Lori Lowenthal Marcus on Antisemitism Lawsuit Against Sequoia Union High School District | Cuomo

On November 15, 2024, 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., 3:24-cv-08015 , 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 the false curricular material regarding Israel/Gaza and their sources be shown to him for inspection—with the teacher’s insistence on teaching the inaccurate material, and refusal to disclose it as required, endorsed and supported by district leadership;
  
• a teacher telling Holocaust jokes to her ninth-grade students—and the teacher 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 current Hamas-Israel conflict by skipping over October 7 and instead beginning his lessons with Israel’s invasion of Gaza, while repeated complaints about this went unanswered;
  
• students referring to Jewish kids as “kikes,” as well as saying they wish the Jews and their families would all die—and the administration’s failure to act to stop or deter this activity, instead insisting that a victimized student take a description about it off social media;
  
  
• a principal claiming to have conducted an investigation which proved that a swastika drawn on the school campus was Japanese anime, and the district’s adherence to this pretext even after it was revealed the student who drew the symbol intended it to be a swastika;
  
  
• a teacher telling a Jewish student 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, and the school district informing a complaining parent that whether this was in fact true was an issue 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 teacher finished teaching his unit—with the school allowing this teacher to remain in the classroom, teaching this propaganda;
  
  
• students laughing about Anne Frank and the plight of Jews during the Holocaust—with no district action taken to correct this.
  

Lead plaintiff Sam Kasle, on behalf of his daughter who was directly impacted, believed in the system and expected the process to work. “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-J 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 which they instead allowed and 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,” said Marcus.

The lawsuit seeks injunctive and compensatory relief, including equal protection and non-discrimination against Jews by the district, staff and faculty training which includes the centrality of Israel to Judaism and its ancestral importance to the Jewish people, and discipline– including termination–for repeated, egregious offenders.

The Deborah Project is a public interest law firm which asserts and defends the civil rights of Jews in education, from K-12, through college and graduate schools. A team of litigators at Ropes & Gray provided stellar assistance in this legal work on a pro bono basis.