During a congressional forum in January, the candidates vying to become the Democratic nominee for California’s 11th Congressional District were asked whether they believed that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan and Saikat Chakrabarti both said “Yes.” But state Senator Scott Wiener himself declined to take a position on the question. Within a few days the moment went viral online, sparking significant backlash against his candidacy.
Later that week, he announced on X that he did, in fact, believe that “Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza.”
On Tuesday, San Franciscans will vote for their next congressional representative. Wiener is leading in the polls, but his about-face has led some voters to question his position on Israel/Palestine and his likely political allegiances in Washington, DC, should he become San Francisco’s next congressional representative.
In the years before October 7, 2023, Wiener criticized Prime Minister Netanyahu, spoke out against the West Bank’s settlement policy, and backed a two-state solution. But according to his current campaign platform, he also supports arming Israel with defensive weapons and opposes the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
In a CNN interview over the summer, he falsely claimed that he has “supported a ceasefire” in Gaza since November 2023. In fact, as late as December 2023, he opposed a ceasefire. On December 5, 2023, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors held a meeting to introduce the ceasefire resolution—which Wiener opposed, alongside the Jewish Community Relations Council.
He did not merely voice his opposition to the measure. In the run-up to a January 2024 vote on it, Wiener personally lobbied board members to oppose the resolution, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Drop Site News.
And, despite rejecting AIPAC money this election cycle, he continues to accept funding from liberal Zionist groups like J Street, which announced a $60,000 ad campaign to support him in May 2026.
Wiener’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The ceasefire resolution that Wiener lobbied against ultimately passed 8-3, thanks in part to the persistent advocacy of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC). The group organized about 65,000 supporters, who sent emails to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to advocate for the resolution, according to Lara Kiswani, AROC’s executive director.
But Wiener’s active opposition to the resolution undercuts the authenticity of his politics, Kiswani told Drop Site News. “Plainly, it is a factual lie that he supported the ceasefire since 2023,” she said.
Influencing the Classroom
A review of Wiener’s record shows several noteworthy attempts to address antisemitism, including advocacy and legislation that raise concerns around censorship in education.
Wiener played a critical role in holding up funding for the state’s ethnic studies program, which was slated to become a graduation requirement for public high school students. Because the program contained material about the Nakba—the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians beginning in 1947—and the BDS movement, the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, on which Wiener served, pushed for guardrails that addressed concerns about “anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias.”
In a letter to a state committee that advises on educational material, the Jewish Caucus said that anti-Jewish bias in the ethnic studies curriculum was “singling out Israel—the world’s only Jewish state—for special critique and condemnation.”
Seth Morrison, a leader of the Bay Area chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, objected to the claim that the curriculum was anti-Jewish. “Israel is a sovereign state. Judaism is a religion, not a nationality. Critiquing Israel does not mean you are anti-Jewish,” he said. “In fact, Israel’s false claims about representing all Jews actually perpetuates antisemitism.”
In 2023, Wiener became co-chair of the Jewish Caucus, while also serving as the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee chair. His simultaneous leadership in these roles has given him outsized power. Under his leadership, the Jewish Caucus continued to insist on changes to the ethnic studies curriculum, while as chair of the Budget Committee, Wiener influenced the program’s funding.
One state legislator, Rep. Al Muratsuchi, complained bitterly about the opposition from Wiener and his allies. “We want to move the ethnic studies high school graduation requirement forward,” Muratsuchi, a former chair of the Assembly Budget Committee on Education Finance, reportedly said. “But that is contingent on appropriation, and it just so happens that the two co-chairs of the Jewish Caucus,” Wiener and his colleague Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, “are both chairs of the budget committees of both houses, the Senate and Assembly. And so we are dealing with complicated politics on several levels.”
An essential component of the campaign against the ethnic studies curriculum was AB 715, which became law in October 2025. The legislation purports to strengthen California’s anti-discrimination policies in K-12 education, with a focus on antisemitism. It was co-authored by Wiener and sponsored by the California Legislative Jewish Caucus. Many teachers, including members of the California Faculty Association, have criticized the law as censoring instruction on topics like Israel/Palestine.
