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Californians protesting outside the Department of Education in Sacramento. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect<\/p>\n
California is suing one of its own publicly funded school systems, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), accusing its officials of refusing for several years to address antisemitism and protect the civil rights of Jewish children being subjected to abuse by both their peers and teachers.<\/p>\n
Filed by the state\u2019s Department of Education on March 5, the complaint alleges that OUSD\u2019s superintendent never followed through on \u201ccorrective actions\u201d decreed by the department to correct a hostile environment which produced \u201cmultiple complaints of antisemitism.\u201d One of the measures called for issuing a letter to parents that \u201ccondemns antisemitism\u201d while outlining OUSD\u2019s efforts to combat it. The state charges that the superintendent, Dr. Denise Saddler, ignored its directive, a legal obligation as a state entity and recipient of public funds.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo law or regulation grants OUSD the discretion to disregard or delay prompt implementation of the corrective actions mandated,\u201d the complaint says. \u201cUnless this court grants the relief requested, respondent OUSD will continue to fail and refuse to perform its legal duties.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawsuit continues a dispute between the department and OUSD which began last year when, amid a flood of Jewish students leaving the district, the agency found OUSD guilty of antisemitic discrimination which affected both students and staff. In one incident, the district allowed the presentation of a map, prepared in support of Arab American Heritage Month, which did not include Israel. Speaking to The Oaklandside, a local newspaper, in October, an OUSD spokesman admitted that was \u201can oversight,\u201d but by that time it had already happened twice.<\/p>\n
California itself is being sued by a coalition of leading Jewish advocacy organizations over its alleged failing to address \u201csystemic\u201d antisemitic discrimination in K-12 public schools.<\/p>\n
Led by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs, the legal action stems from consecutive years of antisemitic abuse perpetrated against Jewish students, parents, and teachers by anti-Zionists at every level of the school system. Court documents shared with The Algemeiner earlier this week revealed new, harrowing accusations of Jews being called \u201ck\u2014kes,\u201d Jewish students being threatened with gang assaults, and K-12 students chanting \u201cF\u2014k the Jews\u201d during anti-Israel demonstrations promoted by faculty.<\/p>\n
In one highly disturbing incident described in the legal complaint, fifth graders from the OUSD were filmed by the teacher saying \u201cAnother major thing that I\u2019ve learned is that the Jews, the people who took over, basically just stole the Palestinians\u2019 land\u201d and \u201cone thing that\u2019s really surprising to me, and that appeals to me is that the US is helping the Jews.\u201d In another incident, the Oakland Education Association confected a curriculum in which the intifada \u2014 which refers to two prolonged periods of terrorism in which Palestinians murdered Israeli civilians \u2014 was taught to third graders as a nursery rhyme.<\/p>\n
Litigation related to antisemitic incidents in California K-12 schools surged following Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, which triggered a barrage of antisemitic hate crimes throughout the US and the world. The list of outrages includes a student group chanting \u201cKill the Jews\u201d <\/a>during an anti-Israel protest and partisan activists smuggling far-left, anti-Zionist content into classrooms without clearing the content with parents and other stakeholders.<\/p>\n Elsewhere in California, K-12 antisemitism has caused severe psychological trauma to Jewish students as young as eight years old and fostered a hostile learning environment, according to complaints.<\/p>\n In the Berkeley United School District (BUSD), teachers have allegedly used their classrooms to promote antisemitic stereotypes<\/a> about Israel, weaponizing disciplines such as art and history to convince unsuspecting minors that Israel is a \u201csettler-colonial\u201d apartheid state committing a genocide of Palestinians. While this took place, high level BUSD officials were accused of ignoring complaints about discrimination and tacitly approving hateful conduct even as it spread throughout the student body.<\/p>\n 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 a lawsuit filed<\/a> in 2024 by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The teacher allegedly 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\u2019t an apartheid state is \u201claughable.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law which requires the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights for monitoring antisemitism in public schools at a time of rising anti-Jewish hatred across the US. As previously reported by\u00a0The Algemeiner<\/a>, the bill confronted Newsom, a Democrat rumored to be interested in running for US president in 2028, with a politically fraught decision, as it aims to limit the extent to which the state\u2019s ideologically charged ethnic studies curricula, supported by progressives and many Democrats, may plant anti-Zionist viewpoints into the minds of the 5.8 million students educated in its public schools.<\/p>\n Newsom, who has since endorsed the false charge that Israel is an \u201capartheid\u201d state, approved the measure amid these cross currents, paving the way for state officials to proceed with establishing an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, setting parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially barring antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom.<\/p>\n