In the wake of excellent recent work by the Shalem Center and its president Yoram Hazony regarding the influence of post-Zionist thinkers on high school teaching, especially of history, American Jews have become aware of the debate raging in Israel: New history textbooks, with the help of a leftist Minister of Education, call into question the basic ethos of Zionism and the Jewish roots and fealty of Israeli students.

Less known is the fact that these same textbooks are also inculcating in high school students the anti-Western and anti-market views of French and American revisionist historians in the way they describe such topics as the history of the Communist revolution or the Cold War.

Israel high school students are taught, for example, that the reason the Russian Communist revolution failed was because proper conditions had not evolved in Russia, or that the US initiated the Cold War because American monopolies wanted to dominate European markets. The market economy (capitalism) is blamed for most social and political ills.

ICSEP has therefore initiated the writing of a new history textbook for high school students. It will be free of any political bias and post-modernist and anti-Zionist ideology. We have put together an impressive roster of scholars to write the text and to advise the writers. The work is proceeding apace, with the hope of having the book ready for the next academic year.

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