Kate Anderson on February 3, 2023
NEW YORK, NY – New York state legislators sent a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul and Betty Rosa, the state’s commissioner of education, requested an investigation into a potentially antisemitic question on the New York Regents Exam asking respondents who “benefited most” from the changes in the Israeli borders from 1947 to 2017.
Republican representatives, led by Rep. Mike Lawler, sent the letter on Thursday, but George Santos and Nicole Malliotakis did not participate. According to the press release, Lawler expressed his dismay at seeing such a “blatantly antisemitic question” on the exam.
The letter came from a place of “grave concern” after lawmakers saw the content of one of the questions on the exam.
“We are writing to express our grave concern with the abhorrent, anti-Semitic question included in this winter’s NYS Regents Exam in Global History and Geography,” the letter read. “The question posed, which is also displayed in an image below, asks who benefited the most from changes shown on maps of Israel and surrounding areas from 1947 to 2017.”
The question shows three maps of Israel starting from 1947 when Israel declared its independence as a Jewish state, in 1949 after the Arab-Israeli war that gave Jordan control of eastern Jerusalem and the East Bank, with Egypt controlling Gaza and, finally, a map from 2017 showing the changes after Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1908, according to the letter. Respondents were given four options to answer: “Zionists and Jewish immigrants,” “the government of Jordan,” “Palestinian nationalists” and “the citizens of Lebanon.”
“For centuries, the State of Israel, one of our Nation’s greatest allies, and Jews have fought for their right to exist,” the letter said. “This question attempts to cast doubt on that very notion and rewrite history by erasing the struggle for independence that the State of Israel faced.”
The letter concluded by calling for an “immediate investigation” calling the question an “abject failure” of the education system and an “attack on New York’s Jewish community.”
“Which is why we are calling on Governor Hochul and Commissioner Rosa to open an immediate investigation into this matter, so that we can hold those responsible accountable for this heinous action,” Lawler said in the press release. “It is imperative that we take on anti-Semitism wherever it attempts to take root and a thorough investigation into this matter should help prevent a question of this nature from ever appearing on a state Regents Exam again.”
Hochul, Rosa and Lawler did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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