Yossi Fendel, the father of a Berkeley High School ninth-grader, wanted to meet his son’s ethnic studies teacher for coffee. Instead, after months of frustration, he is taking his son’s school district to court.
The issue began when Fendel attended a Berkeley Unified School District board meeting on Nov. 15, where pro-Palestinian protesters called on the board to support a cease-fire resolution in the Israel-Hamas war and to support “teaching Palestine” in the classroom.
Fendel was surprised when one of his son’s teachers, Alex Day, rose to speak. Wearing a Palestinian flag pin on his shirt, Day stressed the need to “teach about Palestine” despite, or even because of, the considerable controversy surrounding the subject.
“What do we do,” Day asked the board, “if I’m in a history classroom, talking about colonialism, and a student says, ‘Does this apply to my family in Palestine?’ Am I to lie to them?”
“I emailed him the next day,” Fendel said.
A data analyst and a member of Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom, Fendel said that the message of Israel as the embodiment of “colonialism” implicitly rejects the historical Jewish connection to the land.
“Maybe that anxiety can be relieved if we had a discussion over coffee,” Fendel said, recalling his thinking at the time.
Day declined the invitation for coffee, according to a transcript of emails shared with J. Instead, the two engaged in a monthslong back-and-forth that came to include the high school’s director of curriculum, the principal, the district superintendent, the public information office and the school board.
Fendel wanted a copy of the curriculum on Israel and Palestine that Day said he would be teaching. Day declined, directing Fendel to an administrator.
The issue speaks to the ways in which controversy over the Israel-Hamas war is playing out in American schools. The Bay Area has become a lightning rod for those debates, as teachers across the region have insisted on their right to teach about the plight of Palestinians, sometimes using curriculum, as happened in Oakland public schools, that is not vetted by district leadership.
In January, Fendel was given the opportunity to privately view the material on a district laptop, with the understanding that an electronic copy would be shared soon.
“Just within a few slides, I was saying, ‘There’s an issue here,’” he said.
A slide on “Hate Speech v. Free Speech” that concerned Fendel.
He noticed one slide that struck him as biased. Its purpose was to distinguish between “hate speech” and “free speech,” or permitted speech, when students discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was “not hate speech” to accuse Israel of apartheid or genocide, according to one slide. But it was considered hate speech to make “terrorist jokes” or “suicide bomber jokes.”
“You’re saying that, you know, you’re allowed to call Israel genocidal and an apartheid state. But we don’t permit talking about terrorism and suicide bombing because that would be hate speech,” Fendel said. “I think it’s great to protect students against harmful depictions of Arabs and Palestinians. In the same way, I want Jewish or Israeli students to have that kind of sensitivity, that kind of protection.”
After informally requesting the curriculum for months, Fendel submitted a formal request on Jan. 18 under the California Public Records Act. Berkeley Unified released most of the curriculum to Fendel on Feb. 29, after the three-day lesson plan had already been taught.
On April 4, Fendel and the Deborah Project, a pro-Israel civil rights nonprofit headquartered in Maryland, sued BUSD in Alameda County Superior Court. Their petition filed with the court asks a judge to force BUSD to release “all curricular materials pertaining to its Israel-Palestine curriculum,” including how the curriculum was developed.
In a press release announcing the legal action, the Deborah Project harshly criticized the district, saying that BUSD is “intentionally trying to prevent parents from knowing what their kids are learning” and is teaching kids “lies about this deeply controversial topic.”
Fendel, who finally was allowed to review the full curriculum in early March, said “it could have been a lot worse.” But he took serious issue with some of the content.
He saw a problem with sourcing: A number of slides were taken from Al Jazeera, a news outlet owned by the government of Qatar that carries an anti-Israel bent. And while the perspectives of pro-Israel Jews were represented, “any pro-Israel narrative is immediately countered with an anti-Israel rebuttal,” he said. “Whereas a lot of anti-Israel narratives are allowed to stand on their own.”
For example, the lessons include two slides on the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, stating that 1,033 civilians “were killed.” But it does not go into detail about the brutality of the massacre. The next eight or so slides are devoted to describing the devastation in Gaza, followed by embedded videos produced by Al Jazeera and Democracy Now!, a left-wing news outlet that is often unsparingly critical of Israel.
Another slide compares “hostages” on both sides of the conflict. Using an Al Jazeera infographic, it states that 4,900 “political prisoners” are being held by Israel, while “134 Israeli hostages remain” in captivity in Gaza. The slides do not state that the prisoners held by Israel are suspected of or have been convicted of committing crimes, while the hostages in Gaza were abducted during the Oct. 7 attack.
The legal action increases public scrutiny on BUSD related to the district’s climate for Jewish students post-Oct. 7.
In late February, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal discrimination complaint against BUSD, alleging a hostile environment for Jewish students. Among the incidents mentioned were students “repeatedly hearing anti-Semitic comments in classrooms and hallways, such as ‘kill the Jews,’” and a second-grade teacher leading a classroom activity where students wrote “stop bombing babies” on sticky notes. Students in the district have joined multiple walkouts in support of Palestinians, interrupting class.
A petition created in November by BUSD Jewish parents and “concerned allies,” which now has over 1,300 signatures, states that “we are dismayed, disappointed and frightened by the district’s lack of care for our students’ physical and psychological safety in school since the October 7 terrorist attacks.”
BUSD Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel encouraged all students and parents to report instances of bullying and harassment to district leadership, saying they will be investigated “vigorously,” she told the Mercury News in March in the wake of the federal complaint. Ford Morthel said the district would cooperate with any federal investigation.
“We believe that classrooms must be places of joy, empathy, curiosity, love and rigor where all students feel safe, seen, heard, and valued. We work to make these spaces responsive and humanizing for our diverse students,” Ford Morthel said.
The district did not immediately respond to J.’s request for comment on Fendel’s petition.
Fendel said he is in favor of his son taking ethnic studies, a discipline that focuses on the experiences of non-white ethnic groups. The course will become a state requirement for high school graduation, starting with the class of 2030, though Berkeley has for years required it for ninth-graders.
“I take a lot of pride in the fact that Berkeley High is at the forefront of bringing ethnic studies into the mandatory education of high school students,” Fendel said. “I also think it’s important to keep antisemitic and anti-Israel stuff out of ethnic studies.”
He said he hopes the petition will push BUSD toward greater transparency about lesson plans having to do with Israel-Palestine, including the curriculum that was already taught.
“Although the materials themselves have (belatedly) been delivered, the communications regarding their development have not been,” he said in an email to J. He wished to know “how these lessons were created,” who oversaw their development and whether outside consultants were used.
“There needs to be accountability for this process,” he said.
