Two Laws, One Silence: What California Just Did—and What We Can Still Do About It

What Just Happened On September 25, Governor Newsom signed AB 2664 into law. It creates a 100-foot "safe zone" around the entrances of places of worship. Step inside that zone and approach within eight feet of another person without their consent to hand them a flyer, hold up a sign, or start a conversation about a political issue, and you've committed a crime—up to a $10,000 fine and a year in jail for a first offense, up to $25,000 after that.

The Governor's framing is one most of us would agree with: "Every Californian should be able to walk into a synagogue, church, mosque, or other house of worship without fear" (JTA, 2026). Antisemitism is real and rising. Faith communities of all kinds have faced threats and violence. Worshippers deserve genuine protection, and the impulse behind this law deserves acknowledgment, not dismissal.

But look at what the law actually does. Harassing, threatening, or physically blocking someone was already a crime in California. AB 2664's addition is to make speech itself the offense—handing someone a flyer on a public sidewalk. And it was written in response to one side of one political dispute: protests outside Los Angeles synagogues hosting events marketing property in Israeli settlements, one of which turned violent last year (JTA, 2026). As Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations put it: "If a house of worship in America chooses to serve as a platform for illegal land sales meant to normalize Palestinian displacement, Americans should be able to peacefully demonstrate against that immoral activity" (JTA, 2026).

AB 2664 doesn't touch classrooms. But it doesn't arrive alone either. It follows another law—one that very much does touch classrooms, and that is already changing what California teachers feel safe saying out loud.

The Other Law: What AB 715 Does

AB 715 was signed on October 7, 2025—the second anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel—and took effect January 1, 2026 (LA Public Press, 2026). Its stated goal is protecting Jewish students from a documented rise in antisemitism. Its mechanisms, though, work together to make silence feel safer than teaching:

Anyone can file a complaint— anonymously, and without showing any direct harm. Not just a parent at the school: any member of the public (LA Progressive, 2025). A teacher never knows who might be watching, or why.

The state can withhold funding from schools that violate the law (California Legislative Information, 2025). For a school district, the rational response to that risk is avoidance: remove the lesson, cancel the unit, steer around the topic.

A new state office polices the definition of the problem. The law establishes an Office of Civil Rights and an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, and twice references the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism—a strategy that promotes the IHRA definition of antisemitism, whose examples treat claims that Israel is a "racist endeavor" as antisemitism (LA Progressive, 2025). Many civil liberties organizations and Jewish groups argue this definition ends up treating criticism of Israeli government policies as hatred of Jewish people. Teachers' unions warned the law would leave educators "uncertain about what they can lawfully say in the classroom" (Oaklandside, 2025).

When teachers and students sued, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise dismissed the case on July 28, 2026, ruling among other things that the students hadn't shown they were "going to receive information related to Israel and Palestine and now will not" (Courthouse News, 2026). Read that standard carefully. It requires censorship to be complete before it can be challenged. It cannot see the way censorship usually happens: people going quiet in advance, before anyone can measure the loss.

As ADC staff attorney Malak Afaneh put it after the ruling: "AB 715 has already caused educators to alter the way they teach out of fear that classroom discussions or activities could trigger complaints or investigations" (Times of Israel, 2026).

What This Looks Like in Practice

These aren't hypothetical fears. The complaints have already produced results:

In New Haven Unified (East Bay), teachers presented a summer academy slide deck describing Israeli actions against Palestinians as potentially constituting "genocide, ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism." The state Department of Education ruled the instruction lacked "adequate balance and historical context" and "cast Israel in a negative light" (LA Progressive, 2025).

In Oakland, after a high school newspaper published an article on Israel's violations of international law, the Department instructed the district to provide training for the paper's faculty adviser (LA Progressive, 2025).

In Los Angeles, teachers were ordered to remove Palestinian flags from their classrooms as a "corrective action" following a discrimination complaint—even though investigators found that students described the classroom as open and nonjudgmental, and reported no comments targeting Jewish, Israeli, or Zionist classmates (Truthout, 2026).

That last case is the one I keep returning to. The investigation found no harm. The flags came down anyway. This is how these laws work: they don't need to prove anything to change what happens in a room. They only need to make the risk of speaking feel greater than the cost of silence.