Gabriel Kahn, an eighth-grade teacher in the Oakland Unified School District, said that the law conflates antisemitism and criticism of Israel. “AB 715 creates an environment where teachers are scared to teach the truth and teach current events as they are, particularly around Israel and Palestine,” he told Drop Site. “As a Jewish educator myself, Jewish educators and students are already protected against antisemitism in our education code. What AB 715 does is tag on criticism of Israel and Zionism to the definition of antisemitism.”
Even students can be targeted under AB 715. In one case in April, a middle school in Berkeley received a complaint after hosting a student-led assembly that celebrated South and Southwest Asian and North African (SSWANA) cultures. The complaint alleged that the SSWANA event “contributed to a discriminatory and harassing environment for Jewish and Israeli students,” the California Department of Education said.
During the event, students displayed a PowerPoint presentation, seen by Drop Site, that included a slide recognizing “some wars happening in our area,” including “Palestinian genocide,” “Sudan civil war,” and “Israeli Invasion of Southern Lebanon.” The Department of Education, in its review of the event, cited the school’s finding that the assembly included “controversial content,” including the mention of the genocide in Gaza and “Free Palestine” chants.
Ultimately, the department concluded that the complaint against the student assembly had merit, and ordered the Berkeley Unified School District to take “corrective actions.” It said that the school must provide anti-discrimination instruction to all students and administrators, “with a particular emphasis on anti-Semitism.”
Sahar Habib Ghazi, a parent of one of the students who organized the assembly, told Drop Site that despite the complaint’s centering of Israel, the issue was secondary to the assembly. “Out of the many slides celebrating students’ culture, there was one slide focused on wars that were impacting some of our students who are Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian. Because many kids were being impacted by Israel’s warfare, the slide became important.”
On September 16, Ghazi’s daughter, a student involved in the assembly, spoke at a Berkeley Unified School Board meeting after the department’s ruling. “Thousands of us students came together to build something we’re proud of,” she said, according to a recording of the meeting. “Our culture gets treated like something to be scared of, but because of that assembly my whole school knew that I was Muslim and knew my family survived the British Partition of India. CDE took that and turned it into a story about Israel and antisemitism.”
The organization K-12 Legal Defense is representing students who are challenging the Department of Education decision against the school. Liz Jackson, the group’s legal director, said it was wrong for AB 715 to be weaponized against a student-led assembly celebrating SSWANA culture. “I don’t want my Jewish kids to learn that celebrating SSWANA culture endangers them,” she told Drop Site. “That’s a deeply antisemitic lesson.”
While Jackson said she was grateful to see Wiener’s shift on Israel/Palestine, she added that it did not go far enough. “Scott Wiener has steamrolled a legislative agenda that promoted false and harmful myths around Palestinian stories, equating it to antisemitism and therefore eliminating them from the classroom,” she said. “He may have changed his views, but he has not changed the deep harm he enacted in our education system, which all students and educators are left to cope with.”
That harm is especially evident in the law’s classroom censorship, Jackson said. She noted that AB 715 permits any person to file a complaint over educational practices in any school in the district. One need not be a student, or even a resident of the city, to make a complaint. And the legislation requires that every complaint is investigated by the school district. Jackson said that this arrangement puts schools in a bind. “Because the district knows that there are organizations with deep pockets ready to litigate against them, they aren’t gonna fight for students rights for critical learning,” she said. “They’re just gonna take the posters down and change the curriculum—that is the effect.”
AB 715 was predated by another bill that Wiener co-authored, which restricts protests and free speech in public universities. It became law in September 2024. Student advocates view the law, SB 1287, as an attempt to crack down on campus demonstrations, especially those related to Israel/Palestine. It imposes “time, place, and manner restrictions” on campus protests.
When Michael Lee-Chang was a student at California State University, Sacramento, he was sanctioned for violating the school’s “time, place, and manner restrictions.” He had allegedly placed stickers around campus that criticized the university’s chancellor, Mildred García. Lee-Chang, who recently graduated, said that the law, which the Jewish Caucus has described as ensuring “Jewish safety,” stifles campus protests.
When he was sanctioned by his school, Lee-Chang faced the possibility of suspension. The process to resolve the sanction took several months. In the end, the school issued a warning against him that will remain in his conduct file for seven years.
