been thinking about two of Philip Roth’s Israel-focused novels recently, one being “The Counterlife” which requires the reader to consider an alternate reality for Nathan Zuckerman’s mostly level-headed dentist brother, Henry, whom Roth reinvents as a maniac West Bank settler. Summoning Roth’s notion of a parallel reality, I proposed to Carroll a “what-if”:
“What if it wasn’t the JCRC that had offered you the trip, but the (hypothetical) CCRC – the Chinese Community Relations Council?” In describing a hypothetical CCRC, I cited the many tribulations of Chinese in California, which included having been remanded in large numbers during the 19th century to San Quentin to be used as slave labor; and their suffering through pogroms, lynchings, mutiliations, and sundown laws, not to mention the Chinese Exclusion Act and its extension. I cited ongoing discrimination by law enforcement in California, both local and federal, against Chinese Americans, cases recently brought by the ACLU.
“Based on that history of discrimination and ethnic cleansing right here in California,” I asked Carroll, “what if there were a nonprofit designed to take elected officials from the State of California on paid junkets to China, in order to ‘learn enough about China to create support for the Chinese community and fight sinophobia back home’? Would you take that trip?”
Carroll seemed astounded by the very question. His eyes grew wide, and he said that of course he would not.
“But, why wouldn’t you?” I asked him, equally astounded by his reply.
Carroll stated that he would not do so, because “they were locking people up” referring not to Chinese people, but to the Chinese government.
And yet, so too was the Israeli government: There are currently thousands of Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons and detention centers — many without any charges whatsoever — and worse, Israel was engaging in sadistic acts of torture and rape of its prisoners. Further, there was a plausible case of genocide currently being heard against Israel at the ICJ, which is not the case with China, and warrants being asked at the ICC (yes, at “the Hague”) for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes. I explained that Israel had, for many decades, been in violation of the very UN Charter that established its existence. Carroll seemed unmoved, so I tried rephrasing my question another way.
“Okay, what it it wasn’t the JCRC, and it wasn’t the CCRC, but rather, the RCRC? The Russian Community Relations Council? Would you accept their trip?”
The idea seemed to strike Carroll as preposterous. Again, he stated emphatically that he would not do so.
But Carroll did not explain why it was different to accept a gift from a de facto lobbying group for Israel, which has long been accused of war crimes, and a hypothetical lobbying group for Russia, also accused of war crimes. And we were now clocking in at nearly 50 minutes, with Carroll eager to get on with his actual job. I thanked Carroll for being so open, and in leaving, pointed out that, in fairness to him, many could appreciate the distinction between traveling to Israel before the IDF’s post-October 7 response (which was what Carroll had done) and those elected officials (like Assemblymember Damon Connolly), who traveled to Israel on the JCRC’s dime as recently as February of this year, when the case at the ICJ was already being prepared.
Three days later, I received another very large delivery of emails from the City of San Rafael, which reveal the pressure that elected officials like John Carroll have long faced from groups like SF JCRC. I think you may be more sympathetic to the difficulty faced by a County official like John Carroll when I release those emails, a process that will likely take up the rest of the summer. One aspect of this which is particularly interesting – and timely – is the pressure applied to school districts for control of ethnic studies curricula.
Until then, I thank all the patient readers of this ongoing project, many of whom have offered excellent advice and insight throughout this process. Your communications are always welcome.
©️2024 Eva Chrysanthe