In a case so extreme that even ultra-woke Santa Clara, California saw fit to condemn it, a California school district has upheld a charge of professional misconduct against a public high school teacher who showed her class an anti-Semitic video produced by the Turkish government during a lesson on the Holocaust.
The teacher in question is Kauser Adenwala, a Muslim, who in March 2024 was teaching World History at Wilcox High School in the Santa Clara Unified School District. During a unit on the Holocaust and World War II, Adenwala showed her class a two minute video that was produced by TRT World, an English-language channel of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, which is owned by the Turkish government.
The video itself is a despicable and mendacious piece of Jew hating propaganda that conflates the death of six million Jews during the Nazi regime with Israel’s defensive war against the terror group Hamas in Gaza. It features a Jewish woman named Marione Ingraham who has taken it upon herself to hold daily protests of Israel’s purported “genocide” in Gaza in front of the White House.
“What the children in Gaza are going through is what I went through in terms of hunger and bombs falling on us,” states Ingraham, who identifies herself as a Holocaust survivor. “As a Jew, I find it horrific. I’m actually ashamed sometimes to acknowledge that I belong to the tribe that is killing innocent people.”
The video intersperses images of skeletal Jewish concentration camp victims and masses of people stuffed into cattle cars with allegedly starving children in Gaza and suspected Hamas insurgents rounded up by the IDF during the Gaza war, attempting to draw a false equivalence between them.
In case viewers miss the point, Ingraham makes it directly. “All of my Jewish family was murdered, and it is not in their name that Israel is killing children,” she states. “What the children in Gaza are going through, is what I went through in terms of hunger and bombs falling on us.”
Ingraham’s self-directed Jew hatred and accusations of genocide against Israel may be a matter for psychological professionals. What they are not, is suitable material for a public high school discussion of the Holocaust.
Alarmed by their children’s reports of the one-sided history lesson, parents of Jewish students in the district raised their concerns with school district administrators through a grassroots group called the Bay Area Jewish Coalition (BAJC) which was created to fight increasing anti-Semitism in local public schools following Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
BAJC sent the school district a letter spelling out the consequences of allowing the teacher’s Jew hatred to proceed unchecked. “This video dangerously conflates the war in Gaza with the atrocities of the Holocaust,” the letter read. “It puts all Jews in the position of the guilty and makes Jewish students feel uncomfortable among their peers.”
After a seven-month investigation, Santa Clara Unified School District finally concluded in July 2025 that Adenwala had violated district policies on discrimination,, on teaching about “controversial issues,” and the district’s professional standards which require educators to “exercise good judgment.”
“In considering the totality of the evidence, the investigator found it more likely than not that the content of the video in question promotes a discriminatory bias against Jewish students on the basis of their nationality,” states the school board’s determination, adding that “A Jewish student would reasonably feel uncomfortable hearing this comparison during class.”
Nor is this the first time that Adenwala has faced discipline for her unprofessional conduct and her insistence on targeting Jews and their homeland of Israel. As JWeekly.com describes:
In December 2023, during a lesson on human rights violations, Adenwala gave a presentation overwhelmingly critical of Israel called “Human rights abuses in Palestine”… It portrayed Israel as an authoritarian power, routinely oppressing non-Jews across the region, including in the West Bank, Gaza and within Israel proper. One slide claimed incorrectly that Israel is the “sole governing power” throughout most of the West Bank and Gaza. The same slide also alleged that Israel’s long-term goal is “Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land.”
In this earlier instance, SCUSD determined that Adenwala’s lecture violated district policies on teaching about controversial issues and assigned her to complete anti-discrimination training. It clearly did not have the desired effect.
Despite the repeated findings against her, Adenwala and the Islamist coalition backing her were not about to accept the school district’s disciplinary judgment without challenge.
“Adenwala had the strong backing of anti-Zionist groups, including local chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Jewish Voice for Peace, which wrote a letter to the school district on her behalf,” reports JWeekly.com. “A local chapter of the NAACP also backed her, as did her union.”
Aided by these organizations along with myriad ideologically-captured individuals who spoke before the school board, Adenwala formally appealed the school district’s finding of misconduct.
Even the appeal itself was tinged by Jew hatred. The California Teacher’s Association, the faculty union representing Adenwala, urged school board member Jodi Muirhead to recuse herself from ruling on the appeal because Muirhead is Jewish, echoing the anti-Semitic trope that Jews have ‘divided loyalties.’
“That request to recuse, that was personal. That was because I am Jewish and because I have friends who are Jewish and Israeli,” Muirhead commented. She refused to comply.
Despite the Islamist mob levying accusations of “weaponized anti-Semitism” and claims that the disciplinary ruling would “chill” discussion of Israel and Palestine, the Santa Clara School Board voted unanimously this month to uphold the initial finding of misconduct against teacher Kauser Adenwala. It is a rare win for Jewish students who far too often face anti-Semitism and discrimination in the classroom from the professionals charged with keeping them safe.
So much for Holocaust education. My goodness, what world are we living.