(Nov. 22, 2024 / JNS)
A 64-page complaint in a new lawsuit against the Sequoia Union High School District in California’s Silicon Valley cites “egregious failures” in curbing Jew-hatred and “deliberate indifference” to it. The suit references alleged jokes about the Holocaust, teachers who “have peddled antisemitic falsehoods” about Israel without consequences and the district being “conspicuously silent” about the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The public district’s “tepid response to the Oct. 7 attacks exacerbated the already pervasive antisemitism within its schools. Jewish students faced a barrage of taunts, slurs and hateful remarks, culminating in the appearance of two giant swastikas on campus grounds,” the lawsuit charges. “Rather than addressing the escalating incidents, SUHSD officials shifted blame onto the victims, refused to engage with concerned parents, and used superficial ‘investigations’ to whitewash legitimate concerns.”
Despite all that, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, which is representing Jewish students in the case, told JNS that the alleged instances of Jew-hatred are “pretty standard, at least for many northern California school districts.”
That’s particularly true since the state passed legislation requiring at least a semester of ethnic studies as a prerequisite to high school graduation.
“Ethnic Studies, as most people unfamiliar with it in practice, seems to be a nice idea of everyone learning about everyone else’s culture and history. In practice, there is an invidious form known either as ‘liberated ethnic studies’ or ‘critical ethnic studies,’ which has a Marxist core and classifies everyone as either oppressors or oppressed, similar to diversity, equity and inclusion, but more explicit about who is deemed bad and who is deemed good,” according to Lowenthal Marcus.
“Jews and the Jewish state are always deemed bad and their demonization has become increasingly normalized in K-12 schools in California, but it is slowly—and increasingly less slowly—spreading across the country,” she added.
A “very stark difference” in the new case, which was filed on Nov. 15, is that so many parents were willing to come forward and be named. That allowed the Deborah Project and the rest of the legal team to “be far more explicit and detailed about what happened to Jewish children in the district,” Lowenthal Marcus told JNS.
“These parents patiently attempted repeatedly to get the people in positions of responsibility to take the appropriate actions, and the school district failed those families, time after time,” she said. “I have enormous respect for these families. I’ve worked with dozens of dozens of Jewish parents, students and teachers, and very few are willing to take the step of going to court for redress.”
“It’s scary for so many reasons, but without the courage of families like the plaintiffs in this case, nothing will change,” she added.
Disavow truth
The complaint describes what it describes as the district’s “bureaucratic obfuscation and outright denial” in the face of repeated instances of Jew-hatred that parents reported.
A 10th-grade world history teacher at Woodside High School—which is part of the 129-year-old district that serves some 9,000 students—“exploited his position of trust to spread antisemitic and ahistorical pro-Hamas propaganda” and to single out and harass “the only openly Jewish student in his class,” the lawsuit alleges.
Not only did the teacher display a “free Palestine” sticker prominently on the classroom wall, but during the 2023-24 academic year, he introduced a discussion shortly after Oct. 7 saying, “I want to talk about something happening now that is bad,” per the complaint. The “unmistakable message to impressionable students was that the ‘bad’ event was not Hamas’s murder and kidnapping of innocent Israelis but the Israeli military’s response in self-defense, which he falsely misrepresented as the initial act of aggression,” the suit alleges.
The complaint adds that the teacher asked the class, “How different is Israel from Hamas?” and called the terror organization a “political party that fights against Israel.” In so doing, he forced the Jewish students, who at times came home in tears, to “disavow not only facts and the truth, but her personally held world views and the religious commitments that form her ethnic identity,” the suit alleges.
When parents sought access to the teacher’s instructional materials, which referred to Jews as “colonialists” who didn’t belong in Israel, he and the district rebuffed them, per the suit. The district “actively concealed” the materials and, on one occasion, told a parent that some 75% of the curriculum was handed to students, so he had no right to the remaining 25%.
“This was false,” the suit states, noting that the California Education Code states that “all primary supplemental instructional materials and assessments, including textbooks, teacher’s manuals, films, audio and video recordings, and software shall be compiled and stored by the classroom instructor and made available promptly for inspection by a parent or guardian in a reasonable timeframe.”
Among the other instances of alleged Jew-hatred described in the complaint are a student being told by a teaching assistant to hide her Star of David jewelry or she would “get what she deserved,” a video aired at the school referring to “apartheid Israel” and a teacher telling a student that he could tell she was Jewish “by her nose.”
Leveling the playing field
Once the defendants have been formally served with the court papers, they will have 21 days to file either an answer to the complaint or to file a motion to dismiss, Lowenthal Marcus told JNS.
“Filing that motion is the most likely step they will take,” she said. “A motion to dismiss says, essentially, even if everything written in the complaint is true, it still doesn’t make out a valid legal claim for adjudication. The two sides then argue over that position, there may be a court argument, and then the judge rules on whether or not the case can proceed.”
If the judge denies the motion, then the “discovery” phase begins. “Litigation is a time-consuming exercise, but given the stakes, that’s usually, although not always, a good thing,” she said.
Lowenthal Marcus has met “repeatedly” with the parents and with some of the student plaintiffs.
“The parents were initially optimistic that the school district would respond appropriately and take the families’ complaints seriously. Over time, that optimism faded and eventually was extinguished,” she said. “When moving forward within the school districts, all of the power was in the hands of the district—they were the defendants, the investigators, the judges and the ones who meted out punishment, if any. They also control all of the information.”
That makes for a “very powerless position” for the Jewish families, “when a school district or its agents abuse or appear to abuse its authority,” according to Lowenthal Marcus.
“Once the families all agreed to move forward with the litigation, their complaints could no longer be ignored, demeaned or turned against them. That became a revitalizing force,” she added. “It feels good to take action and to level the playing field. Now, although litigation is an extremely slow process, they are at least in the co-pilot’s seat rather than under the bus.”
https://www.jns.org/explicit-detailed-lawsuit-alleging-jew-hatred-at-ca-district-is-testament-to-courage-of-families/
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