From a narrative therapy perspective, this disrupts what we call re-authoring—the process by which people reclaim their stories from dominant narratives that define them as a problem (White & Epston, 1990). From a Liberation Psychology perspective, it is structural violence: a bureaucratic apparatus, with marginalized voices as the cost (Martín-Baró, 1994). And research on intergenerational trauma shows that when a community's history is suppressed, the unprocessed grief doesn't disappear—it is passed down (Bombay et al., 2014). I see this in my practice. When young people are denied the chance to name and explore what their families endured inter-generationally, they are left with a gap where their history should be.

Why Two Laws, One Conversation

Let me be precise: AB 715 is an education law. AB 2664 is a protest law. One doesn't restrict what a teacher says in a classroom; the other doesn't restrict what a protester says on a sidewalk.

But the pattern is recognizable. Both laws responded to speech about Palestine and Israel not by strengthening enforcement against conduct that was already criminal, but by creating new mechanisms for punishing expression—anonymous complaints and funding threats in one case, buffer zones and criminal penalties in the other. Both were opposed by civil liberties groups, including the ACLU of California's advocacy arm and teachers unions, on free speech grounds (LA Progressive, 2025; ADC, 2026). Both passed anyway.

The message to Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Californians is hard to read any other way: your stories are a problem to be managed. And a student who watches adults lose the ability to protest, and teachers lose the ability to teach, learns quickly which histories are speakable.

Why This Matters in Santa Cruz

Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, who represents Santa Cruz, co-sponsored AB 2664 (CalMatters, 2026). When a local op-ed writer published a piece in Lookout Santa Cruz celebrating AB 715 as "a victory for common sense," a Santa Cruz resident responded with a letter to the editor arguing the law "creates a perverse hierarchy of protection"—and calling on Pajaro Valley Unified and other county school boards to adopt resolutions affirming that AB 715 will not suppress Palestinian history or criticism of Israeli policy (Lookout Santa Cruz, 2026).

This conversation is already happening here. The PVUSD ethnic studies debate—which drew public rebukes and accusations of antisemitic tropes from the county superintendent—showed how quickly questions about whose histories get taught become fights about loyalty and harm (Lookout Santa Cruz, 2025). No enforcement action under AB 715 has been documented in Santa Cruz County yet. But the fight is local in every way that matters.

The question is whether we will use the values we claim when they are tested.

Right now, they are being tested.

What We Can Do

AB 2664 is signed. AB 715 is law, and its first court challenge failed. But "it passed" is not the same as "it's over." 

Here is what remains genuinely available to us:

Support the legal challenges to come. AB 2664's buffer-zone model faces serious constitutional obstacles—the Supreme Court struck down a comparable buffer zone in McCullen v. Coakley (2014), and the older ruling it's modeled on is considered vulnerable by many legal scholars. Organizations like the ADC and CAIR opposed the bill and are positioned to challenge it. The ADC has also signaled it is weighing its options after the AB 715 ruling (Times of Israel, 2026). 

Donations, amplification, or— if you are directly affected—joining as a plaintiff are among the most direct routes available.

Defend what can still be taught. AB 715 requires instruction to be "factually accurate"—and critics of the law note that this cuts both ways: teaching the Nakba from credible sources, with balance, is still lawful (LA Progressive, 2025). The law did not repeal academic freedom. Attend school board meetings (PVUSD, Santa Cruz City Schools). Ask boards to adopt resolutions affirming that Palestinian history, taught accurately, stays in the curriculum. When a teacher is investigated, show up. 

The chilling effect weakens every time a community makes clear it will stand behind accurate teaching.

Build accountability for the next bill. AB 2664 was one of six bills relevant to the Jewish community that passed the legislature this session (JTA, 2026). There will be more. Ask Assemblymember Pellerin to explain her support for AB 2664 publicly, and to support measures that address antisemitism at its roots: Holocaust education, media literacy that teaches students to recognize antisemitic tropes, facilitated dialogue in schools, and anti-bullying policies that target harassment without conflating political criticism with bigotry. 

These approaches reduce antisemitism without costing anyone their voice.

Center those most affected. Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and families, and Jewish communities targeted by real antisemitism, are already organizing—a coalition that included California's teachers unions, the ACLU of California's advocacy arm, and Jewish Voice for Peace opposed AB 715 from the start (LA Progressive, 2025; Truthout, 2026). 

The most useful thing an ally can do is ask what they need, follow their lead, and bring others along.

Tell the stories. Host a narrative circle. Invite educators and students to share what these laws have changed. Healing from oppression is not only an individual process but a collective one—and bearing witness to one another's stories is itself a form of resistance (Watkins & Shulman, 2008; Denborough, 2008).

