Families sue state over antisemitism in schools

It cites a half-dozen districts in which the alleged discrimination has occurred in the past two years. They are the Los Angeles, Berkeley, Fremont, San Francisco and Oakland Unified school districts and Campbell Union High School District, where six students at Branham High in December formed a human swastika on the football field, then posted it on social media with a quote from Adolf Hitler.

The lawsuit cited numerous examples in which the children of the plaintiffs, most of them named, were taunted, bullied, and, in two cases, physically assaulted by other students, because they were Jewish, and instances in which teachers discriminated against them. When parents complained, according to the complaint, school officials either ignored their complaints or, in several instances, transferred the Jewish students to another classroom or to independent study, “enabling anti-Semitic hate to be taught in a Jew-free environment, with no one left to object.”

“The problems in K-12 seem to be widespread and deeply troubling,” said L. Rachel Lerman, vice chair of the Brandeis Center. “The parents who joined this lawsuit are not just interested in their own child. They would like to see (antisemitism) addressed systemically, because it affects not just the Jewish kids, but the other kids who are taught to be antisemitic. This contaminates our society and will persist for years if it’s not checked.”

The lawsuit calls for investigating and addressing past misconduct, taking proactive measures to stop future discrimination, and forbidding California’s schools “from being commandeered as centers of antisemitic indoctrination.”

Specific demands for action

The plaintiffs specifically are asking the court to require the state, including the State Board of Education, the Department of Education and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to:

• Publish the number of and statewide data on antisemitism complaints, including appeals to the Department of Education;

• Mandate antisemitism training for all teachers, administrators and academic staff in coordination with the Brandeis Center;

• Make state funding to districts contingent on discrimination-free conduct by students, staff and third-party contractors;

• Appoint an independent monitor with expertise in antisemitism discrimination “for each recalcitrant” district to oversee enforcement of court-ordered reforms, including the half-dozen school districts cited in the complaint;

• Appoint a committee of experts to review all ethnic studies curricula and teacher training that districts have purchased since 2021. That was the year the Legislature adopted Assembly Bill 101, which requires the still unfunded mandate for a semesterlong high school course in ethnic studies. The experts would also enforce an AB 101 provision that requires districts not to use any portions of the first draft of the voluntary Model Ethnic Studies Curricula that Newsom and the state board rejected as biased and discriminatory.

Pro-Palestinian teacher advocates and legal organizations, together with the California Teachers Association, successfully fought inclusion of several of these oversight requirements, including the vetting of ethnic studies curricula and outside ethnic studies contractors, in Assembly Bill 715, which took effect on Jan. 1. It reinforces current antidiscrimination laws that ban biased instruction and professional development, and will create an Office of Civil Rights and an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to develop antisemitism resources and strategies.

Opponents likely will strongly oppose the Brandeis Center’s proposals. They argue that many Jews conflate opposition to the Israeli conduct of the war in Gaza with antisemitism in an effort to squelch teachers’ freedom to discuss Mideast controversies.

Attorney Jenin Younes, the national legal director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, reiterated that position Thursday in response to the Brandeis Center lawsuit. Her organization “condemns all kinds of racial, religious, and ethnic hatred, but we are very aware that allegations of antisemitism are used to suppress criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, and to erase Palestinian identity, expression, and existence,” she wrote in an email.

“While some of the allegations, if true, reflect actual antisemitism, some are quite clearly about criticism of Israel and Zionism, and the plaintiffs have opted to settle these questions via judicial fiat rather than debate and discussion, furthering AB 715’s chilling effect on speech,” Younes said.

The lawsuit refers several times to the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which some authors of the banned first draft of the state’s model curriculum have repackaged into an alternative curriculum. Five years later, elements of the “liberated curriculum” are taught in the districts cited in the lawsuit and used in dozens of others. The Palestinian conflict with Israel is a theme of a liberated high school ethnic studies course, which characterizes Israelis as white and Israel as an oppressive settler colonialist nation.

Lerman said that rogue teachers who are violating districts’ rules for teaching controversial subjects or using biased “liberated” curricula that are fostering students’ prejudice.

“The view is that Israel is a demonic entity and should not have a right to exist,” she said, “and people who support Israel are also monsters and need to be shunned. The next thing you know, the kid next to you is being called Jew instead of by her name.”

Parents charge mistreatment

The lawsuit lays out ugly allegations of antisemitism:

At Los Angeles Unified’s Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, B.R., the son of Dawn and Michael Rosenfeld, was called a “shitcan Jew” and faced “Heil Hitler” salutes. Rather than disciplining the offending students, the school kept B.R. safe by moving him to a segregated space during lunch. Then, running track during physical education classes, “bullies yelled, ‘Let’s get the Jew,’ and beat him unconscious,” the lawsuit said. The school didn’t suspend any of the attackers, the lawsuit said.

In 2024, a third grader identified as “Student B” planned to sing a song by an Israeli Eurovision contestant at a talent show at Kester Elementary in Los Angeles. According to the lawsuit, a teaching assistant told her not to perform with the poster she had prepared that included a picture of the Israeli flag because “Israel is a racist apartheid state, and by supporting Israel, you are being racist.” The next year, Student B was the only child not accepted for the school talent show, the lawsuit said.

One week after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 Jews in Israel, the art teacher at Berkeley High School of Ilana Pearlman’s ninth grade son, A.D., “boasted to the class about his latest artwork: an image of barbed wire fences in the shape of a Star of David 13 with a giant fist punching through it. A.D. was shocked “by the imagery, the lawsuit said. The next day, the teacher promoted a walkout to support Palestine, where there were “F--- the Jews” chants. Instead of addressing the antisemitism, administrators “banished him to the library and student health center” during the class, after Pearlman complained, the lawsuit said.

Escalating tensions after Oct. 7

Antisemitic incidents in California have been on the rise “at a shocking speed in recent years,” the lawsuit said, quoting Newsom, who noted that Jewish hate crimes made up 62.4% of all reported hate crimes attributable to religious bias in 2022.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, and the two-year Israeli army seizure of Gaza, during which tens of thousands of civilians and Hamas soldiers have perished, parents’ formal complaints against the districts have escalated.

The lawsuit said that districts have ignored or minimized the harm months after the 60-day statutory deadline for responding. There is a large backlog of appeals before the Department of Education.

A notable exception is a strong finding last month, in which the department ordered Oakland Unified’s board to discuss findings and actions taken to prevent antisemitism; principals to send letters to families addressing antisemitism at their specific schools; and schools to hold student assemblies on the Holocaust and the harm caused by antisemitic imagery.

Lerman said the center and parents can no longer wait for the state to act. “California is just chock-full of antidiscrimination statutes — probably the state with the most, and I’m proud of that as a Californian,” she said. “I’m not proud that we’re not enforcing them when it comes to antisemitism.”

There is a double standard, she said. “If this was another group — gay children or Black children or Native American children, the state would’ve found a way,” she said.