California Sued Over ‘Jew-Free’ Classrooms, Unchecked Antisemitism in Landmark Litigation

California Sued Over ‘Jew-Free’ Classrooms, Unchecked Antisemitism in Landmark Litigation

In a landmark case, a group of Jewish parents whose children were subjected to severe antisemitic harassment in school has joined with two civil rights groups to sue the State of California. The lawsuit reportedly marks the first time a U.S. state has been sued for antisemitism.

The complaint, filed yesterday by the Brandeis Center in California State Superior Court, names the State of California, the California State Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and the Superintendent as defendants.

The civil rights group says the defendants “have largely stood by while California public schools permit, and at times encourage, an ongoing hostile environment for Jewish students.” As a result, antisemitism has become “normalized” in California schools.

By failing to address the pervasive antisemitism in its public school system, they claim the state and its department defendants violated the California constitution, including its equal protection and free exercise clauses.

In one disturbing example after another, the complaint lays out pervasive antisemitic harassment by both teachers and students in multiple school districts across the state. To highlight just a few:

• In Los Angeles, a third-grader at Kester Elementary School was told by her teacher that she was not allowed to perform in the school talent show with her poster displaying the Israeli flag, because “Israel is a racist apartheid state, and by supporting Israel, you are being racist.”

• At Berkeley High, one week after the October 7th Hamas massacre, a ninth-grade boy had to sit through an art class where the teacher bragged about his latest masterpiece: an image of barbed wire fences in the shape of a Star of David with a giant fist punching through it. The next day, that same teacher promoted a walkout “in support of Palestine.” The walkout that followed was filled with chants that included “F*ck the Jews.”

• At the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, a son of one of the parents was called a “shitcan Jew” and taunted with “Heil Hitler” salutes. Rather than disciplining his tormenters, the school forced the student to sit in a segregated space. In November 2022, the same student was running around the track during physical education, when one of the bullies yelled, “Let’s get the Jew.” A group of students tripped him and beat him unconscious, the lawsuit says. The school nurse allegedly refused the mother’s request to call an ambulance.  Not only did the school not suspend any of the attackers, it put them in the same classroom with the boy they beat up.

The group alleges California schools were at best “deplorably unresponsive” and at worst complicit in the antisemitic harassment of their students, in these and other episodes described in the lawsuit.

Jewish parents have allegedly filed hundreds of formal complaints reporting harassment, discrimination, bullying, and biased teaching materials. However, they are up against an “often glacial and opaque administrative process” that imposes “entirely toothless” remedies, even when serious discrimination is found.

Both the California Constitution and state law provide robust protections against antisemitism in the classroom. But all the legal backing in the world is to no avail when the State refuses to effectively discharge its constitutional and statutory duties to respond to the antisemitism in its midst, as the lawsuit alleges.

Instead of punishing the wrongdoers, the schools allegedly segregated Jewish students from their peers, “thus enabling anti-Semitic hate to be taught in a Jew-free environment, with no one left to object.”  The complaint suggests the schools districts may fear retaliation from unions if they discipline offending teachers, so instead they are unlawfully removing Jewish children facing a hostile environment.

One of the students now attends a private Catholic high school “because she feels safer there as a Jew than she does in a California public school.”

Parents have also experienced firsthand the Jew-hate running through the California school system. “A mother who had the courage to speak at a school board meeting about how Jewish children are called ‘kikes’ and ‘dirty Jews’ at school was then herself called a ‘Zionist Nazi bitch’ and drowned out by a school employee who made grotesque farting sounds at the meeting,” the lawsuit says.

The surge in antisemitism in the California school system should come as no surprise—its students are taught to hate Jews by the teachers themselves, according to the complaint. The State has allowed dozens of school districts to incorporate so-called “liberated ethnic studies” lessons that cast Jews and Israelis as “oppressors” and the Jewish State a “settler-colonial” and “apartheid” regime that has no right to exist.

One particularly egregious example refers to a “read-aloud of the book P is for Palestine,”—intended for kindergarten through third grade—which states “I is for Intifada,” and defines “Intifada” as “rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grown-up,” as shown in the image below:

The lawsuit claims these materials are openly taught without district approval by teachers who have faced no consequences from their district.

And now, for allowing antisemitic bullying, harassment and outright violence against its Jewish students, the lawyers ask the court to declare the defendants in violation of the State Constitution. They also request the court to block the unlawful segregation of Jewish students and the discriminatory teaching materials in school curricula, among other claims for relief.

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