A Final Thought

As a therapist, I know that silence doesn't dissolve conflict. It buries it, where it hardens into trauma and gets passed down through generations. Communities heal when people can speak, be heard, and engage one another—even in disagreement, even angrily.

Two laws passed this year that make speaking harder: one in the classroom, one on the sidewalk. Neither required anyone to be punished for the silence to begin. That silence is now the story. And stories, as we know, are not fixed. They are re-authored—by people willing to speak, and by communities willing to listen.

The laws may have been signed but the story isn’t over.

In solidarity,
Amanda Helton, AMFT, CSE
Founder, BetweenStories.org

Note: This post reflects the status of AB 715 (signed October 7, 2025; in effect since January 1, 2026) and AB 2664 (signed September 25, 2026) as of October 1, 2026. For updates on legal challenges or related legislation, follow BetweenStories.org or local news outlets like Lookout Santa Cruz.

References

ADC. (2026). Tell California lawmakers: Vote NO on AB 2664. https://adc.org/action-alert/tell-california-lawmakers-vote-no-on-ab-2664/

Bombay, A., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2014). The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 320–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461513503380

California Legislative Information. (2025). Assembly Bill 715: Discrimination: Antisemitism prevention. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB715

CalMatters Digital Democracy. (2026). AB 715: Discrimination: antisemitism prevention. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab715

CalMatters Digital Democracy. (2026). AB 2664: Places of religious worship: unlawful activities. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab2664

Courthouse News Service. (2026, July 28). Fight to block California antisemitism law ends in defeat. https://www.courthousenews.com/fight-to-block-california-antisemitism-law-ends-in-defeat/

Denborough, D. (2008). Collective narrative practice. Dulwich Centre Publications.

Governor's Office. (2026, September 25). Governor Newsom signs bills to keep strengthening security and safe access for California's faith and nonprofit communities. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/25/governor-newsom-signs-bills-to-keep-strengthening-security-and-safe-access-for-californias-faith-and-nonprofit-communities/

Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (2026, September 28). California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs bill to create safe spaces around synagogues. https://www.jta.org/2026/09/28/politics/california-gov-gavin-newsom-signs-bill-to-create-safe-spaces-around-synagogues

LA Progressive. (2025, November 5). AB 715 illegally muzzles students and teachers on Palestine. https://www.laprogressive.com/education-reform/ab-715-illegally-muzzles

LA Progressive. (2026). Silencing Palestine in California classrooms. https://www.laprogressive.com/education-reform/silencing-palestine

LA Public Press. (2026, January). California teachers have no free speech rights in class, judge says in antisemitism case. https://lapublicpress.org/2026/01/california-teachers-have-no-free-speech-rights-in-class-judge-says-in-antisemitism-case/

Lookout Santa Cruz. (2025). Santa Cruz area ethnic studies vote draws rebuke over antisemitism claims. https://lookout.co/county-superintendent-of-schools-warns-pvusd-of-antisemitic-tropes-during-ethnic-studies-debate/story

Lookout Santa Cruz. (2026). Letter to the editor: AB 715 creates a perverse hierarchy of protection. https://lookout.co/letter-to-the-editor-ab-715-creates-a-perverse-hierarchy-of-protection/story

Lookout Santa Cruz. (2026). What California's new antisemitism law means for Santa Cruz County schools [Op-ed by Gil Stein]. https://lookout.co/what-californias-new-antisemitism-law-means-for-santa-cruz-county-schools/story

Martín-Baró, I. (1994). Writings for a liberation psychology. Harvard University Press.

Oaklandside. (2025, October 16). Newsom signs law addressing claims of antisemitism and bias in public schools. https://oaklandside.org/2025/10/16/newsom-signs-law-addressing-claims-antisemitism-bias-public-schools-ab715/

Times of Israel. (2026, July 29). US court dismisses free speech challenge to California's school antisemitism law. https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-court-dismisses-free-speech-challenge-to-californias-school-antisemitism-law/

Truthout. (2026, August). Censorship in LA school district could become national norm, educators warn. https://truthout.org/articles/censorship-in-la-school-district-could-become-national-norm-educators-warn/

U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. (2023). The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/U.S.-National-Strategy-to-Counter-Antisemitism.pdf

Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. Palgrave Macmillan.

White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W. W. Norton & Company.