A California court has cleared the way for students and their parents to sue school districts across the state over the adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic components which discredit Jewish self-determination in Israel while promoting harmful tropes.
The Algemeiner was notified of the decision by The Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit that filed the lawsuit which precipitated the ruling. In that case, the organization sued the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) over its using ethnic studies materials, which fostered aggressively discriminatory beliefs about Israel and the Jewish community, without offering parents the chance to review and approve of its contents.
The Superior Court of California, Alameda County ruled that the materials could be discriminatory and illegal to the extent that they violate civil rights laws, establishing what The Deborah Project described as a “landmark” precedent for future litigation.
“Jewish parents have been waging battle against antisemitic ‘instructional materials’ and instructors that expose their children to harm and hated,” Deborah Project legal director Lori Lowenthal Marcus said in a statement. “This is the first judicial decision addressing claims that the use of biased material violates the law. Now it’s clear: indoctrinating kids that Jews are evil oppressors discriminates against Jews; districts can be held to account and forced to stop doing it.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Jewish civil rights groups have reported that antisemitism in the BUSD has caused severe psychological trauma to Jewish students as young as eight years old and fostered a hostile learning environment.
The problem exploded after Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, according to a civil rights complaint filed in February 2024 by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). BUSD teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes about Israel, weaponizing disciplines such as art and history to convince unsuspecting minors that Israel is a “settler-colonial” apartheid state committing a genocide of Palestinians. While this took place, high level BUSD officials allegedly ignored complaints about discrimination and tacitly approved hateful conduct even as it spread throughout the student body.
At Berkeley High School, for example, a history teacher forced students to explain why Israel is an apartheid state and screened an anti-Zionist documentary, according to the lawsuit. The teacher sharply squelched dissent, telling a Jewish student who raised concerns about the content of her lessons that only anti-Zionist narratives matter in her classroom and that any other which argues that Israel isn’t an apartheid state is “laughable.” Elsewhere in the school, an art teacher, whose name is redacted from the complaint for matters of privacy, displayed anti-Israel artworks in his classroom, one of which showed a fist punching through a Star of David.
Teachers even attempted to intimidate Jewish parents who complained, the complaint continued. Just days after the Oct. 7 atrocities, a second-grade teacher, who hung a Palestinian flag in the window of her classroom, threatened the family of a concerned father after learning he had reported her conduct. “I know who you are, I know who your f—king wife is, and I know where you live,” the teacher allegedly said to him at a school event. Later, in a Facebook post, the teacher defended her politicization of the classroom, proclaiming, “I’ve been a non-neutral educator for all 20 years I’ve been a teacher.”
California lawmakers recently made a major move to address K-12 antisemitism by passing Assembly Bill 715, which would require the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights.
Receiving near-unanimous support, the legislation passed the state Senate earlier this month in a 35-0 vote with five abstentions and then, hours later, cleared the state Assembly in a 71-0 vote with nine abstentions. If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, it would also establish an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, set parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially bar antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom.
Pro-Hamas groups, left-wing nonprofits, and teachers unions have emerged to denounce the bill even as it declined codification of the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — the exclusion of which constitutes a significant compromise for Jewish and pro-Israel activists. Additionally, the bill’s effect on the ethnic studies curricula the Deborah Project fought in court remains unclear.
“This isn’t just curriculum — it’s about whose histories and lived experiences are allowed in our schools,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement, imploring Newsom to veto the bill. “By anchoring enforcement to a politicized definition of antisemitism and inviting politically motivated complaints, AB 715 sets a dangerous precent of censorship and erasure.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the ADL. In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
On Sept. 9, EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism, launching a new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Follow Dion J.Pierre @DionJPierre.
