(Sept. 29, 2025 / JNS)
Han Tran, a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court in California, ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit alleging the Berkeley Unified School District uses anti-Israel curricula can proceed.
The district educates some 9,400 students in 11 public elementary schools, three middle schools and two high schools and also runs three preschools and an adult school serving “several thousand” students annually, according to its site.
Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, which filed the suit in October, told JNS that the judge’s decision is “huge.” “We haven’t had that,” she said.
The nonprofit represents Yossi Fendel, an Israeli-American Jew whose son was a student in the district at Berkeley High School during the 2023-24 academic year. The suit alleges that a school in the district teaches an ethnic studies, ninth-grade course that includes materials that describe Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror group, as “leading armed resistance against Israel for decades” and as an entity that “controls one of the two major political parties in Palestine.”
The teaching materials don’t spell out who carried out the Oct. 7 terror attacks, why they did so and how barbaric the attacks were, although they do state that Hamas led the massacre, per the suit. It adds that the materials falsely claim that 5,000 Israelis live in Gaza. Israel pulled out of Gaza completely in 2005.
“They teach, as fact, a wildly biased, inaccurate, and distorted view of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” the suit alleges. “A person who knew nothing about Israel and her neighbors other than what is in the materials could not possibly come away from exposure to this curriculum believing anything other than that the creation and continued existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state—the explicit command of the United Nations in 1947—is wrong, illegitimate and unjust.”
The district has created “a hostile learning environment, which denies to Jews and to Israelis equal access to the educational facilities of the state,” the suit adds. “It also abuses the rights of other Californians, who are denied the opportunity to learn actual facts, and in an environment free from discrimination against Jews and Israelis.” (JNS sought comment from the district.)
Marcus told JNS that Fendel heard his son’s teacher say at a school board meeting in 2023 that he would teach about “Palestine and colonialism.” The father asked to see the teaching materials, but the teacher, curriculum director, superintendent and school board rejected his request, Marcus said.
The teacher and the department emailed parents in February 2024, after the Deborah Project had asked to see the teaching materials, stating that students would learn three lessons about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” per the suit.
“We’re not at liberty to share the curriculum directly with families, as per the practice we use with all curriculum,” the email stated, according to the lawsuit.
“That’s saying, ‘Yeah, these are your kids, but we get to teach them what we want and you don’t have a say,’” Marcus told JNS. “That’s the opposite of what the education system is supposed to be about.”
The suit stated that the only materials that the district released to Fendel were things that had already been taught in his son’s class.
The superior court judge ruled that material that “denigrates Israel, that misrepresents the current conflict, that misrepresents who is indigenous to the land” and the like “can be discriminatory.”
Marcus told JNS that when the lawsuit reaches the discovery process, “we’ll get to find out who made these decisions to allow materials to be taught to children that misrepresents so much of history.”
“Parents are entitled to see what their children are being taught,” she said. “Now we get to see who made all those decisions and why, and what else is happening behind this closed door of creating curriculum for children that is unscholarly, incorrect and damaging.”
