Six Jewish families have filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that a San Mateo County school district did little to address the “pervasive antisemitism” their children have faced in school.
The lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of the Jewish families enrolled in the Sequoia Union High School District.
The complaint alleges that school leadership at Woodside High School and Menlo-Atherton High School didn’t adequately address repeated complaints about antisemitism for months. Among the incidents alleged in the complaint are antisemitic slurs and taunts toward Jewish students, swastika graffiti and unauthorized anti-Israel “propaganda” presented by teachers
“The school district refused to obey the law or even follow their own internal procedures to stop the harassment and cease the hostile environment which they instead allowed and enabled,” attorney Lori Lowenthal Marcus said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. Lowenthal Marcus is legal director of the Deborah Project, a public-interest law firm dedicated to “defending the civil rights of Jews facing discrimination in educational settings.”
The law firm has filed lawsuits against multiple Bay Area school districts over alleged antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel and global spike in antisemitism, including one against the Berkeley Unified School District in April for allegedly allowing biased and harmful lessons about Israelis and Palestinians to be taught in the classroom.
The new complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court’s Northern District of California, seeks injunctive and compensatory relief as well as a jury trial.
Sam and Andrea Kasle of Redwood City are the lead plaintiffs on behalf of their daughter, who experienced a “traumatizing” sophomore year at Woodside High School last academic year, specifically in her world history class.
“She would come home crying, and eventually I looked at the course material and I was absolutely shocked,” Sam Kasle told NewsNation journalist Chris Cuomo on Monday in a live interview.
The lawsuit alleges that her teacher, Gregory Gruszynski, whose classroom displayed a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker, routinely presented false information and narratives about Israel and Palestine and “urged students to draw a false equivalence between Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and the State of Israel…. [and] asked students rhetorically, ‘How different is Israel from Hamas?’”
“Because of his tenure, he was allowed to create his own material, review and approve his own material, and then teach it and disseminate to other social studies teachers this material,” Kasle told Cuomo.
Last winter, Kasle said, he wrote at least 17 emails to the school’s principal and vice principal about misleading and upsetting course materials but alleges he didn’t receive an adequate response.
Another plaintiff, Margarette Kesselman, an Israeli citizen who lives in Menlo Park, is suing on behalf of her son over antisemitic bullying he reported experiencing as a sophomore at Menlo-Atherton High School during the past academic year.
Several days after Oct. 7, 2023, the lawsuit alleges, Kesselman’s son was on his way to English class when a group of students called him a “kike” and told him that they hope he and his family “burn in hell,” that “all Jews should die” and that “all Israel supporters should get killed.”
Kesselman’s son filed an incident report, according to the lawsuit. “In response, school administrators blamed [him] for his own harassment and suggested he relocate to a different class to avoid ‘provoking’ the main antisemitic perpetrator.”
The lawsuit also describes antisemitic and inaccurate lesson plans presented last school year by an ethnic studies and U.S. history teacher, Chloe Gentile-Montgomery. Gentile-Montgomery no longer works at Menlo-Atherton High and is not a defendant in the lawsuit. The lawsuit claims that in November 2023, Gentile-Montgomery presented a slide deck with “Hamas propaganda” and centuries-old antisemitic tropes. In a lesson on “dominant and counter narratives” about Israelis and Palestinians, a cartoon illustration shows a hand pulling the strings of a puppet, alongside text that describes “dominant narratives” as “the story that is told by people in power (such as men, white people, rich people).”
Another Menlo-Atherton High teacher in the math department distributed materials in fall 2023 that “gratuitously invoked anti-Israel headlines under the pretext of teaching a geometry exercise,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit also states that multiple plaintiffs decided to take legal action after their formal complaints — filed through the state’s Uniform Complaint Procedures, which requires the district to investigate within 60 days — dragged on for months with the findings never disclosed.
Igor and Marina Bershteyn of Redwood City are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Their daughter, a junior at Woodside High School last school year, was harassed by students and once told to “go back to where you came from!” according to the lawsuit.
Scott and Lori Lyle of Woodside are plaintiffs on behalf of their son who was a senior at Woodside High last school year. Daniel and Jennifer Reif of Redwood City are plaintiffs representing their daughter who was a junior at Woodside High last school year. Lisa Joy Rosner of Redwood City is also a plaintiff, representing her daughter who was a senior at Woodside High last school year.
Gruszynski, Gentile-Montgomery and the Sequoia Union High School District did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Last month, a South Bay Jewish family sued University Preparatory Academy, a San Jose 7-12 charter school, as well as two Santa Clara County educational organizations and the California Department of Education, over allegations of antisemitic bullying, harassment and public humiliation on behalf of their daughter, who was then 12 years old.
