How a UNM political scientist reads antisemitism in school boards
In Albuquerque, where the Sandia Mountains meet the high desert, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico has spent several years documenting a phenomenon that rarely surfaces in graduate seminars: the slow drift of conspiracy thinking into ordinary school board meetings. Dr. Miriam Levi, who teaches in UNM's political science department and identifies publicly as Jewish, has built a small but rigorous archive of recorded public sessions, parent testimony, and curriculum disputes from districts large and small.
The project began quietly, almost as a side reaction to her earlier work on minority representation. As school board races grew more heated in the years after the pandemic, Dr. Levi's archive swelled with recordings of parents invoking antisemitic tropes in debates over library books, social studies textbooks, and Holocaust education. What started as a side project has turned into a regional study of how local education politics can become a channel for older hatreds.
For readers in Sydney, Melbourne, and other Australian cities with sizeable Jewish populations, the parallels are hard to miss. Parents in Caulfield and Bondi have watched school councils in their own states grapple with Holocaust denial content, with social-media-amplified claims about "Zionist curriculum", and with parents who arrive at meetings carrying phrases borrowed from overseas forums. Dr. Levi spoke with us about why she believes American school boards have become such a channel, and what Australian communities can take from her data.
The scholar behind the archive
Dr. Miriam Levi grew up in a small Jewish community in the Pacific Northwest, the daughter of a public school teacher and a civil servant. She came to UNM in 2015 after a postdoc at a Midwest institution, and she teaches courses on American political behaviour, identity politics, and quantitative methods. Her initial research focused on local government responsiveness to immigrant communities, and she produced a well-regarded paper on school board responsiveness to Latino voters in the Southwest.
By 2021, with school board meetings drawing national attention across the United States, Levi noticed her colleagues starting to field complaints about the treatment of Jewish students and the place of antisemitism in classrooms. She came to believe that the academic literature on local education politics had largely skipped over Jewish cultural concerns, focusing instead on race and historical immigration.
That gap became her project. She now maintains a database of more than 600 hours of recorded school board meetings across New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, coded for explicit references to Jewish students, Israel, the Holocaust, and related tropes. Graduate students transcribe, code, and verify each session. The archive is open to other researchers through a partnership with UNM's Southwest Political Studies Institute.
What the data show in New Mexico
The findings are striking in their consistency. In roughly 17 percent of meetings where curriculum was discussed, parents or community members invoked what Levi calls "coded accusations": familiar Jewish tropes, allegations of "Zionist" influence over textbooks, or claims that Holocaust education is a form of propaganda. Many of these comments appear in districts where no Jewish family has ever publicly complained, suggesting the conversations are reactive rather than locally initiated.
The patterns cluster around three triggers. The first is any proposed mention of Israel in social studies. The second is any review of an English-language novel with a Jewish protagonist. The third is any review of a maths or psychology curriculum that mentions Jewish contributors. Burnout among teachers and librarians is high, and several Jewish families told Levi they have stopped going to meetings in person.
Levi is careful to distinguish between substantive disagreement over pedagogy and what she calls "imported prejudice". The first involves parents who simply want more or less time spent on a topic. The second involves parents who arrive with phrases that have no connection to local life and that echo material originally circulated on forums with little relationship to the curriculum.
How local meetings became proxy battles
The pipeline, in Levi's reading, runs through three channels. The first is social media accounts that post short clips of American meetings, which reach Australian screens within hours, including in Brisbane and Perth. The second is professional advocacy networks that pre-infiltrate parental groups and school boards, including groups active in Adelaide. The third is candidate networks that recruit for school board races from across the country, including from Hobart and other regional centres.
Levi points out that one reason local chambers become the venue is procedural. The school board is the most accessible forum for parents to speak for three minutes, the meeting becomes a venue, and the venue becomes a channel. She notes that Australian state education departments operate in parallel, with similar concerns recorded under community consultation processes in Melbourne, Sydney, and regional centres.
The parallels do not mean the situations are identical. American school boards are elected, and most Australian state-level committees are appointed. The election codes change how campaigns are administered; the appointment codes change how decisions are reviewed. Yet the channels through which imported prejudice arrives are strikingly similar.
Comparing approaches across two hemispheres
What follows is a side-by-side comparison of what Levi's work has documented in the United States and what Australian state education departments have published. Australian families can use this comparison to understand responses in their own jurisdictions.
| Issue | New Mexico (USA) | NSW and Victoria (Australia) |
|---|---|---|
| Curriculum trigger | Local school board vote | State-level syllabus review |
| Public comment period | Open, three minutes per speaker | Written submissions, published online |
| Antisemitism guidance | State-level, often missing | Australian Curriculum includes Holocaust |
| Response time | Variable by district | Centralised, faster turnaround |
| Data transparency | Public recordings, sometimes late | Public records, sometimes published |
The contrast helps explain why some Australian families feel more confident speaking at consultations, while some New Mexican families have stopped attending in person. Levi argues that the centralised process offers Australian families a clearer path to administrative remedy, while the elected board model offers local parents a more direct line to elected officials.
Practical steps for parents and educators
Parents and educators looking to engage with the patterns in their own communities can take several practical steps. The steps below draw on Levi's field notes and on conversations with Jewish community organisations in Australia, including the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies and the Victorian Jewish Community Council.
- Keep a careful log of meeting attendance, including times, dates, and the names of speakers raising concerns about Jewish students or the Holocaust.
- Save recordings of public comments, where legally allowed, as a record for community groups and university researchers studying local trends.
- Speak with the principal or head teacher before the meeting, so the school leadership is aware of community concerns and prepared to respond to imported prejudice.
- Connect with state-level Jewish community organisations in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, which often track curriculum reviews across multiple states.
- Encourage the school to make Holocaust education part of a broader civic literacy curriculum, alongside local and Pacific stories.
- If a parent feels unsafe, contact the school's wellbeing team and consider involving a community legal centre that handles religious vilification matters.
- For stories that deserve wider circulation, share them with community newsrooms that cover local Jewish life.
Why Jewish identity shapes the work
Levi argues openly that her Jewish identity shapes her research choices, her access to interviews, and her interpretation of coded language. Some coded accusations, she says, are only audible to people who have heard them before. Outside researchers, however sympathetic, can miss the references. The value of having a Jewish scholar on the project is that she can quickly flag a comment for review, while a colleague can flag it for further observation.
She observes that Australian Jewish scholars face a similar question. Australian Catholic schools have a long tradition of Holocaust education; Australian Jewish schools have a long tradition of interfaith engagement; Australian state schools have a long tradition of multicultural policy. Jewish scholars working on antisemitism in Australia can draw on local scholarship, including work by university researchers and local Jewish community leaders.
Levi says her Jewish identity shapes her research, her teaching, and her public profile. The most useful thing a Jewish scholar can do, in her view, is make the patterns visible, so that other researchers can build on the patterns. She wants the patterns to be useful, including for Jewish families who feel alone in their communities, including for teachers who find it hard to respond to imported prejudice, including for journalists who cover the patterns.
Levi is preparing a public version of her archive for release later this year, with a teaching module for high school students and a community guide for parents. If the patterns resonate with your experience in Adelaide, Hobart, or anywhere in between, the most practical response is reading the cited work, attending your next school board meeting, and supporting the local Jewish organisations that document the patterns.