Parents of some Jewish schoolchildren in California along with civil rights organizations have filed a lawsuit against the state of California, the state Board of Education, the California Department of Education, and several individuals, in a landmark case charging the state with failing to protect children “from antisemitic harassment, violence, and propaganda in the state’s public schools,” according to an exclusive to The Free Press.
The suit was filed in federal court by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs on behalf of several Jewish families. What their children were forced to endure, and the abject failure of the state to lift a finger to correct the antisemitic atmosphere in many schools, is almost beyond belief.
The October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis by Palestinian terrorists precipitated a wave of antisemitic incidents and attacks across the country. In 2024, there was a record number of attacks on Jews in the U.S., rising 21% compared to the previous year.
The lawsuit is based on the free exercise of religion protections guaranteed under the California Constitution. The suit argues “that persuasive antisemitism in California’s public schools has ‘deprived [Jewish students] of equal access to educational benefits and opportunities.'”
“The parents who are in the complaint, they’ve done everything right. They’ve gone through the proper steps. They filed these complaints with the district. Some of them have appealed the decisions. They’ve waited months, years in some cases, and some have never gotten decisions,” said Marci Lerner Miller, the director of legal investigations with the Brandeis Center. “They’ve gone through the process that they’ve always assumed would protect their children, and it hasn’t done that.”
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Melissa Alexander, said her 12-year-old son now “refuses to speak about his Jewish heritage and wear his Jewish star anymore at school” due to the way he was treated by one of his teachers.
The suit claims the teacher, whose public social media accounts were allegedly “filled with virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel content,” allegedly targeted the student with fabricated misconduct allegations because he wore Israel-related T-shirts and a Star of David necklace to school. The complaint also alleges that the teacher accused him of being too loud in class, telling the 12-year-old that he had done something “egregious and dangerous.” When Alexander asked what her son had done, the teacher allegedly told her “it did not matter.” Alexander’s son received “Unsatisfactory” grades in the class, and was told that he might not be able “to matriculate to eighth grade.”
“None of [the child’s] other teachers raised concerns about his behavior, and aside from the class with this teacher, [he] was a straight-A student,” the claim alleges.
“Watching my son navigate these challenges has broken my heart,” Alexander said.
What a helpless feeling a parent must experience when the school, the board of education, and the state do nothing to protect their child from hate.
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Jewish kids attacked by classmates, where the perpetrators were never disciplined, was cited several times in the suit. However, a large portion of the suit is dedicated to detailing the antisemitic curriculum that Jewish schoolchildren were forced to learn.
An unauthorized curriculum developed by teachers in Oakland was used in a 2023 “teach-in” that reached students across grade levels, including kindergartners.
The curriculum’s materials included a read-aloud of the children’s alphabet book P Is for Palestine, in which “I is for Intifada,” and is defined in the book as “rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or a grown-up.” The complaint notes that the word intifada refers to two periods of sustained violence in which more than a thousand Israeli civilians—including children—were killed in suicide bombings of buses and cafés carried out by Palestinian terrorist organizations.
A worksheet included in the same curriculum asked elementary school children to draw “the Zionist leaders of Israel receiv[ing] money and support.” Another worksheet referred to “Zionist bullies” who are “always scaring” and “arresting” Palestinian children.
Despite widespread public reporting about the teach-in at the time, and the Oakland Unified School District’s own statement that it was unauthorized, the complaint states that no teachers who participated were ever disciplined.
Government officials would continuously give lip service to protecting kids and addressing antisemitism in schools without doing anything meaningful. When one parent raised concerns to the administration about the curriculum, she was “ignored, dismissed, or offered only paltry solutions that reflect a tolerance for antisemitism.”
“The California education system is teaching the state’s children that Jewish Americans and Israelis are racists, white supremacists, oppressors, and baby-killers who should be shunned,” Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Brandeis Center, told The Free Press. Marcus is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights. “The result is not surprising: Jewish children and children perceived as Jewish are bullied and excluded by their peers and harassed by their teachers, who silence, mock, and even segregate them if they speak out.”
The goal of the lawsuit is to force the state to make significant changes “by investigating and addressing past acts of misconduct, taking proactive measures to stop future discrimination, and forbidding California’s schools from being commandeered as centers of antisemitic indoctrination.”
This is a problem of progressivism. We see the same thing on college campuses, with the same attitudes by administrators toward antisemitic acts. On campus, they justify the antisemitism under the dubious rubric of “academic freedom.” The Trump administration has forced a reckoning on campus that has yet to play out fully. Still, it has made a good start at forcing administrators to take the issue of antisemitism seriously.
This will be a generational battle that all Americans who value religious freedom should support.
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