Adam Kredo writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a significant West Coast lawsuit.
A group of Jewish parents sued the California state education system on Thursday, alleging that the state’s public schools have become anti-Semitic cesspools in which “Jewish students are segregated and pulled out of classes so that teachers can spew anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda without pushback,” according to a copy of the first-of-its-kind lawsuit shared with the Washington Free Beacon.
The California State Board of Education, the California Department of Education, and state superintendent Tony Thurmond fostered a hostile environment throughout all of California, ignoring numerous reports from parents whose children had been targeted solely for being Jewish, according to the complaint. In one case, a teacher punished a 12-year-old student “because he was a Jew who dared to wear Jewish and Israeli symbols.” In another, a ninth-grade art teacher organized a walkout “in support of Palestine” that featured chants of “f— the Jews.” When one parent spoke up about the issue during a school board meeting, faculty members mocked her and called her a “Zionist Nazi bitch.”
State officials responsible for protecting students from discrimination allowed “California’s schools to indoctrinate children, from the earliest ages, to believe that Jewish Americans and Israelis—including Jewish and Israeli classmates—are racists, white supremacists, and oppressors who should be shunned,” the lawsuit states.
The case documents numerous anti-Semitic incidents across the state, according to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which is handling the lawsuit alongside the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs. It marks the first time legal advocates have sued an entire statewide system over pervasive anti-Semitic harassment and could set a precedent for those in other states to follow suit. Anti-Semitism in California schools, though, has been particularly prevalent since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
