Current Cases

In the five years since it was filed, Bronner v. American Studies Association, District of Columbia Superior Court, No. 2019 CA 001712 B, for which Deborah Project lawyers are lead counsel, has yielded crucial insight into how anti-Israel activists conducted a hostile takeover of an American academic society to advance their own political goal of boycotting the Jewish state.  In the documentary record produced in discovery — substantive depositions have not yet begun — Deborah Project lawyers have amassed a record showing that the defendants explicitly chose to conceal their political agenda from Association members when running for positions of power in  the organization; took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the ASA’s modest endowment to finance their political goals; manipulated the vote on adoption of a BDS resolution, to make it appear that it had passed when it had actually failed, and explicitly stated that they would pursue their anti-Israel boycott even if it hurt the Association itself (as hundreds of respected university presidents and other academics said it would, and as the ASA’s records show it has).  

On May 12, 2022, The Deborah Project filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles.

Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, et al, v. Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, et al., 2:22-CV-03243-FMO-PVC, C.D. Cal.   Our case seeks to stop the use of profoundly antisemitic/anti-Zionist teaching materials from being used in the Los Angeles public-school system, and to enforce California law requiring that all public school teaching materials be made public.

Currently the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium is peddling to different school districts across California, including the one in Los Angeles, the same hateful material that was rejected by the people and government of California prior to the passage of A.B. 101, the California law mandating an ethnic studies course for graduation from high school. Not only are the school districts themselves being approached, but LESMCC is providing training to pre-k to high school educators so that they will incorporate the hateful material in their classrooms. For a copy of the Complaint, please contact us.

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- We are currently representing both undergraduates and college professors who have encountered antisemitism in the form of anti-Zionism on their campuses and/or within their departments' academic associations. A first step on behalf of some professors will be published and will appear here soon.

• - The Deborah Project was asked to write an amicus brief for a case against a New Jersey school board for permitting school board members to attack the Jewish State at the conclusion of a school board meeting. Schwartz v. Abedrabbo, Awwad, Clifton Board of Education and Passaic County, in New Jersey Superior Court. In our amicus brief we assert that the School Ethics Commission violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution,  as well as the N.J. Constitution because it rejected the initial complaint against two school board members who viciously denounced Israel for protecting itself from Hamas terrorism, and they did so at the end of a school board meeting. The Ethics Commission claimed there was no violation because "no school board action was taken as a result of those members' statements."  But the Ethics Commission, just a year earlier, had found that a different school board member had committed an ethics violation when he posted harsh criticism of two Muslim members of Congress on his personal Facebook page. In that case, no school board action was taken and the Facebook post was not a government site, nor could he be construed as acting in his official capacity