This case, filed in federal district court in Philadelphia, challenges the decision by the leadership of Haverford College to nurture a virulently anti-Israel environment on campus, where the Jewish commitment to Israel and anyone who speaks in support of that commitment, are shunned, denounced and boycotted by student government, student organizations, and faculty.
Jews of Haverford filed its Complaint on 13 May, 2024. The Court granted Plaintiff's Motion for Pseudonymity. Motion to Dismiss and its Opposition are fully briefed and judge's decision pending.
In this case TDP has teamed up with the prestigious global law firm Ropes & Gray to call a Bay Area School District's leadership to account for either ignoring or exacerbating incessant antisemitic attacks on its campuses, and the repeated, insistent use of antisemitic and inaccurate teaching materials. which school officials either ignored or exacerbated.
Karen Fiss, a highly credentialed art historian, has sued California College of the Arts—the college where she is a tenured professor—for its maintenance of an antisemitic hostile environment, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In her case filed in federal court in San Francisco, Fiss alleges that at CCA, public expression of the Jewish commitment to Israel is met with disciplinary sanctions, while public calls for the death of Israeli Jews is publicly lauded by department chairs, professors, administrators and students, and officially defended as an exercise of academic freedom.
Motion to Dismiss and its Opposition are fully briefed. Oral argument scheduled for January 9, 2025.
A 12 year old Jewish student was repeatedly verbally harassed and attacked, culminating in repeated physical altercations with no effective intervention by school officials. This student , after being loudly denounced for being a "babykiller" and being told "Hitler was right," was told by his attackers to "get down on his knees and apologize for being a Jew."
This case is in active settlement mode with a positive resolution for the family forthcoming.
Four boys were accused of illegally entering or allowing to enter a former student into a high school at the very end of the school year. The boys were reported for allegedly trashing and otherwise violating a Muslim prayer room in the library of this (public) school and with making sexual gestures on Muslim prayer objects and insulting Muslims. None of this happened.
But the four boys, based on the false reports and without any investigation, were summarily suspended and their names and alleged acts were sent out on social media – leading to death threats—and teachers not only shared this on their social media, but also denounced the boys at public school board meetings. The background material is being prepared and a Complaint will be filed in early 2025.
The Deborah Project represents the central Jewish charitable organization in Philadelphia in the Federation’s complaint against teacher Keziah Ridgeway, who has verbally attacked Jewish parents, Zionism, and Israel, and who threatened Jewish parents with gun violence.
As a result of the Complaint, Ridgeway has been removed from her Philadelphia public school classroom. The investigation continues, while acolytes of Ridgeway repeatedly protest her removal, including shutting down a school board meeting.
These cases, in which TDP represents both itself and a Berkeley, California parent, challenge both the decision by Berkeley Unified School District to use antisemitic teaching materials and its insistence on hiding those materials from parents and the public, in violation of the district’s obligations under both California education law and the state’s Public Records Act. Complaint filed.
Biased curricular material inciting hatred of Jews was adopted by the Berkeley High School Ethnic Studies teachers, and protected by BUSD administration. Challenge has been filed in California state court in Alameda County.
TDP brought suit on behalf of Jewish parents & teachers against anti-Israel activists attempting to indoctrinate LA public schoolchildren with antisemitic and virulently anti-Israel, false instructional materials, which defendants counseled teachers to hide from parents and administrators.
This case charges ethical violations by Sahar Aziz, an anti-Israel activist who had been elected to a New Jersey school board, and then elevated to the board’s vice chair, but who also publicly touted her commitment to ensuring that her political views would be adopted in the classroom. In the wake of TDP’s filing against her on behalf of a district parent, Aziz was demoted from her leadership position on the school board and subsequently chose not to run for re-election.
The case is continuing, and now challenges the decision by the New Jersey School Ethics Commission to apply different standards to ethical complaints about antisemitic, versus anti-Muslim, speech.
The Deborah Project went to court in its own name in this case to challenge a California school district’s refusal to turn over documents in response to TDP’s Public Records Act requests concerning antisemitic instructional materials. The school district had to pay TDP's fees and costs.
In early June The Deborah Project asked a Santa Clara County, California court to force the Mountain View-Los Altos Union School District (MVLA) to comply with the California Public Records Act (“CPRA”) and turn over all the relevant disclosable public documents The Deborah Project had requested regarding the use of antisemitic instructional materials.
Client investigated for allegedly revealing confidential information about a student.
TDP represents four professors of American Studies in their claims against the American Studies Association, which was the victim of a hostile takeover by anti-Israel activists who used their control of the ASA to falsely claim that the organization had adopted a resolution calling for the Boycott of, Disinvestment from, and Sanctions against Israel.
This case has gone up and down the court systems in both federal and state court in D.C. It currently is on appeal before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
