On Friday, The Deborah Project, with pro bono assistance from the global law firm Ropes & Gray, filed a lawsuit against the leadership of the Bay Area’s Sequoia Union High School District for widespread and continuous acts of blatant antisemitism, which school officials either ignored or exacerbated.
The case, Kasle, et al. v. Van Putten, et al., was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California on behalf of six families with children in the SUHSD schools. It details egregious and repeated acts of antisemitism, including:
• A parent repeatedly being ignored and insulted when he asked that his legal rights be respected and requested access to curricular materials regarding Israel/Gaza—materials that were inaccurate and withheld by the teacher, with the support of district leadership.
• A teacher telling Holocaust jokes to ninth-grade students—and remaining in the classroom all year despite parents’ complaints and the district’s knowledge of her actions.
• A teacher who began a unit on the Hamas-Israel conflict by skipping over October 7 and instead starting with Israel’s invasion of Gaza, with repeated complaints ignored.
• Students referring to Jewish classmates as “kikes” and saying they wished Jews and their families would die—yet the administration failed to act, instead insisting that a victimized student remove a social media post about the incidents.
• A principal claiming an investigation proved a swastika drawn on school grounds was a Japanese anime symbol, and the district maintaining this position even after the student admitted it was intended as a swastika.
• A teacher telling a Jewish student that he could tell she was Jewish because of her nose.
• A world history lead teacher informing his class that the United Nations created the country of Palestine in 1947, with the school district later telling a concerned parent that this was “subject to various interpretations.”
• A teacher announcing to his class that a particular Jewish student “doesn’t believe Israel is an Apartheid State,” but that the rest of the class would realize the student was wrong after the unit—yet the school allowed the teacher to continue teaching.
• Students laughing about Anne Frank and the Holocaust—with no corrective action taken by the district.
Lead plaintiff Sam Kasle, speaking on behalf of his daughter who was directly impacted, expressed his disappointment in the system. “I tried for months to get the school officials to respond like professionals,” he said. “Instead, they allowed my daughter to be harmed, other Jewish students to be harmed, and non-Jewish students to be taught that the normalization of antisemitism in our school district is acceptable.”
“The widespread, demoralizing antisemitism continued for months, yet the school district refused to obey the law or even follow their own internal procedures to stop the harassment and cease the hostile environment they enabled,” explained Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of The Deborah Project. “Our clients repeatedly attempted to follow the district’s rules to obtain redress for these egregious actions and ultimately realized they had to bring the school district’s actors to court to stop the harm.”
The lawsuit seeks injunctive and compensatory relief, including:
• Equal protection and non-discrimination for Jewish students,
• Staff and faculty training that includes the centrality of Israel to Judaism and its ancestral importance,
• Discipline, including termination, for repeated egregious offenders.
The Deborah Project is a public interest law firm dedicated to asserting and defending the civil rights of Jewish students from K-12 through college and graduate school. A team of litigators at Ropes & Gray provided stellar pro bono assistance in this legal action.
